Thinking about the Bodhisattva.

Joseph Campbell explained, more eloquently than I could, that the Bodhisattva is in us and we are in the Bodhisattva, and the Bodhisattva is us and we are the Bodhisattva. What a crazy thing to declare, because I know I’m not perfect.

Campbell explained that the qualities that we perceive as positive and negative personality traits are all aspects of the Bodhisattva. The wide range of emotions and feelings that I’ve tried to recognize in myself are all human qualities that the Bodhisattva knows completely.

This made me laugh out loud when I thought about it during my work day. I’m a letter carrier for the postal service. I was delivering mail in the rain, and water had soaked my shoes and my socks, and two layers of jackets through to my shirt. Half-way through the day I became so frustrated, I stood in the rain with my arms full of soggy letters and catalogs, ready to cuss at the clouds. Instead I found myself laughing, and I said, “This is an example of the Bodhisattva feeling upset.”

Through the remainder of the day I laughed again every time I recognized an emotion rising up in me, and I would say, “This is the Bodhisattva feeling amused,” or “This is the Bodhisattva feeling hurried,” "This is the Bodhisattva feeling angry," or happy or… etc.

Of course, I am sooo far from being a Bodhisattva, and that’s what made me laugh: the reality that these feelings I recognize in myself are shared with one so far ahead of me on the path that he's made the return trip.

I feel somewhat insecure about sharing these thoughts. Maybe that’s why, until now, I’ve only posted quotes from books and I’ve avoided sharing what I feel about the quotes. This is the Bodhisattva feeling insecure.

Here are a couple of quotes from Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell on the topic:

“If the God is a tribal, racial, national, or sectarian 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 gods, 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 males and female are (as phrased in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad) ‘two halves of a split pea’; whereas in the second, the Father is found to be antecedent to the division 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.”