The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [94]
She returns to the lodge, finds the bag full of hearts, and is running out with it when a voice calls to her, “Stop, stop.” This is the voice, of course, of the magician. But she continues to run. And the voice calls after, “You may think you can get away from me, but you never will.”
Just at that point, she is beginning to faint, when she hears again the voice of the little old man. “I’ll help you,” it says and, to her surprise, he’s pulling her out of the water. She hadn’t known that she was in water. That is to say, that with her marriage she had moved out of the rational, conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious. That’s always what’s represented in such adventures under water. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events. Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.
What happens next in this story is that when the old man has pulled her out of the water, she finds herself in the midst of a company of old men standing along the shore, all looking exactly like her rescuer. They are the Thunderers, powers of the upper air. That is, she is still in the transcendent realm into which she brought herself by her refusal of suitors; only now, having torn herself away from the negative aspect of the powers, she has come into possession of the positive.
There is a lot more to this Iroquois tale, of how this young woman, now in the service of the higher powers, enabled them to destroy the negative powers of the abyss, and how, after that, she was conducted back, through a rainstorm, to the lodge of her mother.
MOYERS: Would you tell this to your students as an illustration of how, if they follow their bliss, if they take chances with their lives, if they do what they want to, the adventure is its own reward?
CAMPBELL: The adventure is its own reward—but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know. One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. If we have been impudent and altogether ineligible for the role into which we have cast ourselves, it is going to be a demon marriage and a real mess. However, even here there may be heard a rescuing voice, to convert the adventure into a glory beyond anything ever imagined.
MOYERS: It’s easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take the journey.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but then life can dry up because you’re not off on your own adventure. On the other hand, I have had an opposite, and to me quite surprising, experience in meeting and coming to know someone whose whole youth was controlled and directed by others, from first to last. My friend is a Tibetan who as a child was recognized as being the reincarnation of an abbot who had been reincarnating since about the seventeenth century. He was taken into a monastery at the age of about four and, from that moment, never was asked what he would like to do, but in all things followed to the letter the rules and instruction of his masters. His entire life was planned for him according to the ritual requirements of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life. Every stage in his spiritual development was celebrated with a ceremony. His personal life was translated into an archetypal journey so that, although on the surface he would seem to be enjoying no personal existence whatsoever, he was actually living on a very deep spiritual level an archetypal life like that of a divinity.
In 1959, this life ended. The Chinese Communist military station in Lhasa bombed the summer palace of the Dalai Lama and a season of massacres began. There were monasteries around Lhasa of as many as six thousand monks—all were destroyed, and their monks and abbots were killed and tortured. Many fled, together with