Even more enlightening than The Hero with a Thousand Faces

books:


	• Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation Joseph Campbell New World Library, 2004 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A great intro to Campbell

If you are looking for something more in depth than the Moyers interviews and something less intimidating than Campbell's more academic works- this is a great one to read.

This is a collection of lectures which cover most of Campbell's fascinating work in comparative religion, but in a way that is accessible and entertaining. The editing is fantastic, so it reads very natural and you'll find some of the most complex ideas are clear and easy to understand. Highly recommended for anyone new to the idea of religion as myth.

Even more enlightening than The Hero with a Thousand Faces

I am grateful for having read this fantastic piece of work that brings together mythology and personal transformation in such a profound and articulate manner. I could notice how it strikes multiple harmonics in my mind as I read on, very much along the lines of Jung's view on the unconscious.

Pathways to Bliss provides both a framework and an inspirational context for anyone interested in the Self as Hero. As such, I have utilized it as a prime reference for my forthcoming work in designing board games and processes that would be useful for furthering the usefulness of the Hero's Journey archetypical metaphor as a tool for personal and group learning, growth, and advancement.

Perhaps it is best to bring forth this excerpt from the book: "There's nothing you can do more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth." (Last paragraph, page 108). In this book, Campbell offers a rich ground for constructing that personal myth, one that would enhance the wisdom, love and inner beauty of a person's Self to mythical proportions!

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Follow your bliss!

I thoroughfully enjoyed this book. It changed my view on reality. And it made me appreciate myths and scriptures for what they truly are: bridges between our mundane lives and the Transcendent. They are not to be taken factually, but they have the power to structure and inspire our personality and our society at large.

This book also contains an interesting introduction to Jung's work.

Western Myth, Indeed

I read 'Hero With a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Campbell first, and although I found it to be insightful, I thought it was a bit sterile, scholarly, and downright technical for my taste. My prejudice was, science should be cold and sterile while myth should be warm and lively.

With this publication of 'Pathways to Bliss', I decided to give Mr. Campbell another read.

I am glad I did.

This book, in contrast to 'Hero', I found to be warm, friendly and engaging. The overall style of the book, in my view, matched the subject matter.

In it, Campbell defines myth as 'other people's religion' and provides a lively history of our religious symbols through time, how they effect us as a society, and finally how myth impacts us personally and today. His mythology is rooted in existential causes i.e. tropical societies noticed fruits fell to the ground, died, and produced more fruit thus offering a glimpse into the necessity of death where a rebirth is required, while land based societies looked upon the animals they killed as kin, and thus came up with rituals to offer the animals rebirth by pouring their blood out onto the ground, an agreement between hunter and hunted that life would continue for the animal.

But Campbell also realizes there is something perhaps more significant at play where myth is concerned than purely environmental causes, and offers the viewpoints of C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud concerning the unconscious, the psyche and the self, and the role they may have played in developing the stories that have shaped our lives so profoundly.

It is amazing to me that a comet thousands of miles away is more predictable than my next door neighbor, but Joseph Campbell helps me understand myself, and perhaps my fellow man, just a little bit better with this wonderful little book.

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A Mythology Self-Help Book!

Everyone with the slightest familiarity with Joseph Campbell, of course, knows the famous catch-phrase: "Follow Your Bliss". And everyone pretty much knows what it means, as well: Figure out whatever your passion is, and responsibly and diligently move forward, and pursue it... for the rest of your life... above and beyond anything else.

Sounds like words of wisdom from a worthy and knowledgable teacher.... but how exactly does one go about following their bliss?

That's what this book aims to answer.

Joseph Campbell, of course, died in 1987, yet this book didn't appear on store shelves until 2004. That's because it has been assembled posthumously by the Joseph Campbell Foundation from many of Campbell's unpublished notes/lectures/interviews/drafts/etc... Their aim is to bring the great mythologist's unfinished works into a form suitable for public consumption. With that as their aim, the Foundation had the inspired idea to organize a whole book around the premise: How To Follow Your Bliss.

So, it's the usual brand of Campbell's 'Mythology as Psychological Resource', albeit this time around in the guise of a sort of 'mythological self-help book'. A satisfying one nonetheless.

As ever, Campbell's basic premise is that the grand purpose of mythology is to ground an individual in relation to an order of being that is larger than himself. Through metaphor and through ritual, an individual is brought into accord with:

1. The great mystery
2. The physical world
3. The societal order
4. The appropriate stage in one's own development as an individual

(These you may recognize as Campbell's four functions of myth.)

The book starts by laying out all four of these as the foundation for the overall theme, and then focuses on the fourth one, the 'personal development' function of myth, throughout the remainder of its pages. A typical scenario where the fourth function of myth may be considered is the following:

All is well, of course, when an infant lives in a dependency on its mother. It is not alright, however, when a thirty-year-old man depends on his mother for decision-making capabilities. Obviously, at some point between infancy and maturity must come the realization that the correct value is to become an autonomous being. Often these realizations that come at specific transition points in the lifecycle are challenging for a developing ego to embrace.

And myths are often stories that show us, through metaphor, that it is possible to negotiate these thresholds-- often they even point a way as to HOW these thresholds may best be negotiated. In a nutshell, what the great stories tell us is this: let the you that you are now DIE so that something new can be born in its place. Let your current incarnation go.

Following the development of the above ideas, the book continues on into the territory of Jung and the idea of one's personal myth. Each of us may become sensitive to one particular myth over another because it has something essential to tell us specifically about our own unique particular journey.

Finding one's own myth, and living it, in essence, is one's pathway to bliss. Campbell gives suggestions to his students (and to us readers) as to how to find, identify and live one's personal myth.

So, here you get the flavor of the book. If you like the ideas behind The Power of Myth and/or Hero With A Thousand Faces and find them to be a nourishing resource in your own life journey, here's a book that attempts to express and focus on those ideas in a way that makes them seem much more immediately relevant and applicable to one's own life journey.

So, if that's what you're into, you'll find it in this book. Because 'mythology as resource for one's psychological development' is what primarily compells me above all else when it comes to myth, I devoured this book and then cried like a little baby when I finished the last page because I was sad it was all over. Those who can't stomach Campbell should move along move along, because they'll find more of the same here as to what they're used to.

* As a bonus, for everyone out there who finds Campbell's ideas of the Hero's Journey to be somewhat not inclusive of women, this book tries to address that as well. The final chapter is a transcript of dialogues in which many of Campbell's students (male and female) challenge him to broaden the conception of the Hero's Journey to include women in a fuller way. It brings what many consider a sour omission from Campbell's writings to light and is definitely worth the read for anyone who follows that discussion closely.

- Phil Robinson
http://www.PhilRobinson.net
"Paint the walls of your cage with a dream."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

Joseph Campbell is one of this century's great disseminators of the psychological wisdom of mythology. One of the basic functions of myth, he contends, is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a travel guide to reach fulfillment ? a map to discover "bliss." In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell once again draws on his masterful gift of storytelling to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and transformation. Looking at the more personal, psychological side of myth, he begins to dwell on life's more important questions ? those that are often submerged beneath the frantic activity of our daily life. With characteristic wit and insight, he draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the Hero's Journey, revealing the way myth helps identify one's heroic path.

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