Joseph Campbell's bliss as Flow Theory

So, Joseph Campbell is probably the most famous academic scholar in the domain of comparative mythology:


In 1949 he published The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1949) in which he identified the same seventeen (17) narrative steps (and, Jungian character archetypes) within thousands of popular `hero’ myths including religious narratives - a story algorithm also known as the `monomyth’.*

(None of this is Breaking News... it was 1949, and also we were all given Joe Campbell to read, 20 years ago at Film School...)


The monomyth underpins many popular narratives across many media (movies, novels, going waaay back to: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey of Homer) and not least, a lot of good (and also some bad) Hollywood movies, since Chris Vogler's** great book:


At any rate, there's a Call For Papers in the Journal of Genius and Eminence, for a Special Issue of the journal, a tribute to Joseph Campbell, on the 30th anniversary of his death. - Yay!

One of the books about Campbell's work I particularly admire is - this one:


Here are some quotes from it... This first one is from the Editor's Introduction, by Diane K. Osbon,

`As we love ourselves, we move toward our own bliss, by which Joseph Campbell meant our highest enthusiasm. The word entheos means “god-filled”. Moving toward that which fills us with the godhood, that place where time is not, is all we need to do to change the world around us.’ (Osbon, 1991, pp. 8-9)

Campbell's mantra from his study of mythology became "Follow Your Bliss."

`Live from your own center. Your real dutyis to go away from the community to find your bliss.
The society is the enemyWhen it imposes its structuresOn the individual. On the dragon there are many scales.Every one of them says “Thou Shalt.”Kill the dragon “Thou Shalt.”When one has killed the dragon One has become The Child.
Breaking outIs following your bliss pattern,Quitting the old place, Starting your hero’s journey,Following your bliss.'
                                    (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, p. 21)
What's fairly obvious to scientific scholars of creativity is that the `bliss' that Campbell refers to so often, equates to flow theory.

Namely, finding activities of meaning where you enter the flow state.

For what `flow' is, see this post on Flow Theory, Creativity and Happiness.

(Also the `Theory' in "Flow Theory" is like the one in "Evolutionary Theory". It's not "just a theory". It's a working scientific model of: how stuff actually works. Gravitational Theory is not "just a theory" either. - It works.)

For those who aren't aware of (or haven't yet found) what puts them in the flow state, Campbell suggests to ask yourself:

`What did you do as a child that created timelessness, that made you forget time? 

There lies the myth to live by.’ (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, p. 181)

When we look at the 9 characteristics of the flow state, Campbell is here referring to #8, below:

(1) There are clear goals every step of the way… 

(2) There is immediate feedback to one’s actions… 

(3) There is a balance between challenges and skills… 

(4) Action and awareness are merged… 

(5) Distractions are excluded from consciousness… 

(6) There is no worry of failure… 

(7) Self-consciousness disappears… 

(8) The sense of time becomes distorted… [or: `time flies when you’re having fun’]
and(9) The activity becomes autotelic…’ , [or: worth doing for its own sake, as the process is so  enjoyable]
(Csikszentmihalyi 1996, Creativity)
[text inside square brackets are my inclusions – JTV]

This is how you should feel when you're writing. Or painting. Or dancing. Or - whatever it is, that puts you in flow. It could even be: reading a great book. If all the above things are happening, you're probably in the flow state. i.e., bliss.

This phenomena (i.e., flow) is also Why videogames are so addictive are so addictive for so many players, as, one of the first things they teach you, when you become a Videogame Designer is all about flow theory, and the flow state.

- It's the state every player (in fact, every person) longs to be in, and videogames (just as an example) are purposly designed (by: Game Designers) to maximize it. (This, for example, is why game-levels deliberately increase slightly in difficulty, as the game progresses.)

- It's also (sadly) why corporations (which are essentially: psychopaths, yikes!) aim for the gamification of well, everything.

(...Game theory is originally derived from Evolutionary Theory. The science of Creativity is also explained by: Evolutionary Theory. Geology, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology and Culturology is also explained by Evolutionary Theory... Go figure.)

For more on all that, maybe see:

StoryAlity #100 – The Holon-Parton Structure of the Meme – the Unit of Culture (Velikovsky 2013, 2014, 2016)and
StoryAlity #100A – The 3 Universal Laws of Holon/Partons (Velikovsky 2015)At any rate, Campbell's (1949, mein gott, that's a long time ago) main message is that: most people don't think for themselves, and, just do what society tells them to do, and so they're unhappy, and feel their life has no deep meaning, or purpose, and so...

They live, what he calls "inauthentic" lives. And he (Campbell) calls that: "the waste land"...

In essence, they're not following their heart's desire; they're doing either what (a) they think society expects them to do, or, (b) what they've been told - or read - someplace, that they `should' do.

i.e., They follow the rules, conform, and accept, without first: questioning everything.

As an example, Campbell says:

`In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they think they ought to do or have to do is the wasteland.  

What is the wasteland to you?

I know damned well what the wasteland would be to me: the academic approach to my material; or a marriage to someone who had no thoughts or feelings for me or my work. Living with such a person would be the wasteland.

I find working for money to be the wasteland – doing something that somebody else wants, instead of the thing that is my next step. 

I have been guided all along by a strong revulsion from any sort of action that does not correspond to the impulse of my own wish… 

The crucial thing to live for is the sense of life in what you are doing, and if that is not there, then you are living according to other peoples’ notions of how life should be lived.’ (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, pp. 72-73)

And Campbell also suggests:

`The normal way is to fake it, to feel oneself to be inadequate, to pretend to believe, to strive to believe, and to live, in the imitation of others, an inauthentic life. 

The authentic creative way on the other hand, which I would term the way of art as opposed to religion, is, rather, to reverse this authoritative order. 

As in the novels of Joyce, so in those of Mann, the key to the progression lies in the stress on what is inward… 

In the words of Joyce’s hero: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.” 

For what to the soul are nets, “flung at it to hold it back from flight”, can become for the one who has found his own center the garment, freely chosen, of his further adventure...   

What kind of action and life experience would be appropriate for one who has had this fulfilling moment of the Grail experience? 

There are no rules for what you do. 

Buddha came back and taught for fifty years...  

My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled.' (Campbell in Osbon 1991, pp. 75-6)

Campbell also says:

`Follow your bliss.
The heroic life is living the individual adventure.'  (Campbell in Osbon 1991, p. 22) 
But he also notes - the hero's journey is not for everyone...! (And in fact, therapist Maureen Murdock wrote a whole book about it from a female perspective. She even wrote, a workbook.)

Campbell also notes:

            `The great problem is bringing life back into the wasteland,where people live inauthentically.' (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, p. 77)
And - here's one I love, that Campbell quotes from American Indian mythology:

`As you proceed through life,Following your own path,Birds will shit on you.
...Don’t bother to brush it off.’ (Campbell in Osbon 1991, p. 20) 
(I love that last one so hard... funny!***)

At any rate, most of Campbell's stuff is a fun read, although The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949, 2008) is a bit heavy-going in places, for a general audience.

One of the memorable quotes from it, is this one (including the Hamlet quote):

`The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. 

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!Or that the Everlasting had notfix'dHis canon 'gainst self-slaughter! 0 God! God!So exclaims the great spokesman of this moment, Hamlet:How weary, stale, fiat, and unprofitableSeem to me all the uses of this world!Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,That grows to seed; things rank and gross in naturePossess it merely. That it should come to this! 

...The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.' (Campbell, 2004, pp. 111-112)

He's suggesting stop thinking about the `baser' evolutionary urges (like, say: just getting laid) and get on with your own hero's journey... so, go into `the forest' - away from the wasteland - go find a boon (an Elixir), and bring it on back, to the big-ole world.

Hey - here's something I discovered, while doing my PhD... People seem to like it.

Hey, and going back aways - after writing a whole bunch of movie scripts using The Writer's Journey template (thanks Chris!) - just for fun, I also wrote a satirical comedy novel about (well, among other things) what happens to the 9-out-of-10 would-be `heroes' who accidentally have a bad Mentor - and end up accidentally getting eaten by the dragon instead of rescuing the princess... Because those guys have a story too, and, it deserves to be told.

Or not.

Thanks to evolution, we all tend to suffer from the cognitive bias known as survivorship bias. We remember the heroes - and forget the also-rans - and attribute their success to: the `classic' traits of heroism. See How The Mind Works (1997), by Steven Pinker.

But hey, maybe sometimes, the heroes also got lucky, and maybe the `also-rans' had some unluck...

The scientific research on creativity (i.e., success in artistic domains, such as: movies, novels, painting, bog-snorkelling and so on) shows there are 4 different (separate) kinds of luck.

...More on that, to follow.... soon!

(On the 4 kinds of luck, not on: bog-snorkelling)

Meantime: as you were...

Well; unless, you're different now.

...You may well have evolved or something, who knows. Hard to say.

- Hey, but you know what else's a great book?

Well, lots of them, but especially, this one.

Hey also, did you know the latest theory of how universes are created? Two other universes (or else, branes) combine, to form a new universe. See the 5-min Michio Kaku video, here. Which means the laws of Evolution operate at macro and micro scales. Funny that. Not funny ha-ha, just funny-weird. It's almost like, Evolution explains, pretty much everything. Hey wait...

And hey, guess what, if "President" Trump gets impeached soon - like all right-thinking persons hope he does, then his VeeP steps up as Prez, and: he's a Creationist. 


Now that's: funny. Here come The Dark Ages, again... Somebody really needs to read All Life Is Problem Solving by Sir Karl Popper. And maybe all these books. Science (which includes: Evolution) explains everything much less worse than Non-Science does.

Hey - while we're at it, here's another great book!


Hey - which brings us back to Geniuses, and, to Joseph Campbell.
...See what I did there.
(...Phew! And just in the nick of time, as, this blog post was just about to end. Man, that was close.)
Then again "authenticity" is also just a cheesy buzzword - and one that's so `last millennium'. But it sure sucks a lot of people in... Marketing Departments use it a lot. Like the current widespread move to rebrand `Human Resources' to `People and Culture'. (If you're a corporation, you're probably still a psychopath. destroying the environment - and destroying people - for profit.)

"...clearly notions of authenticity and identity are closely interlinked. What one is (or wants to be) cannot be ‘inauthentic’, whatever else it is. Authenticity is definitely not a property of music, musicians and their relations to an audience…Instead we should see ‘authenticity’ as a discursive trope of great persuasive power. It focuses a way of talking about music, a way of saying to outsiders and insiders alike ‘this is what is really significant about this music’, ‘this is the music that makes us different from other people’" (Stokes 1994, p. 6).

See: Stokes, M. (1994) Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place,(Oxford: Berg Publishers).

So; yeah. Don't try to be `authentic'. Cut the `Marketing' B.S.

Just find your bliss, and follow it.

It could turn out to be a heroic adventure.

(Well; or not.)

`The goal of the hero’s journey is yourself , finding yourself .’ (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, p. 154)

-------------------------------

JT Velikovsky, PhD
Evolutionary Systems Theorist,
Narratologist, 
& Transmedia Guy

NOTES:

* It should maybe be noted just how close Campbell's monomyth is to Propp's Morphology of the Russian Folk Tale. It's real close. See also: The Feature Film Screenwriters' Workbook (Velikovsky 1995, 2011), which is a work of `comparative Screenplayology' - and is used to teach screenwriting in many universities and film schools.

** (The great Chris Vogler was one of my teachers at film school 20 years ago, and actually gave me a 100% mark for his class... so, I like the guy :)

*** Also, but don't forget: that bird might be on a hero's journey himself, and maybe his `boon' was bringing back to his community, the idea of: crapping on random people, just for shiggles. And that makes me think of The Simurgh, which Jorges Luis Borges talks about. Aw man, Borges is the best. Especially since his first name rhymes with his last name. (When you pronounce it `Hor-hay Bor-hay'. But don't try this at home. Also see what the great Dan Dennett says about Borges's Labyrinths in this book below, which is also: another utterly brilliant book. Actually, they both are. See what Dan says about `memes', i.e. units of culture, in there, too. Memes are what creative people: create!.)


Also I better finish on a Joe Campbell quote.

`“What is the meaning of life?’” Joseph was often asked, and he would respond, “There is no meaning. We bring the meaning to it.” Like Carl Jung, he saw the approach of old age, not as mere diminution of life, but as a time of blooming.’ (Osbon, 1991, p. 10)   

(So - in other words, if you're on a `spiritual' journey, you're probably wasting your time, looking for something that isn't actually there... It's like all these folks who get tricked into thinking they've found a guru. Read Candy or something by Terry Southern.... Then, go read some Dan Dennett or something!

i.e., You have to look inside, to find your bliss (or, for what puts you in flow) you schmuck - instead of looking outside, for some guru. Read lots of these books. No really! ...I mean even Joe Campbell misunderstood C P Snow and `The Two Cultures'. Sheesh!)

...Nah, just kidding. Read Joe Campbell. Because he read all these other `spiritual' books (even the Upanishads, jeez - they're really long), and then he interpreted the meaning for you, so that you don't have to go read them all. ...I mean you can, you can do what you like, what do I care. (But, shame that he also used so much Freudian Theory, which was really big back in 1949, but sadly, is now: outdated. - It was superseded by Evolutionary Psychology. Go figure. Weird how: Science keeps getting it right...?!)

(...And - hey, don't get mad at me - I don't make up the facts, I just report 'em. ;)

Maybe just re-read this quote:

`The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be, seldom correspond to what life really is.' (Joseph Campbell, in Osbon 1991)

Well, for some folks, anyway.

Also - Spoiler Alert: Joe Campbell says Religion is hogwash, the closest to reality (e.g. Science) is Buddhism.

Where: you're the Buddha...!

`It seems impossible today, but people actually believed all that as recently as half a century or so ago: clergymen, philosophers, government officers and all. Today we know - and know right well – that there never was anything of the kind: no Garden of Eden anywhere on this earth, no time when the serpent could talk, no prehistoric “Fall”, no exclusion from the Garden, no universal Flood, no Noah’s Ark. The entire history on which our leading Occidental religions have been founded is an anthology of fictions. But these are fictions of a type that have had – curiously enough – a universal vogue as the founding of other religions, too. Their counterparts have turned up everywhere – and yet, there never was such a garden, serpent, tree, or deluge.’ (Campbell in Osbon, 1991, pp. 30-31)

But: Buddhism defers to Science anyway. And - Buddhism is just an intuitive stab at what is far better explained by Systems Philosophy and Systems Science. (I'm not making this up. Read Joe Campbell. It's in there.)

But meantime, yeah.

Creativity Theory: Follow your bliss. Find what puts you in the flow state, and make your life: a hero's journey.

...Or not. (Hey, it's not for everyone. Some folks actually like it out there in the wasteland. And frankly, they're welcome to it...)

And -- with that...

...Here endeth the sermon.

And, I didn't even talk about Positive Psychology. (Or, how people with lives of meaning actually do it. It's not that hard.)

But hey, there's a great chapter on how it started, and why, here:


i.e. See specifically, the chapter:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). `The Systems Model of Creativity and Its Applications'. In D. K. Simonton (Ed.), The Wiley Handbook of Genius (pp. 533-545). Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.  

And, here is a quote from it taken entirely at random, and which proves nothing:

`In fact, the Greeks eventually concluded that it was possible for men to achieve some sort of immortality because of their actions. A brave warrior, an illustrious statesman, or even a great poetcould aspire to have their feats remembered generation after generation, and as longas their achievements were still in the memory of their descendants, they were notreally, entirely stone dead.' (Csikszentmihalyi in Simonton 2014, p. 534)

Or wait, maybe that refers to: memes, the units of culture. Well, whatever.

...See what I deliberately and accidentally didn't do, there...

And also then there's this:

StoryAlity #73 – The Heros Journey: It’s Not What You Think




(And yes, I'm: the Buddha. And so can YOU. )