Joseph Campbell - The Ultimate Boon

...it is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of the development of the infant, symptoms of a dawning "mythology" of a state beyond the vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defenses against, the body-destruction fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother breast. 

"The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mother's body...The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e., that everything will be scooped out of its own inside." 

Roehim

Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the "bad" forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.

The profession of the medicine man, this nucleus of all primitive societies, "originates...on the basis of the infantile body-destruction fantasies, by means of a series of defense mechanisms."

Roheim

The first formula is abreaction in fantasy (my inside has already been destroyed) followed by reaction-formation (my inside is not something corruptible and full of faeces, but incorruptible, full of quartz crystals). The second is projection:' It is not I who am trying to penetrate into the body but foreign sorcerers who shoot disease-substance into people.' The third formula is restitution: ' I am not trying to destroy people's insides, I am healing them.' 

Image of indestructibility 

spiritual double - an external soul not afflicted by the losses and injuries of the present body, but existing safely in some place removed. 

Tjurunga - talisman of the man's totem ancestor

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

Roheim

Indestructible Body

Paradise of the Milk that Nver Fails

Mt. Olympus - Ambrosia (not mortal)

Wotan - 32,000 heroes eat flesh of Sachrimnir, the Cosmic Boar and milk from she-goat Hidrum: she feeds on leaves of Yggdrasil, the World Ash. 

It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale, and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the images, and seems to be remembering something already known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond. The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended. The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

Wolverine

http://www.flylyf.com/x-men-origins-wolvering/

Joseph Campbell - Apotheosis Part 2

Nirvana - "Extinguised of the threefold fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion."

Nirva (snskrit) - 'to blow out', deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified', it is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached. Nirvana - "blown out, gone out,extinguished"

Kama-Mara vs. Future Buddha

Magician of Delusion vs. Subdued, ultimate ember of threefold fire

the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings

Myth, psychology, metaphysics

Vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds.

Life-wish "eros or libido" corresponding to the Buddhist Kama "desire"

Death-wish "thanatos or destrudo" identical to Buddhist Mara "hostility or death"

The unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidya).

Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. 

Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not be readjusting the deisre ((eros) and hostility (thanatos) - for that would only originate a new context of delusion - but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root.

Buddhist Eightfold Path

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is indeed form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form, that is emptiness; what is emptiness, that is form. And the same applies to perception, name, conception, and knowledge."

Having surpassed the delusions of his formerly self-assertive, self-defensive, self-concerned ego, he knows without and within the same repose. What he beholds without is the visual aspect of the magnitudinous, thought-transcending emptiness on which his own experiences of ego, form, perceptions, speech, conceptions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. 

"Gift waves" go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. "This our worldy life is an activity of Nirvana itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them."

The Taoist Immortals

Four benevolent animals - phoenix, unicorn, tortoise, dragon

Goddess Hsi Wang Mu "The Golden Mother of the Tortoise"

K'un-lun Mountain

"Feast of the Peaches" every six thousand years

Teshouse "abode of fancy" encloses poetic ituition "abode of vacancy"

"abode of the unsymmetrical" suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour

"the secret of temporal existence" "existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity"

"The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protext us and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us" 

Apache or Buddhist "sermon of the inanimate"

Shiva symbol "Lingam" combined phallus and vulva

Third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The wise realize that they have come from the father and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.

Tibetan 'Yum - female - time' 'Yab - male - eternity'

The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female G0d. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. 

The male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads (Nirvana or Eternity). The two are the same, each is both, and the dual form is only an effect of illusion, which itself, however, is not different from enlightenment. 

"...the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal 'goods' and 'evils' is but a reflex of the mind..."

This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created man in his own image created him male and female. In the male's right hand is the thunderbolt, while in his left he holds a bell, symbolizing the goddess. The thunderbolt is both the method and eternity, whereas the bell is "illumined mind"; its note is the beautiful sound of eternity that is heard by the pure mind throughout creation, and therefore within itself.

"And The Word was made flesh"

Et Verbum caro factum est 

"The Jewel is in the Lotus"

Om mani padme hum

Tao

Supreme Buddha

Bodhisattva

Jivan Mukta

The Word Made Flesh

***

The Void    The World

Eternity     Time

Nirvana    Samsara

Truth    Illusoriness

Elightenment    Compassion

The God    The Goddess

The Enemy    The Friend

Death    Birth

The Thunderbolt    The Bell

The Jewel    The Lotus

Subject   Object

Yab   Yum

Yang   Yin

Wolverine as Mythology

Film Notes

Warner Bros., Paramount, Walt Disney/Buena Vista, Sony/Columbia,
Twentieth Century Fox, Universal

Time Warner owns Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, Picturehouse, Warner
Independent Pictures
America On Line.
CNN, HBO, Cartoon Network, Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, People, DC
Comics
Atlantic, Elektra
Six Flags
Braves & Hawks

Disney
Miramax

Average film
$60 million to make
$35 million to distribute
2000-4000 screens

Theatres = 30 million weekly viewers
Television = 200 million weekly viewers

35mm film = 12+ million pixels
Broadcast Video = 350,000 pixels
HD video = 2 million pixels

Video = 17 million hues
Film = 800+ million hues

Digital compresses film, adding more bit-by-bit encoding to moving
images. Non-moving scenes flat.

Top 10 percent of all films released garners 50 percent of all box
office receipts. Most popular 30 count for 80 percent.

Joseph Campbell - Apotheosis

Bodhisattvas
Avalokiteshvara "The Lord Looking Down in Pity"
Suffering the evils of existence
Om mani padme hum "the jewel is in the lotus"
During his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paushed: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard.

Hinayana Buddhism reveres the Buddha as a human hero, a supreme saint and sage. Mahayana Buddhism regards the Enlightened One as a world savior, and incarnation of the universal principle of enlightenment.

A Bodhisattva is a personage on the point of Buddhahood: according to the Hinayana view, and adept who will become a Buddha in a subsequent reincarnation; according to the Mahayana view, a type of world savior, representing particularily the universal principle or essence is enlightenment.

Mahayana Buddhism has developed a pantheon of many Bdhisattvas and many past and future Buddhas. These all inflect the manifested powers of the transcendent, one and only Adi-Buddha (Primal Buddha) who is the highest conceivable source and ultimate boundary of all being, suspended in the void of nonbeing like a wonderful bubble.

"When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change."

This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things" or All beings are without self."

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (he whose being is enlightenment); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them - and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps.

Eighty four thousand

Kwannon
The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to forego until the end of time ( which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent - made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum.

Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind.

Pg 152 yin-yang, tao

Great Original
T'ai Yuan
Combined yin-yang in herself

Word Made Flesh
Androgynous
Adam before Eve
Hermaphrodite (child of Hermes & Aphrodite)

The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where Go walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the "coincidence of opposites", by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.

The mystery of creation
Devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle, and with equal propriety at the conclusion of the hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained.

As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. "Whatever is killed becomes the father." The impulse to destroy the father is continually transforming itself into public violence.

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

Page 157 "turn the other cheek"

Motherly fathers, manipulating sons into defense

Pg 158 techniques/devices versus god is love

"Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves"

"God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself."

Civitas Dei / Civitas Diaboli
St. Augustine

"And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way of consent...They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies"

The perennial agony of man, self-torturing, deluded, tangled in the net of his own tenuous delirium, frustrated, yet having within himself, undiscovered, absolutely unutilized, the secret of release: this too he regards - and is.

We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other - the enemy - that one too is the God.

This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were. If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or secretarian archetype, we are the warriors of his cause; but if he is a lord of the universe itself, we then go forth as knowers to whom all men are brothers. And in either case, the childhood parent images and ideas of "good" and "evil" have been surpassed. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. All the god, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas have been subsumed in us, as in the halo of the mighty holder of the lotus of the world.

This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. For in the first the initiate learns that male and female are "two halves of a split pea"; whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the divison of sex: the pronoun "He" was a manner of speech, the myth of Sonship a guiding line to be erased. And in both cases it is found (or rather, recollected) that the hero himself is that which he had come to find.

Annihilation of the distinction between life and release from life

Joseph Campbell - Atonement With the Father Part 2

Phaethon/Phoebus
Icarus/Daedalus

This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. The son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world.

The traditional idea of initiation combines and introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images.

The Mystagogue (father or father-substitute) is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes - for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of "good" and "evil" to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being.

Circumcision, cutting off the part of the mother, revealing his male power.

Communion/blood drinking rituals.

Egypto-Babylonian & Trojan-Cretan " labyrinth complex", Aeneas & Gilgamesh, "journey of the soul to the underworld"

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key know of his limited existence.

The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned.

"Gird up thy loins now like a man; I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disannul my judgement? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be righteous? Hast thou an arm like God? Or canst thou thunder with a voice like him? Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty. Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud and abase him. Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place. Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret. Then I will also confess unto thee that thine own hand can save thee."
God to Job

Man cannot measure the will of God, which derives from a center beyond the range of human categories. Categories are totally shattered to the last. Job was a hero who, by his courage in the fiery furnace, his unreadiness to break down and grovel before a popular conception of the character of the All Highest, had proven himself capable of facing a greater revelation than the one that satisfied his friends.

For the son who has grown really to know the father, the agonies of the ordeal are readily borne; the world is no longer a vale of tears but a bliss-yielding, perpetual manifestation of the Presence.