WASTELANDS & SACRED SPACES

This below posting from a Heron Dance email.  See  http://www.herondance.org/subscribe-renew/past-reflections.html 

Some Joseph Campbell (no relation) thoughts on the subject from various sources, including Michael Tom's interviews of him and Diane Osbon's A Joseph Campbell Companion:

You don't really have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that's not a Waste Land, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia--a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you--a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. The joy is there. 

The Grail Castle--that's what this sacred space is: the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have found a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life.

The sacred space is the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. You do not get there in the normal run of life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have to have a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well that goes down deep.

The problem of the grail quest is the re-vilification of what is known as the Waste Land. The Waste Land is a world where people live not out of their own initiative, but out of what they think they're supposed to do. People have inherited their official roles and positions; they haven't earned them. This is the situation of the Waste Land: everybody leading a false life. T. S. Eliot used that idea in his poem, "The Waste Land", and he actually quotes several lines from Wolfram's Parzival.

The adventure is always in the dark forest, and there's something perilous about it. My impression is that many of my friends are baffled; they're wandering in the Waste Land without any sense of where the water is — the source that makes things green.