Follow Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell’s Path to the Transcendent, by Liam James

[Surya]

Intro by me, Surya (not a part of the substack)

So, in the winter months, I had a chat online with this wonderfull fellow, about Jung and myth. He invited me to his substack, where he once in a blue moon shares his writings. I have decided to share this with you for several reasons:
- to spread his writings
- in the hope it is of interrest to you as well
- perhsaps start a discussion here

 

Cheers!

 

Follow Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell’s Path to the Transcendent

Liam James Jul 10

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For Joseph Campbell, following your own personal myth provides a framework for personal growth and helps us live lives in tune with our nature.

You find your myth by following your bliss.

Discover Campbell’s teachings on following your bliss to reach the transcendent below, with help from Brazilian football and Oasis.

All the Campbell quotes below are taken from Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation.

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Mythic figures as guides

Mythic figures can serve as role models in a given area. Campbell explains:

‘…the gods represent the patron powers that support you in your field of action. And by contemplating the deities, you’re given a kind of steadying force that puts you in the role, as it were, that is represented by that particular deity.’

Myths represent a society’s values and provide directions and frameworks for living well, something Campbell held valuable.

‘I don’t know how it is now, right this minute, when so many new possibilities have opened up for life. But in my experience it has always been the model that gives you the idea of the direction in which to go, and the way in which to handle the problems and opportunities that come up.’

But even then, in the mid-to-late 20th century, he hints at a lack of myths to represent the diversity of human experience. The ‘new possibilities’ Campbell refers to in the last century are dwarfed by contemporary risks and opportunities ushered in by technological advancements and AI, rendering the myths of old even less applicable and new myths harder to imagine.

He makes the same point later in the text:

‘Life has changed in form so rapidly that even the forms that were normal to think about in the time of my boyhood are no longer around, and there’s another set, and everything is moving very, very fast. Today we don’t have the stasis that is required for the formation of a mythic tradition.’

So while the myths of old may offer some guidance, we need some new way of relating ourselves to the transcendent through myth.

Read the article I wrote on Campbell below to learn more about the transcendent:

• Becoming Transparent to the Transcendent: Joseph Campbell on Realising Your True Nature

Relating yourself to transcendence

Campbell distinguishes myth from Eastern traditions as a way of relating yourself to transcendence:

‘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. They are battling their way through as if no one had ever been there before.’

So myth gives you direction, unscrambling the labyrinth. But if the old models don’t fit, what can we do?

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Bliss as a model for life

Campbell suggests following bliss is a reliable model for reaching the transcendent:

‘In this way, your bliss becomes your life. There’s a saying in Sanskrit: the three aspects that point furthest toward the border of the abyss are sat, cit, and ananda: being, consciousness, and bliss. You can call transcendence a hole or the whole, either one, because it is beyond all words. All that we can talk about is what is on this side of transcendence. And the problem is to open the words, to open the images so that they point past themselves. 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-ananda. Being, consciousness, and bliss.’

He continues:

‘Now, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been thinking a lot 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. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already.’

Campbell studied in Germany and Paris, and returned to America just three weeks before the 1929 Wall Street crash. But this apparent disaster proved auspicious, as it allowed him time to pursue his bliss:

‘…I didn’t have a job for five years. And, fortunately for me, there was no welfare. I had nothing to do but sit in Woodstock and read and figure out where my bliss lay. There I was, on the edge of excitement all the time.’

The edge of excitement is a great place to spend your life, and Campbell’s experiences there inform his philosophy for life:

‘So, what I’ve told my students is this: follow your bliss. You’ll have moments when you’ll experience bliss. And when that goes away, what happens to it? Just stay with us, and there’s more security in that than in finding out where the money is going to come from next year’.

I recently started rereading Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid, and found this to resonate with the teachings of Campbell and Jung:

‘That tension – between beauty and cynicism, between what Brazilians call futebol d’arte and futebol de resultados – is a constant, perhaps because it is so fundamental, not merely to sport but also to life: to win, or to play the game well? It is hard to think of any significant actions that are not in some way a negotiation between the two extremes of pragmatism and idealism.’

Campbell’s clearly on the ‘play the game well’ side, but his point is that this idealistic philosophy is the most practical too; more ‘secure’, to quote him.

The blissful ideal itself becomes the practical guide.

Discovering your myth through bliss

For Campbell, bliss is a guide that will help you discover your myth:

‘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 idea that it is one’s own myth is key for Campbell; earlier traditions can give clues, but they are only clues:

‘As many a wise man has said, “You can’t wear another person’s hat.”… You’ve got to find the wisdom, not the clothing of it. Through those trappings, the myths of other cultures, you can come to a wisdom that you’ve then got to translate into your own. The whole problem is to turn these mythologies into your own.’

The Holy Grail

Campbell references an Arthurian myth, where the Holy Grail partially reveals itself to the knights assembled in the banquet hall. It doesn’t appear in its full glory, and is covered with a radiant cloth, before it withdraws, leaving the knights in awe.

Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, proposes that the knights go in quest of the Grail to behold it unveiled. Below is Campbell’s response:

‘Now we come to the text that interested me. The text reads, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the Forest Adventurous at that point which he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no way or path.”

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no way or path. Where there’s a way or path, it is somebody else’s path; each human being is a unique phenomenon.

The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss’.

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What if you don’t know what your bliss is?

‘I don’t know what it is that makes me feel alive

I don’t know how to wake the things that sleep inside

I only wanna see the light that shines behind your eyes’

Acquiesce – Oasis

I’m realising my teenage dream tomorrow and seeing Oasis live – a band that millions of us worldwide love for the way they awaken that very feeling of blissful transcendence and liveliness within us.

And while it’s probably optimistic to try and discern too many deep truths about the human condition from Oasis lyrics, particularly those related to the psychological teachings of Campbell and Jung, there is a light-hearted connection to make between the opening lines of Acquiesce and the points I’ve made earlier in this article.

The point is, we may not know our bliss – what makes us ‘feel alive’ – but there’s often some hint: some fleeting moments of curiosity or sparks amid the dull listlessness of life that can orient us towards the transcendent.

Campbell would advise looking out for these.

In Jungian discourse, uncertainty is often just a lack of self-knowledge, and can be approached with inner work that deals with the unconscious

Jung would probably go a step further than Campbell and advise using active imagination and dialoguing with both emotional sides – the general feelings of ennui and the transient moments of interest or joy – to explore them more, gain self-knowledge, and expand the personality.

Summary

For Campbell, bliss – that ‘deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself’ – is a pathway to the transcendent.

Following bliss puts you on a mythic path, offering an alternative model to that of Eastern traditions.

And if you don’t know your bliss, you can look to Jung’s teachings on working with the unconscious to unlock the energy stored there.

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Three Ways to Understand ‘Meaning’ in Life: A Fortune Cookie Philosophy

LIAM JAMES AUG 17

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“What’s the meaning of life?”

It’s one of the most profound philosophical questions, profound to the point of skin-crawling triteness.

Were it directed towards you in a street or bar or kitchen you’d likely meet it with a roll of the eyes and a shake of the head as you suppress your hidden rage: “Get this prick away from me or I’ll be forced to throw a flailing overhand right in the vicinity of his vocal cords.”

Yet here I am writing about it — hopefully from a slant that makes it slightly less unbearable — and here you are reading it.

And while I don’t have any answers, I do have a useful way of thinking about it meaning itself that’s worth considering next time you’re hungover or on a comedown or having an existential crisis.

In this article I’m going to look at three different ways we can define ‘meaning’ to make thinking about the question easier.

I’m also going to share with you my own work-in-progress-and-open-to-revision philosophy on what type of meaning is the most profound to me, and probably to you too.

I’m not claiming any of these ideas as my own; as I’ve said, this is as hackneyed a topic as you’re likely to find in philosophical discourse, so no hot takes here.

I’m not claiming any of them to be ‘right’ or ‘true’ either — just ideas I’m thinking through, writing down, and sharing.

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We all live our meaning

Whether we know it or not, we all have a philosophy of the meaning of life because, to some degree at least, we’re living it.

It may be conscious, something we’ve spent time formulating, questioning, and testing, though it’s more likely that it’s unconscious, but implicit in our actions.

‘Meaning’ is a broad term, but we can break it down into three distinct types.

Three types of meaning

The three types of meaning I want to look at are:

• Cognitive/intellectual meaning

• Teleological meaning

• Intrinsic meaning

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and I know this is a topic that will have been covered countless times by people infinitely smarter than me. But I’m going to explore what I think each one… means.

Cognitive/intellectual meaning

The first type of meaning I want to consider is cognitive, or intellectual, meaning.

This is the type of meaning we associate with the mind, the cerebral meaning we derive from understanding things and how they work, and the conceptual frameworks and worldviews we build as a result.

If you want a cognitive understanding of why we’re here, the introduction to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens may suffice:

‘About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics.

About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry.

About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.’

If you read something like that and your response isn’t to think “what the fuck?” then you’re probably a bit odd.

This four-step genealogy of our place in the cosmos spanning 13 billion years is mind-boggling in its brevity, and can help us build a conceptual map of why we’re here.

Philosophising and intellectual contemplation — that is, investigating these conceptual frameworks more deeply — might lead us to more profound spiritual insights about ourselves and our existence.

But still, this type of intellectualising probably isn’t what we’re imagining when we consider meaning in life.

It’s only one part of the puzzle, and lacks the felt depth of the other two types.

Teleological meaning

Teleology relates to purpose.

As a branch of philosophy, it explores the idea that a thing’s ultimate purpose or goal explains its existence, focusing on what it is for rather than only how it came to be.

Objective teleology — more common in classical philosophy, but unpopular now — argues that purpose is baked into existence, and that all phenomena have a telos (purpose).

For Aristotle, an acorn’s telos is to become a fully grown oak tree.

Framed biologically, our telos may be to survive long enough to procreate and pass on our genetic code.

I don’t think I believe in an objective purpose underpinning all our actions; instead, I think it’s something we’re either drawn towards or something we get to choose.

This is a subjective teleology, which relates to existentialist thinking.

Sartre thought that ‘existence precedes essence’, meaning we’re born without a fixed nature or purpose, creating our own meaning through our choices and actions.

Camus viewed the universe as inherently meaningless, and that we should embrace this absurdity and find meaning in the struggle itself.

This worldview (intellectual meaning) can give rise to more ‘purposes’.

An artist might argue that it’s to create beautiful things and edify the world with their work.

An athlete might claim it’s to push the boundaries in their sport and discover what humans are capable of.

A Buddhist might say it’s the cessation of suffering for all humanity through Buddhist practices.

Purpose is something you’re pulled to do, and I think this is closer to the type of answer we imagine when we consider the question at hand.

Meaning alone is tricky to answer. Maybe purpose is the meaning.

But maybe not.

Intrinsic meaning

This is where it gets interesting.

For me, intrinsic meaning is the most profound, because it transcends both other types discussed.

Switching the word ‘meaning’ to ‘significance’ may better illustrate the point here.

Some things feel deeply significant despite making no sense intellectually or teleologically: Music is a great example.

Do we derive intellectual meaning from music?

Music may require intellectual understanding; chord progressions, time signatures, scales, and a litany of other technical components that music comprises can all be ridiculously complex, and understanding them intellectually may enrich your experience of making or listening to music.

But none of these elements constitute the essence of the meaning we derive from music, no matter how much the nerds try to convince you.

Does music have a purpose?

It might do. Purposes can range from protest to enjoyment, propaganda to praise.

But again, do any of these really capture what music is?

Alan Watts claimed:

‘Good music never refers to anything other than the music. If you ask Bach, "What is your meaning?" he would say "Listen! That is the meaning."’

It recalls James Joyce, who considered art that taught a lesson ‘improper’. Joseph Campbell made a similar point:

‘When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never exhaust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you.

The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?’

Nothing illustrates this better than music, because nothing makes you feel like music does.

It’s that fucking good that it justifies itself and doesn’t need any other justification — it just feels deeply significant.

This is a subjective point I’m sure, and I’m wary of making universal claims or stating a universal significance.

Still things like love, beauty, and art can all elicit this feeling of deep subjective significance; while they may be able to be ‘explained’ evolutionarily or psychologically, the experiences themselves and the intuitive sense of meaning they engender can’t be reduced to intellect or teleological interpretations.

This, to me, is the deepest type of meaning we experience as humans.

It’s what I think Joseph Campbell’s referring to when he talks about bliss — that significance that you feel deep in your bones that defies all logic and has no purpose outside itself.

To me, Campbell’s advice to ‘follow your bliss’ is an instruction to make intrinsic meaning your purpose: surely one of the most beautiful models for living.

Summary

As I’ve mentioned, I’m writing these articles to work out what I think.

My intuition is that what truly means most is meaningless, purposeless, and fundamentally inexpressible, because it’s deeply significant in itself.

Intellectual meaning gives us worldviews, philosophies, or reflective systems that help us make sense of life beyond facts, but life itself can’t be reduced to any conceptual framework.

Teleological meaning might give us purpose, or a ‘why’, in what I see as an objectively meaningless world — a necessary function, but still lacking something.

Whereas the first two types of meaning attempt to explain or justify experience, intrinsic meaning recognises inherent significance.

Music, art, and beauty capture this, because they’re all portals into a deep significance that’s ultimately meaningless and purposeless — something subjectively ineffable.

And perhaps that’s the paradox we’re faced with: the inherent meaninglessness of existence — that is, its lack of explanation or justification — is what makes it deeply significant in itself.

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