Discovering My Tiger Face

Sitting here at sixty-two years old, turning page after page of my final few chapters, it’s odd that I feel no sense of nostalgia when looking back over the past forty plus years. I can honestly say that I feel no love for the “glory days’ of my youth, no longing to revisit those (few) peak experiences that I once hung my self-worth on. That oddity creates a curiously inverted type of self-reflection, meaning that I am far more comfortable looking forward than back. But why is that? What caused my view of the world, and myself, to turn inside out?

Well, the answer to that is an easy one. As I’ve written many times before, I divide my history between two radically different lives; the one before John Lennon’s death, and the one that emerged after it. In fact, if you were to take scalpel in hand to dissect this old soul, cutting through the tissue and muscle of my life, performing a type of autopsy with the hope of discovering how a shallow, sports obsessed teenager who had never read a book somehow morphed into a man obsessed with books, words, and ideas, there you would find Lennon’s name etched prominently on the walls of my selfhood. Lennon’s influence permeated down to the marrow in my bones and cause me to see the world in a radically different light. But in addition to seeing Lennon’s name scattered all around, you would also find another. 

Throughout thirty plus years of journal writing, Joseph Campbell’s name is mentioned perhaps more than any other. In fact, the footprint he occupies on my life exceeds that of Lennon in many ways, which is surprising to admit, but the fact is that Campbell occupies a sizable chunk of my intellectual real-estate. Lennon’s influence constitutes something more analogous to “turning the house lights on,” meaning that before him there was not an “I” in my vocabulary to any legible degree, there was no steward at the helm guiding the ship. The clearest effect he had on me is that it felt as if another person had stepped inside my head and grabbed the steering wheel that had been left unattended. I was nineteen and it was the first time I caught a clear glimpse of the person I was always meant to become. 

The key point I wish to make there is that the doors to my self-awareness that Lennon blew open is precisely what allowed the rush of air from Campbell to enter the room. For me, and only me, without Lennon, there would have been no Campbell. In fact, his entrance occurred precisely when I first began developing deeper intuitions about religion. At that crucial point, I happen to stumble across his “The Power of Myth” on PBS one evening, which struck me with the same force that Lennon had a few years earlier, meaning that it changed the course of my life. The key difference between the two is that with Lennon, all I had were his lyrics, a few snippets from interviews, and a few of biographies, while Campbell was a scholar who had written extensively about many of the questions I wrestled with at the time.

Yet even more than his scholarship, I quickly discovered that he got the punchline regarding religion, and understood that our long history obsessing over God(s) has always been reflective in nature, meaning all the thousands of deities that have spilled out of our imagination for countless millennia are projections of our deep psychological and social needs. From Campbell, I soon learned those ancient myths were far more than fantasy tales.  

Campbell had also read extensively, and I mean EXTENSIVELY, and had a wisdom that encompassed a surprisingly wide range of topics that went well beyond mythology and comparative religions, but also psychology, philosophy, literature, and art, so it should surprise no one to learn that I was completely enthralled with his mind. He also possessed a poets sensitivity that was apparent in his story telling, as he would seamlessly merge the poignant and the poetic into a single story-thread. He often described myths as public dreams, emerging from our shared commonality as complex social beings, which certainly captures the point I wish to make here.

It goes without saying that discovering Campbell was the missing link for me regarding the religion question. At no point in my life have I been a “believer”, even before discovering him, but due to my limited education, I lacked the vocabulary and conceptual framework to explain or defend my thoughts on the matter. Well, Campbell quickly changed all that by effectively providing me with a wide-angle lens that expanded how I considered the question.

Once I immersed myself into his world of mythology, a veil lifted from my eyes, and I began to appreciate the teeth those mythic stories had on the believing mind. Myths accustom people, almost from birth, to think in certain ways, to behave in a predictable manner, and to desire the same types of things from life. Myths were not simply “stories” meant to entertain, but were also spun to illuminate moral or social ethics with the intent to instruct people how to get along within a given community or society. Myths functioned as a type of social glue that bound groups together in a common cause, a type of technology, in other words, that enables large numbers of disparate people to live together in relative peace.

For those who lived before the Scientific Revolution, myths functioned as something analogous to a modern-day Google search, meaning they provided the answers to many of their deepest existential questions. For them, if not also for a sizable percentage even today, myths worked as a type of mashup of holy scripture and the Encyclopedia Britannica. By combining fiction and fact into a single story thread, they were able to explain social, psychological and environmental complexities (reality) within a simple and entertaining story that could be easily absorbed. For the ancients, virtually all ethical and moral knowledge was wrapped inside a story.

This we all know, of course. There were a hundred stories that Campbell explained, all emphasizing the various points I just made, but there is one parable that I have thought about for many years now that I want to present with this note. It’s called “The Tiger and the Goat,” which has several important downstream effects that I will discuss later. Campbell didn’t create the parable, of course, but his inflections as a storyteller are uniquely his own. It essentially describes what happens when someone finds themselves caught in a life they were not born to inhabit, which certainly resonated with me. Here is Campbell.

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“The story I’d like to give is that of a tigress who was pregnant and starving hungry. She came upon a little flock of goats. And in pouncing upon them, with the energy that she expended, she brought on the birth of her little one and her own death. So, she died giving birth to a little tiger. The goats, meanwhile, had scattered, and they finally came back to their little grazing place, and they found this just-born little tiger and its dead mother. They had very strong parental instincts, and they adopted the little tiger, who grew up thinking he was a goat. He learned to bleat, he learned to eat grass, but the grass was very bad for his digestive system. He couldn’t handle the cellulose. By the time he was an adolescent he was a pretty miserable specimen of his species.”

“At that time a male tiger pounced on the little flock, and they again scattered. But this little fellow was a tiger, he wasn’t a goat. So, there he was, standing. The big fellow looked at him and said, “What, you living here with these goats?”

“The little tiger goes Maaaaa and begins nibbling grass in a kind of embarrassed way. The big fellow is mortified, like a father coming home and finding his son with long hair; something like that. So, he swats him back and forth a couple of times because the little fellow could only bleat and nibble grass. Then he takes him by the neck and carries him to a pond. There was no wind blowing; it was perfectly still.”

“Now the Hindus say of yoga that it is the art of making the mind stand still. The intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind itself. It’s as though a pond was to be made to stand still. When the wind is blowing, the waters are rippling and all these little broken reflections come and go, come and go, come and go, and that’s the way we are in our lives. We identify ourselves with one of these coming and going reflections, and we think, Oh dear, here I come, there I go. If you make the pond stand still, then the image stands still and you see your eternal presence, and identifying with that, you are relatively indifferent to the world.”

“So, this little tiger is now being introduced to the principles of yoga. And the big fellow says. “Now look into that pond.” And the little one puts his face over it. And for the first time in his little life, he sees his actual face. The big tiger puts his face over there, and he says, “You see! You’ve got the face of a tiger, you’re like me, Be like me! (Now that’s guru stuff).”

“Anyhow, the little tiger’s beginning to sort of get the message. The big fellow’s next discipline is to pick him up and take him to his den, where there are the remains of a recently slaughtered gazelle. The big fellow takes a chunk of this bloody stuff, and he says to the little one, “Open your face.”

The little one backs off and says, “I’m a vegetarian.”

“Well,” says the big one, “none of that nonsense.” And he shoves it down his throat. And the little one gags on it, as the text says, “As all do on true doctrine.”

“So, gagging on the true doctrine, it’s nevertheless getting into his system since it is his proper food, and it activates his proper nature. Spontaneously moved by his proper food, he gives a little tiger roar, sort of Tiger Roar 101. Then the big guy says, “There we are. Now we’ve got it. Now we’ll eat tiger food.”

Then once Campbell finished the parable, he drove home the mythical import that we are intended to absorb and take with us.

“There is a moral here, of course. It is that we’re all really tigers living here as goats. The function of sociology and most of our religious education is to teach us to be goats. But the function of properly interpreting mythological symbols, together with a meditation discipline is to introduce you to your tiger face. Then comes the problem. You’ve found your tiger face but you’re still living here with these goats. How are you going to do that?”

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“How are you going to do that?” There is a lot to unpack there, so allow me to circle back to that question later, because there are several important points to lay out first if my intentions here are to be understood.

I first read this parable some thirty years ago and if asked at that point to summarize its intent, I would have stumbled through a few vaguely plausible ideas that I had gathered from other books, from other authors, while having little to no idea of my own Tiger face.

In a deeply poignant way, both Lennon and Campbell played the role of that elder Tiger for me, exposing my life among the goats (the common herd), with each of them implying that if my ambition was to capture a glimpse of my own Tiger face, it would require something of a hero’s journey, which was a challenge that I eagerly accepted. In fact, I recently posted an essay about that very thing, titled “Answering the Call.”

Interestingly enough, each of them illuminated different paths at precisely the moments I needed their particular guidance. In regard to Lennon, I was confronted with a clear example of what true intellectual independence looked like, as well as the incalculable value of discovering and walking my own path, which included the need to have a healthy skepticism toward all forms of authority that aimed to restrict or control that independence.

Campbell, on the other hand, laid out a roadmap to my search for the meaning of life. Yes, I know that sounds embarrassingly quaint, I admit, but that is honestly how I thought of it at the time, and I desperately wanted to know. Yet, even after reading most of his works, as well as an impressively wide range of others, encompassing everything from the evolutionary discoveries of Richard Leaky through the mystical flights of Carlos Castaneda, I still had nothing. I knew in my gut that all those ancient stories were misplaced, at least for my nature, but I still had nothing to show for two decades of searching. Now looking back on it, I can see that I was under the misguided notion that it was something I could learn, that if I could simply find the right book, or read the right line, problem would meet solution and enlightenment would ensue.

Well, finally after many years of coming up empty-handed, I stumbled across the answer, and to no surprise it was Campbell who delivered the goods. It came during an interview when asked to describe the meaning of life, to which he had this brilliant retort.

“there is no meaning to life……we bring the meaning to it.”

That’s all it took, just a simple rephrasing of the question. I was guilty of inserting the wrong premise, that “life” somehow stands separately as an independent thing, as a distinct entity, as a noun, in other words, so “it” must have some purpose. But Campbell’s point was that “life” can only have meaning as a verb. When it’s properly defined, “LIFE” can only equate to biological processes, while whatever “meaning” we wish to impose on that life is nothing more than philosophical or theological posturing that will vary from person to person. His simple quote, coming essentially from a guru of sorts, is one of the few sentences that cause me to feel lighter than air, and I mean that quite literally. A lifelong obsession had been lifted, and with it, an essential part of my peace of mind floated at the suggestion.

But allow me to circle back to Campbell’s “moral” from the parable for a moment, particularly his point of discovering ourselves to be Tigers living among Goats, which he implies as being analogous to the influence that society, education, and parents exert on us, each colluding to prod us into setting aside our own unique nature in order to “assume” the identity we are expected to follow. Like that young Tiger in the parable, we mimic our way into becoming their end products. And since our critical thinking skills don’t come online until late adolescence, or even later, we will have by that time accumulated a heaping stack of beliefs that are not truly our own. Now there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that, as the vast majority of people appear perfectly happy tending that garden, but there are others, and I will include myself among them, who simply refuse to comply, preferring to write our own script, and create our own destiny…. whatever the price.

All of which leads me to a key piece of wisdom that I picked up from Campbell from a lecture he gave regarding the nature of “Zen”, but before diving into that, I want to step back in order to reframe this a bit. I first read Campbell’s “Tiger Face” parable decades ago and has has been on my mind to write about it ever since, but I could not figure out how to present it properly, so it sat idle, percolating in the background, waiting for the right framing. Well, that framing fell into place after coming across his “Zen” lecture recently. 

In that lecture, he began with an analogy that he termed “the way of the Kitten or the way of the Monkey,” which perfectly illustrates the two general ways the world approaches this singular question, and by extension, the existential fork in the road that it presented me…… in other words, a choice had to be made.

Here is Campbell describing it:

“…. when a Kitten cries “Miaow,” its mother comes and takes it by the scruff and carries it to safety; but as is common in India, bands of monkeys will come scampering down their trees and across the road, with the babies riding on their mother’s back, hanging on by themselves. The two attitudes, accordingly, can be understood as apposing approaches to the question at hand, with the first being that of someone in prayer, “O Lord, O Lord, come save me!”, while the second, without prayers or cries, goes to work on themselves.”

Clearly, with that imposition in view, you can see the dilemma I faced all those years ago, because those two approaches represented a distinct fork in the road that had to be considered and a path chosen. What tipped the scales for me was Lennon. Let me explain. 

It wasn’t long after he died that I felt an intense, almost primal urge to begin something of a discipleship under his tutelage, which quickly revealed to my eye that I was that young Tiger nibbling on grass alongside my fictive kin group. I was that malnourished little tiger who found himself mimicking others in an environment that wasn’t at all suited to bring out my own true nature. Lennon effectively grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and placed my face in front of a mirror, where I clearly saw that I didn’t have the face of a goat. I wasn’t quite sure what a Tiger face should look like at that point, but I did understand that a life nibbling grass, or crying out to be saved was not the path for me.

I want to pause here for a moment in order to circle back and appreciate the optics that Campbell provided to this quest of mine, because once I discovered him, I soon learned how to interpret for myself the metaphoric and symbolic languages being thrown about. Dozens and dozens of Gods were explained, all of whom once proudly roamed the earth, from the soap-opera polytheism of the Greeks to the likes of Ishtar, Inanna, Shiva, Ninurta, Zalmoxis, Osiris, and countless others. Each of them were Gods of the highest standing during their heyday but are now regulated to the fairytale section of the library. 

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will make gods by dozens.” ― Montaigne

To circle back to Campbell’s analogy, it should be self-evident to anyone following the plot that our current collection of “revealed” religions; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each instruct their followers in the way of the Kitten. That cannot be denied. Each of them employs the same language of submission and subjugation, such as being described as sheep living under the care of a righteous Shepard, and other similar depictions. All that is required is unquestioned obedience, with the promise of “salvation” (save me), or perhaps some other form of reward offered to cement the transaction. Each of them place believers in a subservient role, living under the watchful gaze of an all-powerful father-figure who rewards or punishes based on our behavior, effectively extending our childhood well into adulthood, if not fully to the grave.

Well…… I simply asked myself, “what good is that for a grown adult?” To dutifully submit to a set of beliefs dating back to the Iron Age? And why does my unique, authentic sense of self need to be suppressed and replaced with one foreign to my own independent nature (we must die and be reborn in Christ)? Is it not a better option to become a self-actualized, self-determined, mature adult? At least those were the questions that arose once my system had a steady diet of Tiger food to digest.

Even Nietzsche anteed up and got in on the action by rebranding the same principles with his introduction of “Overman vs Lastman”, as presented in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” There Nietzsche’s prophet attempted to instruct the local villagers to embrace his ideal of the Übermensch or “overman”, by pressing upon them the virtues of seeking their own inner strength and self-mastery (true doctrine). In other words, Nietzsche presents his prophet in precisely the same light as that elder Tiger from Campbell’s parable, attempting to show the misguided villagers a clear path to discover their own tiger faces. They rejected him, of course, wanting the easy comfort and simplicity of the Lastman instead, content to munch on grass along with the all the other goats.