Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as ''other people's religion.'' But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment - or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic bestselling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology's symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives. Campbell dwells on life's important questions. Combining cross-cultural stories with the teachings of modern psychology, he examines the ways in which our myths shape and enrich our lives. He explores the many insights of Carl Jung; the notion of self as the hero; and how East and West differ in their approaches to the ego. The book also includes an extensive question-and-answer session that ranges from mythological readings of the Bible to how the Hero's Journey unfolds for women. With his usual wit and insight, Campbell draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the Hero's Journey. Along the way, he shows how myth can help each of us truly identify and follow our bliss.

Mythology and Personal Transformation: Easyread Large Edition

Pathways to Bliss

Laura Mei

There lives in us a life wisdom. 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. The energy is blocked, and we are thrown off center.

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. 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. 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.

The only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. That’s the first function of mythology: not merely a reconciliation of consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence, but reconciliation with gratitude, with love, with recognition of the sweetness. Through the bitterness and pain, the primary experience at the core of life is a sweet, wonderful thing. A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning in existence, which, my dear friend, has no meaning — it simply is. But the mind goes asking for meanings; it can’t play unless it knows (or makes up) some system of rules. Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. 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. ✨️

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