Yoga Life Book
Page 21
THE POWER AND THE MYTH
When we say God is love, does that have anything
to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love
and God?
“Yes, I’d begin with the troubadours in the
twelfth century, the singers of love. They were the poets of their
age. The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology
of love, the transformation of love. Before that, love was simply
Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the
experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood
it. The troubadours recognized amour or love as the highest spiritual
experience.”
“For amour there was an essential requirement
- that one must have a gentle heart, that is, a heart capable of
love, not simply of lust”.
What does the idea of a gentle heart suggest to you?
“One that is capable of, well, the key word is compassion.”
Wasn’t there something of this idea of compassion in the
legend of the Holy Grail?
“Yes, when Perceval comes to the Grail castle, he meets the
Grail King, who is brought in on a litter, wounded. Perceval’s
compassion moves him to ask, “What ails you, Uncle?” But
he doesn’t
ask the question because he has been taught by his instructor that
a knight doesn’t display emotions. So he obeys a rule and the
adventure fails. And then it takes him five years of ordeals and
embarrassments and all kinds of things to get back to that castle
and ask the question that heals the king and heals society. The question
is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion,
the natural opening of the human heart to another human being. That’s
the Grail. And it is a kind of love that - well, it is a spontaneous
compassion.”
“The theme of the Grail romance is that the
land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid to
waste. Society has become a wasteland. And what is the nature of
the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic
life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with
no courage for your own life. I come into this society, so I’ve
got to live in terms of this society. But I mustn’t allow this
society to entirely dictate to me how I should live. One has to build
up one’s own
system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes
society doesn’t accept that.”
The troubadours weren’t aiming, were they, to dissolve
social structure.
“No, they celebrated life directly in the experience of love
as a refining, sublimating force. They weren’t trying to destroy
things; the motive of power was not what was in them. It was the
motive of personal experience and sublimation. It’s quite different.”
“The
idea was to sublimate life into an experience of love.”
By
Joseph Campbell
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