Source Text
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.
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.
AI Summary
Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell presents key insights from the Tibetan Buddhism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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