Luke’s Cave

What’s in There?

Only What You Take With You.

“ We choose mentors throughout our lives : 

• Sometimes Consciously, Sometimes Not;

• Sometimes Wisely, Sometimes Not. 

The point of this book is to understand this process and to •improve• it. 

— When selecting a mentor we must be aware of what it is we •want• from them. 

— When we are selected •as• a mentor we must know what the role entails. 

One of the unexpected advantages that my drug addiction granted me is that the 12 Step process of recovery that I practise includes a mentorship tradition. 

When you enter a 12 Step program, you have to ask someone else to guide you through the steps, or ‘sponsor’ you. 

This typically induces an unwitting humility; few people would say ‘Hey, babe, it’s your lucky day – I want you to take me on a spiritual journey.’ 

Usually one feels a little shy on asking someone to sponsor them, a little meek, a bit like you’re asking them on a date. 

In undertaking this we accept that :

• Our previous methods have FAILED, 

• That we need HELP,

• THAT our own opinions are INFERIOR TO THE WISDOM OF THE MENTOR and hopefully •THE CREED TO WHICH THEY BELONG TO.

In 12 Step custom the sponsor teaches the sponsee the method by which they practised the 12 Steps; they replace their own sponsor, and they give to another what they have been given. 

Whilst it may bear personal inflections, it is sufficiently faithful to the original program to inhere its power. 

The same, I note, is true in martial arts traditions, there’s a lineage and a system that is carried from teacher to student. 

Clearly there are parallels in academia, but anyone who’s been to school knows that mass education can be pretty inconsistent and the average harried educator has too many bureaucratic and financial burdens to mindfully endow more than a handful of pupils with the elixir of mentorship. “

Excerpt From

Mentors

Russell Brand

“Dreams of flying appeared in the collective unconscious before the reality of flight existed in technology, and I suspect that if we understood our dreams better we would use our technology more wisely . . .

I suggest that we contemplate what our children look at every Saturday morning on TV. One of the most popular jokes in animated cartoons shows the protagonist walking off a cliff, without noticing what he has done. Sublimely ignorant, he continues to walk - on air - until he notices that he has been doing the "impossible," and then he falls . . .

Daedalus who, imprisoned in a labyrinth (conventional "reality"), invented wings and flew away, over the heads of his persecutors; and Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who flew too close to the Sun Absolute and fell back to Earth. Like Porky Pig walking off a cliff, Icarus' fall contains a symbolism many have encountered in their own dreams . . .

Daedalus means "artist" in Greek . . . Daedalus, inventor of wings that took him from Earth to Outer Space - why does he represent Art, instead of Science? . . .

The genius of an artist, Aristotle says, lies in his texne, the root from which we get our word "technology"; but texne basically means skill or craft, or the ability to make things that never existed before. Negative entropy, i.e., information . . .

The musician and the architect, the poet and the physicist -- all inventors of new realities -- all such Creators may be best considered late evolutionary developments of the type that first appears as the shaman. Please remember that shamans in most cultures are known as "they who walk in the sky," just like our current shaman-heroine, Rey Skywalker.

The ironies of Swift and Aristophanes, and the myths of the fall of Icarus and Donald Duck, indicate that the collective unconscious contains a force opposed to our dreams of flight. This appears inevitable . . .

But what if we begin to regrow healthy organs of Poetic Imagination and flight? What if we "put on wings and arouse the coiled splendor within," as Liber Al urges? . . .

Joyce did not name his emblematic Artist merely Daedalus, but Stephen Daedalus -- after St. Stephen the Protomartyr, who reported a Vision and was stoned to death for it . . .

Those of us who have no avocation for martyrdom must learn, when we realize how much neophobia remains built into the contraptions of "society" and "the State," the art of surviving in spite of them. In a word, we must "get wise" in both the Socratic meaning of the phrase and in the most hardboiled street meaning. Neophobia functions as an Evolutionary Driver, forcing the neophiliac to get very smart very fast."

Robert Anton Wilson,

Email to The Universe

 

 BILL MOYERS: You visited some of the great painted caves in Europe.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when first you looked upon those underground caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you didn’t want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral, with these animals painted. And they’re painted with a life like the life of an ink on silk, the Japanese painting. And well, you realize the darkness is inconceivable. We’re there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances, the concierge, the man who was showing us through, turned off the lights and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It’s like a, I don’t know, just a complete knockout of, you don’t know where you are, whether you’re looking north, south, east or west. All orientation is gone, and you’re in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they tum the lights on again, and you see these gloriously painted animals. A bull that will be 20 feet long, and painted so that the haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock, you know, they take account of the whole thing. It’s incredible.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects, and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there, painting or creating? I find that’s where I speculate.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, this is what hits you when you go into those caves, I can tell you that. What was in their mind when they were doing that? And that’s not an easy thing to do. And how did they get up there? And how did they see anything? And what kind of light did they have the little flashing torches throwing flickering things on it, to get something of that grace and perfection? And with respect to the problem of beauty, is this beauty intended, or is this something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit. You know what I mean? When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird’s song, is this intentional, in what sense is it intentional? But it’s the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might almost say, and I think that way very often about this art. 

To what degree was the intention of the artist, what we would call “aesthetic,” or to what degree expressive, you know, and to what degree something that they simply had learned to do that way? It’s a difficult point. 

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature, you know, it’s instinctive beauty. 

And how much of the beauty of our own lives is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it is conscious intention? 

That’s a big question.

BILL MOYERS: 

You call them temple caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why temple?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Temple with images and stained glass windows, cathedrals, are a landscape of the soul. You move into a world of spiritual images, that’s what this is. When lean and I, my wife and I, drove down from Paris to this part of France, we stopped off at Chartres Cathedral. There is a cathedral. When you walk into the cathedral, it’s the mother, womb of your spiritual life Mother church All the forms around are significant of spiritual values, and the imagery is in anthropomorphic form God and Jesus and the saints and all, in human form.

BILL MOYERS: In human form.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Then we went down to the Lascaux. The images were in animal form. The form is secondary; the message is what’s important

BILL MOYERS: And the message of the cave?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you.

BILL MOYERS: You had that feeling when you were there?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I had it every time. Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.

BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.

BILL MOYERS: I see.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.

BILL MOYERS: Don’t you wonder what effect this had on a boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you can go through it today, actually, in cultures that arc still having the initiations with young boys. They give them an ordeal, a terrifying ordeal, that the youngster has to survive, makes a man of him, you know.

BILL MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child, if I went through one of these rites, as far as we can…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we know what they do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they’re naked except for stripes of white down that has been stuck on their bodies, and stripes with their men’s blood. They used their own blood for gluing this on. And they’re swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother; she’ll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, a mother’s no good from then on, you see, he’s no longer a little boy. He’s in the men’s group, and then they put him really through an ordeal. These are the rites, you know, of circumcision, subincision, and so forth.

BILL MOYERS: And the whole purpose is to…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Tum him into a member of the tribe.

BILL MOYERS: And a hunter.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And a hunter.

BILL MOYERS: Because that was the way of life.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, but most important is to live according to the needs and values of that tribe. He is initiated in a Short period of time into the whole culture context of his people.

BILL MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

BILL MOYERS: And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. that we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up. But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. It’s been reduced to that, and nothing’s happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah, and whether it works actually to effect a psychological transformation, I suppose, will depend on the individual case. There was no problem in these old days. The boy came out with a different body, and he’d gone through something.

"Property is theft," Hagbard said, passing the peace pipe. 

 

"If the BIA helps those real estate developers take our land," Uncle John Feather said, "that will be theft. But if we keep the land, that is certainly not theft." 

 

Night was falling in the Mohawk reservation, but Hagbard saw Sam Three Arrows nod vigorously in the gloom of the small cabin. He felt, again, that American Indians were the hardest people in the world to understand. His tutors had given him a cosmopolitan education, in every sense of the word, and he usually found no blocks in relating to people of any culture, but the Indians did puzzle him at times.

 

After five years of specializing in handling the legal battles of various tribes against the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the land pirates it served, he was still conscious that these people's heads were someplace he couldn't yet reach. Either they were the simplest, or the most sophisticated, society on the planet; maybe, he thought, they were both, and the ultimate simplicity and the ultimate sophistication are identical. 

 

"Property is liberty," Hagbard said. "I am quoting the same man who said property is theft. He also said property is impossible. I speak from the heart. I wish you to understand why I take this case. I wish you to understand in fullness." 

 

Sam Three Arrows drew on the pipe, then raised his dark eyes to Hagbard's. "You mean that justice is not known like a dog who barks in the night? That it is more like the unexpected sound in the woods that must be identified cautiously after hard thinking?" 

 

There it was again: Hagbard had heard the same concreteness of imagery in the speech of the Shoshone at the opposite end of the continent. He wondered, idly, if Ezra Pound's poetry might have been influenced by habits of speech his father acquired from the Indians—Homer Pound had been the first white man born in Idaho. It certainly went beyond the Chinese. And it came, not from books on rhetoric, but from listening to the heart— the Indian metaphor he had himself used a minute ago. 

 

He took his time about answering: he was beginning to acquire the Indian habit of thinking a long while before speaking. 

 

"Property and justice are water," he said finally. "No man can hold them long. I have spent many years in courtrooms, and I have seen property and justice change when a man speaks, change as the caterpillar changes to the butterfly.

 

Do you understand me?

 

I thought I had victory in my hands, and then the judge spoke and it went away. Like water running through the fingers." 

 

Uncle John Feather nodded. "I understand. You mean we will lose again. We are accustomed to losing. Since George Washington promised us these lands 'as long as the mountain stands and the grass is green,' and then broke his promise and stole part of them back in ten years— in ten years, my friend!— we have lost, always lost. We have one acre left of each hundred promised to us then." 

 

"We may not lose," Hagbard said. "I promise you, the BIA will at least know they have been in a fight this time. I learn more tricks, and get nastier, each time I go into a courtroom. I am very tricky and very nasty by now.

 

But I am less sure of myself than I was when I took my first case. I no longer understand what I am fighting. I have a word for it— The Snafu Principle, I call it— but I do not understand what it is." 

 

There was another pause. Hagbard heard the lid on the garbage can in back of the cabin rattling: that was the raccoon that Uncle John Feather called Old Grandfather come to steal his evening dinner. Property was theft, certainly, in Old Grandfather's world, Hagbard thought. 

 

"I am also puzzled," Sam Three Arrows said finally. "I worked, long ago, in New York City, in construction, like many young men of the Mohawk Nation. I found that whites were often like us, and I could not hate them one at a time.

 

But they do not know the earth or love it. They do not speak from the heart, usually. They do not act from the heart. They are more like the actors on the movie screen. They play roles.

 

And their leaders are not like our leaders. They are not chosen for virtue, but for their skill at playing roles. Whites have told me this, in plain words. They do not trust their leaders, and yet they follow them. When we do not trust a leader, he is finished.

 

Then, also, the leaders of the whites have too much power. It is bad for a man to be obeyed too often. But the worst thing is what I have said about the heart. Their leaders have lost it and they have lost mercy.

 

They speak from somewhere else. They act from somewhere else. But from where? Like you, I do not know. It is, I think, a kind of insanity."

 

He looked at Hagbard and added politely. "Some are different." 

 

It was a long speech for him, and it stirred something in Uncle John Feather. "I was in the army," he said. "We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called orientation and education. There were films.

 

It was to show us how this bad white man was doing terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me.

 

I was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not angry, but puzzled.

 

There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country do not also do.

 

They told us about a place named Lidice.

It was much like Wounded Knee.

 

They told us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed.

It was much like the Trail of Tears.

 

They told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him.

It was much like the way white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me.

 

I asked another soldier about this, a black white man.

He was easier to talk to than the regular white man.

I asked him what he thought of the orientation and education.

 

He said it was shit, and he spoke from the heart!

 

I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right.

The orientation and education was shit.

 

When the men from the BIA come here to talk, it is the same. Shit.

 

But let me tell you this: the Mohawk Nation is losing its soul.

Soul is not like breath or blood or bone and it can be taken in ways no man understands.

 

My grandfather had more soul than I have, and the young men have less than me.

But I have enough soul to talk to Old Grandfather, who is a raccoon now.

 

He thinks as a raccoon and he is worried about the raccoon nation, more than I am worried about the Mohawk Nation.

He thinks the raccoon nation will die soon, and all the nations of the free and wild animals.

 

That is a terrible thing and it frightens me.

 

When the nations of the animals die, the earth will also die.

That is an old teaching and I cannot doubt it.

I see it happening, already.

 

If they steal more of our land to build that dam, more of our soul will die, and more of the souls of the animals will die!

The earth will die, and the stars will no longer shine!

The Great Mother herself may die!"

 

The old man was crying unashamedly.

 

"And it will be because men do not speak words but speak shit!" 

 

 

Hagbard had turned pale beneath his olive skin. "You're coming into court," he said slowly, "and you're going to tell the judge that, in exactly those words."