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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