Month: July 2023

find a place where there’s joy

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you’re stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter.The problem with hell is that the fire doesn’t consume you. The fires of transformation do.

Fire is symbolic of the night sea journey, the up- coming of shadow-repressed biography, history, and traumas-and the burning out of the imps of malice. Purgatory is a place where that fire is turned into a purging fire that burns out the fear system, burns out the blockage so that it will open.

If hell is the wasteland, then purgatory would be the journey where you leave the place of pain. You are still in pain, but you’re in quest with a sense of possible realization. There is no longer despair. You really do not have a sacred place, a rescue land, until you can find some little field of action, or place to be, where it’s not a wasteland, where there is a little spring of ambrosia. It’s a joy that comes from inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, but a place that lets you so experience your own will, your own intention, and your own wish that, in small, the joy is there. The sin against the Holy Ghost, I think, is despair. The Holy Ghost is that which inspires you to realization., and despair is the feeling that nothing can come. That is absolute hell.

Find a place where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

– Joseph Campbell

removed from the rest of humanity

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Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love: they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god. And there takes place, then, that dramatic divorce of the two principles of love and hate which the pages of history so bountifully illustrate. Instead of clearing his own hear the zealot tries to clear the world.

– Joseph Campbell, from The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Photo by vitalina on Pexels.com

meditation by paint

/ Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

I’ve added paint to my morning meditation. I do one each day. Here’s the work from this week. Each one is 9×12 acrylic on paper. (the number after the title represents the number of days I’ve been in recovery…grateful recovery.)

LaVerna 2 birds #2432, July 17, 2023,

Anesthetized #2433, July 18, 2023

Terrarium #2434, July 19, 2023

On Hold #2435, July 20, 2023

Head Waters #2436, July 21, 2023

realizing that everything has been misunderstood

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There is a Japanese saying I recall once having heard, of the five stages of a man’s growth: “At ten, an animal; at twenty, a lunatic; at thirty, a failure; at forty, a fraud; at fifty, a criminal.” And at sixty, I would add (since by that time one will have gone through all this), one begins advising one’s friends; and at seventy (realizing that everything has been misunderstood) one keeps quiet and is taken for a sage. “At eighty,” then said Confucius, “I knew my ground and stood firm.” – Joseph Campbell, from Myths to Live By