The Power of Myth

by Joseph Campbell

CAMPBELL: It’s quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and commands of your neighborhood that you don’t know what you really want and could be. I think that anyone brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowledge of himself.

I feel it's me.

The first instruction would be to follow the hints of the myth itself and of your guru, your teacher, who should know. It’s like an athlete going to a coach. The coach tells him how to bring his own energies into play. A good coach doesn’t tell a runner exactly how to hold his arms or anything like that. He watches him run, then helps him to correct his own natural mode. A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands. The command would be, “This is the way I do it, so you must do it this way, too.” Some artists teach their students that way. But the teacher in any case has to talk it out, to give some general clues. If you don’t have someone to do that for you, you’ve got to work it all out from scratch—like reinventing the wheel. A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you’re now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. In my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things.

Jack

thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done. MOYERS By doing what? CAMPBELL: By holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system’s impersonal claims upon you.

Be yourself.

the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

Expressing one's true self.

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

Ones true task.

MOYERS: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make, what you call “the soul’s high adventure”? CAMPBELL: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

Personal mission.

we’re not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.

Yes

Jung had a patient who came to him because she felt herself

Great story

That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariande thread.

Jack

You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal lesson for us of the acceptance of death.

Powerful

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure—fearlessness and achievement.

Very reassuring

the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

true

There is that testing time in your life when you have got to test yourself out to your own flight.

You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

Amen

This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call “following your bliss.”

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.

how relevant. We learn much from our enemies.

Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with.”

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.

you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

The place to find is within yourself.

MOYERS: So when you find your father, you find yourself?

And do you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there. So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered—out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?

What does this say to you? CAMPBELL: It says to me that there’s an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and our thinking: death to the animal nature and birth to the spiritual. These symbols are talking about this one way or another.

birth is through a spiritual mother. Notre Dame de Paris, Notre Dame de Chartres—our Mother Church. We are reborn spiritually by entering and leaving a church.

It’s the female as the giver of forms. She is the one who gave life to the forms and she knows where they came from. It is from that which is beyond male and female. It is from that which is beyond being and nonbeing. It both is and is not. It neither is nor is not. It is beyond all categories of thought and the mind. MOYERS: There is that wonderful saying in the New Testament, “In Jesus there is no male or female.” In the ultimate

By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.

The Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.

What was it Jung said—that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the other is always a you? Is that what the romantic—

Carl Jung

But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live.

That’s very mysterious. It’s almost as though the future life that you’re going to have with that person has already told you, This is the one whom you will have that life with.

CAMPBELL: Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.

But instead of regarding them as facts, I can now think of them as metaphors for the impulses that move and guide me.

“Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”

But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one’s god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with the ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well. And so this is it.

There is a Hindu saying, “None but a god can worship a god.” You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word.

CAMPBELL: A couple of years ago, I had a very amusing experience. I was in the New York Athletic Club swimming pool, where I was introduced to a priest who was a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I had had my swim, I came and sat in a lounging chair in what we call the “horizontal athlete” position, and the priest, who was beside me, asked, “Now, Mr. Campbell, are you a priest?” I answered, “No, Father.” He asked, “Are you a Catholic?” I answered, “I was, Father.” Then he asked—and I think it interesting that he phrased the question in this way—“Do you believe in a personal god?” “No, Father,” I said. And he replied, “Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the existence of a personal god.” “If there were, Father,” said I, “what then would be the value of faith?” “Well, Mr. Campbell,” said the priest quickly, “it’s nice to have met you.” And he was off. I felt I had executed a jujitsu throw. But that was an illuminating

It is out of the depths of the unconscious that the energies of life come to us.

When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot.

But the goal of your quest for knowledge of yourself is to be found at that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is innocent of the goods and evils of the world as already become, and therefore desireless and fearless.

There’s no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts.

Spreading strife is my greatest joy.”

No matter what the system of thought you may have, it can’t possibly include boundless life.

When you think everything is just that way, the trickster arrives, and it all blows, and you get change and becoming again.

The peak experience refers to actual moments of your life when you experience your relationship to the harmony of being.

You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany. And that is what might in religious terms be thought of as the all-informing Christ principle coming through.

you are clinging fiercely to your ego and its little temporal world of sorrows and joys, hanging on for dear life, it will be the wrathful aspect of the deity that appears. It will seem terrifying. But the moment your ego yields and gives up, that same meditation Buddha is experienced as a bestower of bliss.

Heaven and hell are described as forever. Heaven is of unending time. It is not eternal. Eternal is beyond time. The concept of time shuts out eternity. It is over the ground of that deep experience of eternity that all of these temporal pains and troubles come and go.

But when you realize that heaven is a beholding of the beatific image of God—that would be a timeless moment. Time explodes, so again eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships.