Joseph Campbell Notes

Notes:

Joseph Campbell: “life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”

Joseph Campbell: there's a lot of magic in the fact that there's so many things you just can't know, can't hold.

-The magic of Death is in transcending the ego. Transcending the ego itself is something most of us can only do occasionally before we slip back into its grasp.

-the white rose represents purification of the desire nature.

Spiritual Commons

by Mark Vernon

Here’s a pub quiz question. Which piece of British legislation was on the statute books longer than any other? Answer: The Charter of the Forest. It was signed in 1217 and lasted 754 years.

The follow-up question is, do you know what it secured? And the answer to that is: The Commons.

The commons are those shared resources that nobody in particular owns; typically including land and forests, water and minerals. The charter asserted the right of common men and women to subsistence, to work and to reparation for loss of commons.

Nowadays, in an age of enclosures, sell-offs, privatisation and imparkments, it’s shocking to learn that in the Middle Ages, fifty per cent or more of the land was commons, accessible to everybody. Fifty per cent. 

It raises the question of how that was possible and I suspect it was because people had a powerful sense of an even more extensive commons. There was also a “spiritual commons”. The land belonged to nobody because it belonged to everybody, which is to say that people were conscious of it as part of life itself.

It’s why, in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom. It had to do with the relationship of households and cities to nature and deities. The aim was to facilitate the greatest human goods in conjunction with the gods. 

in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom

Similarly, in the medieval period, estates and kingdoms were regarded fundamentally as entrusted patrimonies bestowed by heaven, not capital resources defined by law. It was a world “charged with the grandeur of God”, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, equally blessed and terrifying.

Those times were not utopias, of course. But it does suggest that alongside the tangible loss of the commons, the spiritual commons has been lost to us too. My intuition is that matters. The world has been turned into property that can be traded. It can be manipulated because, stripped of its spiritual vitality, its extrinsic value outshines any intrinsic meaning. The unintended byproduct is that we are now viciously spiralling down a vortex of unsustainable consumption because we are caught in an agony of lost meaning, desperately seeking proxies for the spiritual commons in addictive consumption. 

If this is even partly right, we will need to regain sight of this lost dimension to save ourselves and the planet. But can that be done? Can the spiritual commons be re-imagined again for our times? My hypothesis is that the undertaking is hopeful because spiritual commons is not depleted. It is a type of wealth defined not by scarcity but abundance. It cannot be traded, though we can be trained to enjoy it. It’s here, still, already. It’s disappeared from view but not disappeared. So, what does it look like?

Spiritual commons includes the capacities we have to imagine and to relate, to know and to delight. It’s also the practical wisdom about how to live well and thrive. Its nature is akin to the wealth Albert Einstein had in mind when he asked: “Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?” 

It is the non-material aspects of life that, more often than not, are crucial for finding meaning and purpose, particularly when life involves suffering. The appreciation of what’s good, beautiful and true should be added to the list, therefore, as well as the freedom to orientate one’s life around them. This also implies that love lives in this domain.

My sense is that the rediscovery of spiritual commons would be primarily an imaginative and educative task. We might train ourselves to relate to it again. It would be known through deepening attention and expanding perception. It’s about focusing on what’s implicit as well as measurable; valuing what’s felt as well as what can be kicked. It’s about toying with the possibility that the whole world has an inner life, not just the bit of it that’s my body and yours.

I think time would be a crucial element to re-imagine, too, the spiritual commons given to us freely each day by the sun. Some simple words could help differentiate between types of time, thereby to experience its qualities afresh.

The ancient Greeks might assist. They could tell the difference between several types of time. There was recreation, which was about fostering spiritual commons such as participation and compassion when going to a play or sharing in a sport. There was leisure, which was time for pursuing activities such education or visiting the temple. And there was inactivity, which Aristotle regarded as vital for the highest human experience of all: conscious awareness of how you are living and what qualities it exhibits. 

There was also work, though the Greeks might also advise taking a stand against the use of phrases like “free time”. It implies that work is the owner of time, which is one of our fundamental mistakes, removing it from our spiritual commons.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights. I think we’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products. We’d also have to show that the horizons of human intelligence reach far further than the domains of decision-making and problem-solving, as is assumed by researchers in artificial intelligence. It includes contemplation and appreciation, imagination and inspiration, all of which are truth-bearing too.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights… We’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products.

Another area of contention has been highlighted by Andrew Kimbrell, not least in his publication, Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics. “Cold evil” is the insidious valuing of objectivity over intuition and understanding; efficiency over affection and friendship; competition over help and vulnerability – in other words, another loss of spiritual commons. He cites the dictum that “technology is a way of organising the world so that we do not experience it”. Experience is at the heart of regaining spiritual commons so technology may often, therefore, be an opponent, though the hope is that a rekindled imagination would help us to spot that and see how it can mindfully serve not mindlessly shape us.

Spiritual commons are often manifest in and through the loveliness of the material world, so that matters as well. It’s another area, alongside education, where spiritual commons has practical implications. That was spotted early by John Ruskin. 

Consider his 1884 lecture, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in which he noted that “one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw” was in 1876, almost a decade previously. The colours back then were “prismatic”, he said, the sun going into “gold and vermillion”. “The brightest pigments we have would look dim beside the truth,” he continued. He had attempted to reflect that glorious manifestation of the spiritual commons in paint.

He also knew that his experience of its beauty was lost because the atmosphere was becoming polluted. As a keen observer of nature, he noted how dust and smoke muddied and thinned the sky’s brilliance. In short, it would be crucial to clean up the environment if the vivid, natural displays were to return. Of course. But the subtler point Ruskin draws our attention to is the one about motivation: he wanted the vivid, natural displays because he had an awareness of, and desire for, spiritual commons.

Imagination, relationship, knowledge, delight. Wisdom and time, truth and love, the implicit and the felt. The meaning of suffering and the purpose of struggle. Life has been organised around spiritual commons before. Might training ourselves to become conscious of their abundance again help us to do so once more?

Mark Vernon is an Associate at Perspectiva and the author of A Secret History of Christianity

Castle Beach

Since coming here I have always loved the geology of castle beach, it inspired a lot of my thinking about morphology during and my presentation. Today I discovered a blog with more information on the geology of this place, I knew it was ancient but did not realise how ancient.

“Castle Beach at the end of the promenade is a favourite for locals, as children love to explore the many rock pools at low tide. And if you are interested in geology, take a look at the rocks on the beach. They are over 400 million years old, some of the oldest rocks in England. They were originally laid down as sandstone and silt sediments in the Devonian era and remained undisturbed as horizontal strata for over 100 million years until they were uplifted and deformed by the tremendous pressures of tectonic plates coming together in the final phase of the formation of the supercontinent Pangea. This uplifting produced the Variscan mountain range, the eroded remnants of which are America's Appalachians, the Urals, the Pyrenees, and, in SW England, the high moors of Dartmoor and Bodmin. This unimaginable tectonic pressure also partly melted the underlying mantle, which eventually solidified into a giant granite batholith, which underlies most of Cornwall, outcropping in several areas. The hot granite baked the deformed sediments into a hard metamorphic rock known locally as killas, which cracked as it cooled, allowing mineral-laden waters to rise from the mantle, and crystallise in the cracks. In many parts of Cornwall tin and copper minerals crystallised, while in Falmouth you will see white quartz crystallised into these cracks.” - Sourced from the blog http://min-eng.blogspot.com/2017/04/

Last Night, Dream Post

Last night a lake, a woman, wearing leaves on her face, sat on a silver floating bridge sitting in a shining lake, not bridging anything, but just adrift. She wore beech on her chin, willow on her cheeks, haw on her head, seeds and other leaf debris.

A man that I feel was the presence of my father put his arms around me, his body turned into a prism, all around me, a rainbow then formed from the prism and into the lake, another bridge.

Notes, keywords. Bridge, connectivity, silvering, body of water, leaves, Jungian consciousness, prism, rainbow, graces, emitting light, water, land, masculine and feminine energies, father energy, mother, symbol

Jungian bridge: (WIP research)

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Before going to sleep I was reading about the Miraculous medal and the nun Catherine Labouré in Clark Strand & Perdita Finn’s book ‘The Way of the Rose’, the apparition that appeared to her, she did not believe that it was Mary, but could not quite explain why.

Inanna the Sumerian Queen of heaven.

The back of the miraculous medal central image monogram.

The central image is a monogram: the letter M with a crossbar through the middle supporting an upright cross. Bizarrely, and completely unremarked upon by modern scholars, the lower half of that symbol turns out to be the cuneiform word for Inanna, the Sumerian “Queen of Heaven”. The first cuneiform tablets were not translated until much later in the nineteenth century, and so there was no way Catherine, even if she had been educated, which she most definitely was not, could have understood what she had seen. - page 204

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –

so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.”

― Mary Oliver, Dream Work

Thought Zine, Notes & Umwelten

My body is your body.

My body came from your body.

Once my heart was inside my mother's body.

Now it sits approximately five feet six above your body ~

~ Biosemiotics - A recognition that communication, interpretation and meaning-making are not limited to human life, but to all life everywhere.

~ Learning to listen to the myriad of other voices beyond the human.

“Biosemiotics, which bridges the sciences and the humanities, is a new field of study and a new way of understanding the world. It takes its name from bios (Greek for life) and semeion (Greek for sign). Its central insight is that all living organisms experience their world through signs which they must make sense of, or interpret. In other words, all organisms are in a communicative relation with their semiotic worlds, and these worlds are full of other forms of communicative semiotic life. Biosemioticians refer to these semiotic worlds as umwelten (plural of umwelt, or semiotic environment). They consist of all the sign relations which species’ evolution has made relevant to the organism’s meaning-making.

For example, many birds and insects see at the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, where humans do not. Their umwelt, in other words, is slightly different. For humans, the cultures they have made are relevant to their existence as humans, and these exist – as living ideas, artefacts and technology – interwoven with the human umwelt of nature. There is an underlying reality, but every species has evolved to experience it in the way that is most useful for that species’ life and survival.” - Wendy Wheeler, extract from In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss

You can find the full script here >>>>>

https://modernforms.org/blog/colourful-speculation/

“Both nature and culture grow from the same evolutionary source. Whether we are super-aware of it or not, we are all influenced by the communicational feedback loops that flow between selves and natural and cultural environments. When meanings (or functions) go wrong at any point in these sense-making circuits, all our living systems fall into potential danger. So what are we doing to ourselves and the planet when we allow this ceaseless slippage of natural and cultural meanings that starts to dismantle the life of our worlds?” - Wendy Wheeler