(Campbell’s lifelong thesis: myth as pathway to bliss)
Joseph Campbell said in 1972, while he was compiling his book Myths to Live By from two decades’ worth of lectures, that he experienced a revelation: My notion about myself was that I had grown up during that time, that my ideas had changed, and, too, that I had progressed. But when I brought these papers together, they were all saying essentially the same thing—over a span of decades. I found out something about the thing that was moving me. I didn’t even have a very clear idea of what it was until I recognized those continuities running through that whole book. Twenty-four years is a pretty good stretch of time. A lot had happened during that period. And there I was babbling on about the same thing.
Some of his thinking grew—his feelings about the promise and dangers of LSD as a gateway to unlocking the mythic images of the collective unconscious, for example —yet the overall thesis remained the same. He felt that myth offered a framework for personal growth and transformation, and that understanding the ways that myths and symbols affect the individual mind offered a way to lead a life that was in tune with one’s nature—a pathway to bliss.
Myth is not the same as history; myths are not inspiring stories of people who lived notable lives. No, myth is the transcendent in relationship to the present. Now, a folk hero is different from the subject of a biography, even when the hero may have been a real person once upon a
Everything gets incorporated into the mythology immediately. In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal. Of course, in trying to relate yourself to transcendence, you don’t have to have images. You can go the Zen way and forget the myths altogether. But I’m talking about the mythic way. And what the myth does is to provide a field in which you can locate yourself. That’s the sense of the mandala, the sacred circle, whether you are a Tibetan monk or the patient of a Jungian analyst. The symbols are laid out around the circle, and you are to locate yourself in the center. A labyrinth, of course, is a scrambled mandala, in which you don’t know where you are. That’s the way the world is for people who don’t have a mythology. It’s a labyrinth.
(Transparency to the transcendent: what myth does)
We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped us all in our mother’s womb. And this kind of wisdom lives in us, and it represents the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time and space. But it’s a transcendent energy. It’s an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge. And that energy becomes bound in each of us—in this body—to a certain commitment. Now, the mind that thinks, the eyes that see, they can become so involved in concepts and local, temporal tasks that we become bound up and don’t let this energy flow through. And then we become sick.
So the psychological problem, the way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself—and here is the phrase—transparent to the transcendent. It’s as easy as that. What myth does for you is to point beyond the phenomenal field toward the transcendent.
Where a myth points past itself to something indescribable, an allegory is merely a story or image that teaches a practical lesson. It is what Joyce would call improper art.
Ritual is simply myth enacted; by participating in a rite, you are participating directly in the myth. In the Navaho world today,
That is thinking in terms of good and evil, light and dark—pairs of opposites. The wisdom sheath doesn’t know about pairs of opposites. The bliss sheath contains all opposites. The wisdom sheath is just coming right up out of it, and it turns into pairs of opposites later on.
And within this, of course, was the ātman, the body itself. Unfortunately, the Egyptians made the enormous error of mistaking eternal life for the eternal concretized life of the body.
Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.
When people say, “Well, you know, this couldn’t have happened, and that couldn’t have happened, and so let’s get rid of the myths,” what they are doing is getting rid of the vocabulary of discourse between manomaya-kośa and vijñānamaya-kośa, between mental wisdom and organic, life-body wisdom.
(Following bliss as guide to the transcendent)
You can use that person as a model. The other way is to live for bliss. In this way, your bliss becomes your life.
They will tend to shut off the experience through their own opacity. But these three concepts are those that will bring you closest to that void: sat-cit-ānanda. Being, consciousness, and bliss. Now, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been thinking about these things. And I don’t know what being is. And I don’t know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.
There are only two attitudes: one is to follow your bliss; and the other is to read the projections as to where the money is going to be when you graduate. Well, it changes so fast. This year it’s computer work; next year it’s dentistry, and so on.
Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again. And that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that’s the way it is. One works out one’s own myth that way.
The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that’s where you have the conflict.
Here is a story that seems to me to embody the essential image of living one’s life, finding it and having the courage to pursue it. It comes from an Arthurian romance, La
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path; each
human being is a unique phenomenon. The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss.
CHAPTER I The Necessity of Rites
(The functions of mythology: awe, cosmos, and rites of passage)
The Functions of Mythology Traditionally, the first function of a living mythology is to reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence; that is to say, to the nature of life. Now, life lives on life. Its first law is, now I’ll eat you, now you eat me—quite something for consciousness to assimilate.
When you realize what primitive people run up against—the pains and the agonies and the problems simply of existing—I think it’s quite amazing. I’ve studied a lot of the myths of these cultures around the world, and I can’t recall a single negative word in primitive thought with respect to existence or to the universe. World-weariness comes later, with people who are living high on the hog. The only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. It is this kind of affirmation that one finds in the primitive rites. Some of these rites are so brutal you can hardly read about, let alone look at, them. Yet they present a vivid image before the young adolescent mind:
That’s the first function of mythology, to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence. The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. This function we may call the cosmological function of mythology.
People live by playing a game, and you can ruin a game by being Sir Sobersides who comes in and says, “Well, what’s the use of this?”