Joseph Campbell and the Masks of Eternity

A while ago I was asked to blog about Joseph Campbell, and after months of not knowing how, here it finally is. It’s hard for me to try to condense what I understand and love about Joseph Campbell into a few ideas. I’ve been watching The Power of Myth ever since college, after I read The Hero with a Thousand Faces (I still have the book I “borrowed’’ from my mom), when I saw it on TV and decided I had to buy it. I once described it as food for the soul. So for one, it resonates with me. For another, it deals with the human experience (as all myths do) and so it is universal and un-specific, and thus it is hard to specify. But anyway, it’s difficult to sum up what Joseph Campbell means to me... but this blog wasn’t created for summations that distill great meaning into digestible portions of meaninglessness, so I will do what I can. To not do that.

After watching the last episode of The Power of Myth, “The Masks of Eternity,” and writing down everything awesome (which filled nearly three pages), I am resisting the urge to quote the entire thing. But I think there is one part where Joe explains a statue of the Hindu god Shiva which encompasses most of the main themes he talks about.

 “The dance of the world – the dancer whose dance is the Universe. In this hand he has the drum of time, which shuts out eternity, and we are enclosed in that; and in this hand a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens us up to eternity; and in his hair is a skull and a new moon, the death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming.... The goal of your quest in your life is to find that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is fearless, and desireless, but just becoming.”

Drum of time: The beat of the drum symbolizes time and shuts out eternity, which is timeless. Thought is temporal. Symbols are expressions of thought. The great mystery transcends thinking and symbols. “God is a thought – God is an idea – but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. It is beyond being! Beyond the category of being and non-being! Is he or is he not? Neither is or is not.” So the idea of God that most people have is a symbol of the eternal, but it is not the eternal. Everything that exists, exists in the field of time, and things like unicorns merely do not exist, but the eternal refers to the transcendence of such dualities and is not then, or there, but in the ever-changing moment.

Flame of eternity: The flame which burns away the veil of time opens us up to eternity. It is a cleansing fire. To be open to what is instead of what you desire or what you fear is also to give up your ego and your identification of self with your thoughts. You are not your thoughts, and you are not your fears. This is the experience of the sublime, which opens you, but which may be terrifying, detaching you from what you had identified as yourself – your house, your car, your job, your country, what you are good at, what you hate, what you find funny – The “dismantling” process talked about in I <3 Huckabees, this is it. You are the blanket.

Death and rebirth: In the “moment of becoming” you have the symbols of death and rebirth, creation and destruction, and the idea of unified duality. Duality is expressed by the world and its opposites – being and non-being, light and dark, good and evil, up and down, true and false – and in the unity of duality, as in the symbol of the Yin Yang, polar opposites are understood as existing coherently and inter-dependently – for if there were no such thing as dark, then light would be meaningless. In one episode Joe talks about how Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the garden of unity, eat of the fruit of knowledge of the pairs of opposites and are cast out. From Heaven to Earth truly: from transcendence to existence. This is not to say that Heaven is a place, for that gives it the property of existence. Heaven is an idea, whose “reference is to something that transcends all thinking.”

Burning point of becoming: The statue of Shiva is understood as metaphorical, as all myths are, of the human mystery, and so the “quest in your life” is not to worship the god Shiva but to find the Shiva-ness in yourself that is “desireless and fearless.” The hero’s journey is a symbolic undertaking that represents this quest: the hero leaves the world of the known to obtain rejuvenating life for the community. The hero finds and brings back fire, dies and is reborn, kills the dragon, becomes enlightened... but myths, religions, and rituals can be understood in terms of the hero’s journey because the hero is a symbol of you, and his journey symbolizes your life. “Have you died to your animal nature and been reborn?” Have you killed your dragon of ego and greed?

Well, how do you do that? Find that point of fire within yourself: “Follow your Bliss.” (Or, as he later remarked, follow your blisters.) This is not what makes you happy but what makes you energized, or makes you “feel the rapture of being alive.” It increases the awesome and decreases the suck. It is the immovable center, the eternal, the God, that is in you. It is your hero quest and your great adventure. For Joseph Campbell, his Bliss was in the study of mythology. Sometimes mine is writing this blog. However:

“Words are always qualifications and limitations, and that’s why it’s a peak experience to break past all that, every now and then, to realize: ‘Oh, ah.’ I think so.”

As do I, Joseph Campbell. As do I.

Guest Post: Breathless

Luckily for my readers, I am not the only one with deep thoughts. Not only is Steph a doctor of astrophysics and an immaculate karaoke singer, she has decided to single-handedly combat bad science in the guise of a fiction novel. Her book review was recently published in the Reports of the National Center for Science Education and can be found here. Thanks Steph, and keep up the good fight!

Breathless
by Dean Koontz
New York: Bantam, 2009. 352 pages
reviewed by Stephanie LaMassa

The plot of Dean Koontz’s novel Breathless centers on the mysterious appearance of two furry white creatures in the Rockies. The size of young children, they have attributes of dogs, cats, and otters, yet resemble none of these, having hands with opposable thumbs. The two main characters, Grady Adams, a craftsman, and Camilla Rivers, a veterinarian, spend the majority of the novel acquainting themselves with these animals and speculating on their origins. The animals’ eyes are their most enchanting feature, larger in proportion to their head than any known animal’s and colored in various hues of gold.

Seemingly unrelated subplots persist throughout the book and are ultimately tied together in the conclusion. One such subplot focuses on Lamar Woosley, who holds a PhD in both mathematics and physics, specializing in chaos theory. His musings on the nature of scientific inquiry set the tone for the climax of the book, where the target of his criticisms of unfounded theories and the scientists who cling to them is ultimately revealed: evolution.

These new creatures signify the end of the acceptance of evolution and the beginning of a new way of thinking. Where do these creatures originate? From “out of infinity into the finite, from out of time into time” (p 305). Such an alternative to evolution is certainly not a viable scientific one, but as a novelist who often writes about supernatural phenomena, it is neither Koontz’s obligation nor his intention to promote this sudden appearance as a realistic truth. Rather, he is focused on inciting his readers to question the validity of evolution.

Koontz utilizes a two-prong approach to achieve this end: portraying scientists as dogmatic and closed-minded and debunking evolution using specious arguments commonly used by anti-evolutionists. For the first prong, he insists, through his character Woosley, that it’s unscientific ever to regard a scientific fact as settled: a scientist who does so has “ceased to be a scientist, and he’s become an evangelist for one cult or another” (p 300). Indeed, scientists are apt to “become so committed to a theory that they spend entire careers ever more desperately defending it as new discoveries ever more rapidly undermine it” (p 300). By declaring that evolution is such a theory that survives despite the contradicting evidence, he implies that evolution is a “religion” (p 216).

For the second prong, Woosley offers several lines of evidence against evolution, correcting the “misconceptions” Grady and Camilla, representing the non-scientific public, held. Koontz’s message seems to be that non-scientists accept the fallacious arguments supporting a debunked theory since they are  ignorant of the evidence to the contrary. However, these counterarguments are not based on an accurate understanding of evolution or scientific evidence and therefore lend no credence to the claim that evolution has been scientifically refuted. I consider three examples.

Fossil Record. When Grady points out to Woosley that the fossil record supports evolution, he is told that it provides no such evidence. His major points to back up this claim are that Darwin predicted thousands of dead-end species but none has been found, and that no evidence exists for transitional forms in the fossil record. Supposed transitional forms may be unrelated species that have since gone extinct; moreover, dating techniques are not precise enough to date fossils sequentially. The first claim, lack of evolutionary dead-ends, is quite perplexing, for evolutionary biologists have found numerous such fossils, even in the human fossil record. Also, his second claim contradicts the first: if the fossils observed do not represent transitional forms, but rather separate species that have gone extinct, then these would be dead-end fossils. Beyond contradicting the first claim, this second claim also reveals ignorance about the scientific process, since the age of fossils have been accurately determined using independent radiometric dating techniques.

Not Enough Time. Woosley claims that the earth has not existed long enough for evolution to occur. Assuming that each “bit of data” (Koontz’s phrase) in a gene is obtained from mutation, and the fastest this change can occur is the time it takes for the speed of light to transverse a molecule, the amount of time needed to accrue enough changes to evolve from a single-celled organism to a simple one, such as a worm, is much longer than the age of the earth (which he correctly cites as four billion years old). If a worm could not evolve in such a short amount of time, how could anything else, much less a human? (Apparently, the skills of a chaos mathematician are needed to multiply and divide a couple of numbers to refute a biological theory.) This statement demonstrates a lack of understanding about the evolutionary process since not each “bit of data” needs to be acquired through mutation.  Evolution occurs through a number of processes, and scientists have demonstrated that these mechanisms can account for evolutionary change within the history of the earth.

The Eye. Though the argument is never made explicitly, it is suggested throughout the book—from the mesmerizing nature of the new creatures’ eyes, referred to as a “more impressive engineering feat than in the human eye” (p 119), to how the “principal challenge they offer [a geneticist and physiologist] is the impossible nature of their eyes” (p 274), it is not coincidental that these creatures’ eyes are their most stunning attribute or that the background on the book’s front cover is a rendering of this eye. For those well-versed in anti-evolution rhetoric, this is a reference to one of the most often used claims of antievolutionists: the complexity of the (vertebrate) eye cannot be accounted for by evolution. True, the eye is complex, but not irreducibly so. Evolutionary biologists have shown how this system could have evolved naturally, and it almost defies reason that this often refuted anti-evolution claim still persists.

Koontz should take the advice he gives to his readers, namely to look beyond what they accept to discover the truth. In his attempts to discredit evolution, he only reveals his (seemingly willing) ignorance on this topic and becomes an “evangelist” for misinformation. His time would have been better spent to learn what the scientific consensus on this issue is and how such tired arguments have been often refuted in the scientific literature. One can only hope that his readers are not swayed by his specious arguments but are instead encouraged to learn the scientific truth—rather than taking science lessons from a novelist. Fitting with the title, Breathless’s dissemination of false information in the guise of bemoaning the stagnation of scientific inquiry can be best described in the words of Judge Jones from the Kitzmiller v Dover decision: “breathtaking inanity.”

About the author:
Stephanie LaMassa has a PhD in astrophysics and is a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University, studying the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.

What is Quality?

Preamble: I wrote this in August 2007, probably shortly after I read Lila, Robert Pirsig’s long-winded sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Zen etc. is a great novel with some philosophy and metaphysics interspersed that introduces his notion of Quality, and I recommend reading it, whereas Lila is a metaphysical exploration of these ideas with bits of a novel interspersed and is very boring. Both were thought-provoking enough to make me write this, though I am aware some of it only makes sense if you’ve read both, and some of it only makes sense to me. (Also, I apologize for the cheesy ending.) Anyway, without further ado, enjoy, and comment, especially if you are feeling philosophical! (If not, consider opening some wine.)

Is the lack of meaning over which I’ve been lamenting the same as lack of Quality?

Example which brought about this question: receiving scarves, gloves, and picture frames from Mom’s friend at Christmas and birthdays; a nice gesture, devoid of meaning – for me, worse than nothing?

This is to be the beginning of a discourse on Quality… or something.

Quality: the process by which the experiencer experiences the experience; the relationship between subject and object; the “pre-intellectual awareness” of object by subject; the connection between mind and matter, the perennial false dichotomy, two polar opposites residing in the same circle; an event; Reality.

Sweetly pondering chaos… “It is my path, though not my choice, and I will know the meaning.”

What is meaning?

I have and still do maintain that “the meaning of life” does not exist.  What is the meaning of a flower?  There is no purpose for which humanity exists, that guides or should guide our actions.  There is no striving from inorganic to biological to social to intellectual forms of static quality, no fight between static and Dynamic any more than there is a fight between mind and matter, subject and object, ideas and reality, or whatever terms suit you best.  Some believe ideas are the only way to truth, others experience.  Some like it hot.

I feel like I can interpret Zen etc. in such a way that it makes perfect sense to me, but that my interpretation would mis-represent what Pirsig is trying to say, as evidenced by Lila.  Why do good ideas always turn bad when they attempt to solve everything?  If Quality is composed of static and Dynamic, but static is lower-case and Dynamic always capitalized, and they are always opposed… what’s the point of introducing the static?  Indeed, it makes an easier subject for a Metaphysics, being definable and categorical; but these are the very things that Quality is not, and seemingly neither is Dynamic Quality, and so one wonders how static quality is Quality at all.

If one is better able to repair a motorcycle when they are open to Quality, does it mean one’s actions have intellectual quality?  Does a bolt have more inorganic quality when it is placed in the correct position on the bike, so as to hold it together?  Does the bolt care where it is placed; does it strive toward being assembled, being a part of a larger machine; does this give the bolt meaning?

What is the meaning of a bolt?

Humans are a process that has become aware of itself.  (Switching philosophical novels for a moment…)  But are we really more aware than, say, a squirrel?  It may not be able to tell that a car is coming, but it’s driven by hunger and the need for nuts.  It wants to survive, but sometimes its desire for better nuts somewhere else leads it to ruin.  We may not be able to tell that our foreign policy moves will lead to war, but we are driven by our own need to survive, and historically this has been at the expense of other tribes/nations/belief systems.

Are Meaning and Quality the same thing?

There’s something in me that loves certain objects, like my dragon candle for example, because of their meaning.  Obviously this is a meaning with which I imbue them, and exists for me and me alone.  It is a state of connection between myself and the thing.  In this way it is indeed very similar to Pirsig’s Quality.

However, I can’t believe that it has existence of its own, as a primary “pre-intellectual” reality, on par with the Tao.  Quality, an event, the phenomenon of awareness perhaps – awareness without thought – can be seen as the primary reality, out of which subject and object spring.  Does anything exist which cannot be perceived?  Common sense says of course, but philosophy says we can never know.  So maybe my aversion to giving Meaning this same status is the result of a lingering intuition that primary reality must be unchanging, constant, eternal, universal.  Okay, by “unchanging” I don’t mean it doesn’t change over time, but that in each instant of time it is the same everywhere…. But what is “everywhere”?

Anyway, perhaps I resist saying that meaning is the same as Quality because this raises meaning from a personal phenomenon to a universal primal Meaning of Life; it becomes Capitalized, a caricature of the thing itself, at once everyone’s contradictory ideas of it.  All of a sudden it has some Special Significance.  It is the Answer.

What was the question?

If I stick with my explanations (not definitions) that Quality is an event or process which connects subject to object, then the problem is solved.  Instead of elevating meaning (whose lack I lament) to the status of some Reality un-defined as Quality, I can instead realize that this mysterious quality can be understood to be the same as the meaning which gives objects, events, actions, etc. a fullness and wonder the absence of which is characterized by meaninglessness.

So when I receive a gift of another cheap scarf, it is not the item I miss, but the meaning behind it.  That is to say, I would rather receive something which connects me to this un-defined Quality, where I could say that this item has meaning and this meaning brings me outside of myself.  I would desire a gift that brings to me a feeling that someone cares.

Ah, good, I wanted to talk next about Pirsig’s notion that the inverse of Quality is caring.  It is hard to imagine an inverse of an un-definable pre-intellectual awareness event which creates subjects and objects, but such is the failing of words made plain.  You have to care to realize Quality, and opening to Quality entails caring.  “Caring about what?” is perhaps the wrong question that we are inclined to ask.  Caring is an investing of energy to the task of understanding; it is the desire to understand.  To understand is to achieve Quality, to have your perceptions of reality come from reality itself instead of preconceived notions, emotions, or drama.  To say that a thing lacks Quality is thus to say that it is meaningless, which is to say that understanding is not possible; but if one could understand the thing, Quality would be found.  It is as misguided to think that some things have Quality while others don’t as it is to think that some things are more real than others.  Thus the answer to the question which has been bugging me in some form ever since reading Zen etc. and Lila, that is, “How does one thing have quality while another doesn’t?”, which can be rephrased as “Does x have quality?”, can be answered: “Do you care?”

If you are open to understanding (that is, you care… see previous musings for more), then Quality shines forth.  That is to say, “A sacred place is a place where Eternity shines through Time.” (Joseph Campbell)

In my head, all of these ideas are really describing the same thing; all these words are explicating the same wordless reality, the indefinable, unfathomable, etc. etc.

“Eternity is Now” – Frank Herbert, Dune

“Follow Your Bliss” etc. – Joseph Campbell

“Quality blah Victorians blah blah” – Robert Pirsig

“The Tao that can be Named is not the Eternal Tao” – Lao Tzu

“A deep, abiding, living change” – Krishnamurti

“Bother” – Winnie-the-Pooh

I’m still left with the feeling that this is simply not enough.  It may be true, beautiful, and simple, but is that enough?  What would someone reading these ramblings think?  Obviously, it would depend on their past thoughts and experiences, but what can possibly be communicated here?  I see all these things as coming from a common thread which humanity shares, which human myths express; it resounds in me and fills me to overflowing, like a good piece of music.  But that’s just me.  I’ve had certain thoughts, reflected on certain other people’s thoughts, had certain experiences, possess certain personality traits and proclivities, which combine to form these lofty ideas.  I enjoy thinking in this way and attempting to open myself to wondrous new ideas, and finding their place in a coherent whole.  These things connect with me in a powerful way; but how can such a connection be communicated?  It is exactly the problem of “defining Quality,” of “Naming the Tao,” which Pirsig was drawn to do in Lila while at the same time acknowledging its impossibility.

Of course it’s impossible.  Wholly and completely impossible, but utterly necessary.  Humanity has some choices to make in the near future, and it is no longer a question of isolated groups surviving or not.  We are a global system, and forgetting to care about this amazing truth could spell disaster.  Then again, disaster is a part of life.

And we are life.  All of us.  Every one.  We are nature, and we are civilization.  We have become aware of ourselves, but we do not yet understand ourselves.

In the end, to care is a choice that all of us must make on our own.