FOLLOW YOUR BLISS

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have had this book for a long time and have read parts now and then. I have watched the video of the TV Series with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell which the book documents. I decided to really read 'The Power of Myth' chapter by chapter, word by word. Most of the time I did not understand what I was reading, but at other times the words inspired me. This lead to the following passages that I wanted to save to read again. Maybe some day I will read the book again to see if the words make sense to me after a period of time and experience has passed. Joseph Campbell's basic words to live by have been in my vocabulary since I watched that video. "Follow Your Bliss"

The following are those words that I want to ponder.
Page 12:
Moyers: So there are mythological rituals at work in our society. The ceremony of marriage is one. The ceremony of the inauguration of a President or judge is another. What are some other rituals that are important in society today?
Campbell: Joining the army, putting on a uniform, is another. You're giving up your personal life and accepting a socially determined manner of life in the service of the society of which you are a member. That is why I think it is obscene to judge people in terms of civil law for performances that they rendered in time of war. They were acting not as individuals, they were acting as agents of something above them and to which they had by dedication given themselves. To judge them as though they were individual human beings is totally improper.

Campbell
Page 17: I don't know what's coming, any more that Yeats* knew, but when you come to the end of one time and the beginning of a new one, it's a period of tremendous pain and turmoil. The threat we feel, and every body feels-well, there is this notion of Armageddon coming, you know?
*refer to Yeats poem "The Second Coming".
Page 28: "Here you have the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius ad Lao-tze, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man's reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted earth, no longer by the courses of the planets---but by reason.

Page 56:
Moyers: What is a metaphor?
Campbell: A metaphor is an image that suggest something else...The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing.
Page 57: Campbell: The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies ad your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnations. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."

Campbell:
Page 58: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely.
Page 60: I think the clergy is really not doing its proper work. It does not speak about the connotations of the metaphors but is stuck with the ethics of good and evil.
Page 64: ...You can make a choice, either to throw it all off and go into the forest to meditate, or to stay in the world, both in the life of your job of politics and achievement, and in the love life with your wife and family. Now, this is a very nice myth, it seems to me.
Page 66: Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions. I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way Santa Claus told me it ought to be. But affirming it the way it is--that's the hard thing. and that is what rituals are about.
Page 67: ...Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.
And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won't even think of eternity. You'll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.
Page 118:
Moyers: What happens when you follow your bliss?
Campbell: You come to bliss. ... We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your depth.

Page 149:
Moyers: What's my ego?
Campbell: What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to.

Page 154:
Moyers: What are the "thou shalts" of a child that he needs to shed?
Campbell: Every one that inhibits his self-fulfillment.

Page 182:
Moyers: So when you say, "Save the earth", we're talking about saving ourselves.
Campbell: Yes. All this hope for something happening in society has to wait for something in the human psyche a whole new way of experiencing a society.

Page 207:
Moyers: As you've moved among various world views, dipping in and out of cultures, civilizations, and religions, have you found something in common in every culture that creates the need for God?
Campbell: Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses.

Campbell
Page 229: Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you are in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life, And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.


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