Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

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,

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.

annamaya-kośa, the food sheath.

second sheath is called the sheath of breath, prānamaya-kośa.

That’s this thing, this body: food on fire.

mental sheath, manom...

with the you that thinks ...

wisdom sheath, vijñānamaya-kośa.

The power of myth is to put the mental sheath in touch with this wisdom sheath, which is the one that speaks of the transcendent.

the sheath of bliss,

ānandamaya-kośa,

a kernel of that transcendence in a...

Life is a manifestation...

manomaya-kośa, the mental sheath, is attached to the sufferings and pleasures of the food sheath. And so i...

thinking in terms of good and evil, light and dark—pairs of opposites.

The wisdom sheath doesn’t know about pairs of opposites.

The bliss sheath contains all...

Eternity has nothing to do with time.

Time is what shuts you out from eternity.

Xxx

Eternity ...

is the transcendent dimension of the now to wh...

vocabulary of discourse between manomaya-kośa and vijñānamaya-kośa,

between mental wisdom and organic, life-body wisdom.

These deities in myths serve as models, give you life roles, so long as you understand their reference to...

“I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”11 That means that the eternal thing works in me.

the meaning of the Buddha consciousness,

the consciousness that is both the entire universe ...

we don’t have the stasis that is required for the formation of a mythic tradition.

The rolling stone gathers no moss.

Myth is moss. So now you’ve got to do it yo...

three aspects of thought

sat, cit, and ānanda: being, consciousness, and bliss.

You can call transcendence a hole or the whole, either one, becaus...

the problem is to open the words, to open the images so that they p...

these three concepts are those that will bring you closest to that void: sat-cit-ānanda. Bein...

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.

But if they have found where the center of their real bliss is, they can have that. You may not have money, but you’ll have your bliss.

Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you.

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.

What you have to do is translate that myth into its eloquence, not just into the literacy. You have to learn to hear its song.

the best things can’t be told—they are transcendent, inexpressible truths.

The second-best are misunderstood: myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point the way toward the first. And the third-best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on.

The only kind of talking that can be understood i...

to embody the essential image of living one’s life, finding it and having the courage to pursue it.

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 first function of a living mythology is to reconcile consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence; that is to say, to the nature of life.