WISE WORDS: Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss

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Once in a great while you hear a voice that is like no other and that has something very important to tell you. For me, one such person is Joseph Campbell who studied the world’s stories and myths for clues to human nature and existence. Here are some of his more enlightening observations. If you feel the earth move a little under your feet, you’re hearing what he’s saying. ⬇️

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Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.

Sit in a room and read — and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

The Garden of Eden is upon the Earth, but people will not see it.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.

We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

In the way of nature one may experience, from time to time, glimpses of the world in this [transcendent] light — after the pelvic bioenergetic commitments have been honored and fulfilled, so that, freed from the dictatorship of the species, one is released to live as an individual (some little time, say, after the age of about thirty-five).

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

A marriage is a life commitment. In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament — love and forgiveness…. Like the yin/yang symbol….Here I am, and here they are, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I’m not sacrificing to them, I’m sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in the relationship, that’s where your life now is. That’s what a marriage is.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.

The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. 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 is called following your bliss.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is writing in your mind now. But that takes a lot of waiting for the right word to come.

To become individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one’s own or the masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles.

When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with their local group, but with the planet.

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, ‘Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.

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…. the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere — to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can’t change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle.

Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. There’s a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other.

Only birth can conquer death — the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

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 own depth.

Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.

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