As I mull over my re-exposure to Boyd I think of Joseph Campbell's view on the Hero.
The Hero steps outside the Waste Land of the institution. Boyd and his acolytes lived this alternative.
…The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think that they are supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven’t earned them…everybody leading a false life.. where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid life that the job does not mean a thing.
Here is the best explanation that I know of what it means to have to separate yourself from the such a Waste Land:-
The Hero’s Journey
‘There two ways of living a mythological grounded life. One way is just to live what I call ‘the way of the village compound” where you remain within the sphere of your people. This can be a very strong and powerful and noble life. There are, however, people who feel that this isn’t the whole story. And today all historical circumstances are changing and we no longer have the enclosing horizons that shut us in from the knowledge of other people – new worlds are sneaking in on us all the time. It’s inevitable that a person with any sense of openness to new experience will say to herself, “Now this won’t do, the way that we are living.” Do you see what I mean? And so one goes out for oneself to find a broader base, a broader relationship.
…if a person has had a sense of the Call – the feeling that there’s an adventure for her – and if she doesn’t follow that but remains in the society because it’s safe and secure, then life dries up….
….if you have the guts to follow the risk, however life opens, opens, opens all along the line. .. I feel that if one follows one’s “Bliss” – the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life, then doors will open up. They do!
…..just as in Dickens novels, little accidental meetings and so forth turn out to be main features in the plot, so in your life. And what turn out to have been mistakes at the time, turn out to be directive crises….Can anything happen to you for which you are not ready? I look back now on certain things that at the time seemed to me to be real disasters, but the result turned out to be the structuring of a really great aspect of my life and career.
…if you follow your bliss you’ll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. If you follow the money, you may lose the money, and then you don’t even have that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way.
…There’s a kind of … inevitable sequence of experiences if you start to follow your adventure. I don’t care if it is in economics, in art, or just in play. There’s the sense of the potential that opens out before you. And you have no idea how to achieve it. You start out in the dark. Then, little helpmates come along…. Who just give you clues, and these open out. Then there is the sense of danger you always run into – really deep peril – because no one has gone this way before. And the wind blows and you’re in a forest of darkness very often and terror strikes you.
… where you stumble, there your treasure is.. the world is a match for us and we’re a match for the world. An where it seems the most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves.
Jesus represents the inspiration to life, I mean the life of the spirit, not merely of physical conditions, the thing that is life for man, namely the spiritual adventure. He comes and is the awakener; and if you close your mind to that awakener, he may not come back again. You can lose it……those people who have the knowledge that the magic must somehow be followed must stay with it. It may make a lonely life for you, but its your life. And this to me was a very interesting theme. I’m sure that in our world, where emphasis is put on success and all that, the song is heard and forgotten by young people.
…if you stay open, you’ll not only hear the song, but you’ll hear it in great symphonic composition as you go on, so that you know that you’re still on track..
…The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think that they are supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven’t earned them…everybody leading a false life.. where the sense of the vitality of life has gone. People take jobs because they have to live, and then they find in mid life that the job does not mean a thing.
..Now the grail hero is one who acts out of his own spontaneous nature.. the meaning of the grail, and of most myths, is finding the dynamic source in your life so that its trajectory is out of your own centre and not something put upon you by society. Then of course there is the problem of coordinating your well being and your virtue with the goods and needs of society. But first you must find your own trajectory and then comes the social coordination.
…The moment the life process stops, it starts drying up; and the whole sense of myth is finding the courage to follow the process. In order to have something new, something old has to be broken; if you are too heavily fixed on the old, then you’re going to get stuck. That’s what hell is: the place of people who could not yield their ego system to allow the grace of a transpersonal power to move them.
..Nature becomes feared if it has been surpressed long enough and you are out of accord with it; it is always going to break up the quadrangular mode of planning that you have had for your life. Falling in love is nature coming in. And, my God, it has wrecked many a program!
…..I think that the person who takes a job to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don’t like what you are doing. There is a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there is no such thing as work, and there is no such thing as getting tired…..It takes a little courage at first because who the hell wants you to do what you want to do; they’ve all got a lot of plans for you. But you can make it happen. I think that it is very important for a young person to have the courage to do what seems to him to be significant in his life, and not just take a job in order to make money. But this takes prudence and very careful planning and may delay financial achievement and comfortable living. But the ultimate result will be very much to his pleasure..
But there is an incredible amount of pressure to conform
I know it. But there is a margin too. There are plenty of ways to coast along until you find your centre. I don’t mean going on welfare. I don’t have much respect for people who expect society to support them while they are finding their feet. There are other ways to work that out. If you have a job, for instance which allows you time enough to develop your own system of ideas for the future, and the boss offers you more money for extra hours, then you refuse that because it would take away from your free time. Do you see what I mean? Acceptance of the popular advancement is often to the detriment of your career work. Every artist has to make that kind of decision. If a writer says to himself. “Oh I’ll write potboilers until I get enough money to write,” he’s probably not going to write the book he wants to write when the time comes because he has learnt how to write pot boilers. His hand is working from that level rather than from the higher one. So it is an early decision of courage to do the ting that is your authentic drive. That’s the path where there is no path.
What’s happened to institutions is that they have become self interested rather than of service to a national impulse. So people break away.
Every single one of the old horizon-bound mythologies reserved love for the in-group, and aggression and denigration were reserved for the out-group .. the teaching of humanity rather than the teaching of in-group appreciations is what’s important… the big challenge however is education so that the person identifies himself with humanity rather than the in-group.
