Joseph Campbell – Pathways to Bliss

ISBN-13: 978-1577314714

xii – He felt that myth offered a framework for personal growth and transformation, and that understanding the ways that myth and symbols affect the individual mind offered a way to lead a life that was in tune with one’s nature–a pathway to bliss.

xvi – Of course, in trying to relate yourself to transcendence, you don’t have to have images. You can go the Zen way and forget the myths altogether. But I’m talking about 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, the sacred circle, whether you are a Tibetan monk or the patient of a Jungian analyst. The symbols are laid out around the circle, and you are to locate yourself in the center. 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. They are battling their way through as if no one had ever been there before.

xvii – We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped us all in our mother’s womb. And this kin of wisdom lives in us, an it represents the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time an space. But it’s a transcendent energy. It’s an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge. And that energy becomes bound in each of us–in this body–to a certain commitment. Now, the mind that thinks, the eyes that see, they can become so involved in concepts and local, temporal task that we become bound up and don’t let this energy flow through. And then we become sick. The energy is blocked, an we are thrown off our center; this idea is very similar to the tenets of traditional Chinese and Indian medicine. So the psychological problem, the way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself-and here is the phrase-transparent to the transcendent. It’s as easy as that.

xvii – Where a myth points past itself to something indescribable, an allegory is merely a story or image that teaches a practical lesson. it is what Joyce would call improper art. If the reference of the mythic image is to a fact or a concept, then you have an allegorical figure. A mythic figure has one leg in the transcendent. An done of the problems with the popularization of religious ideas is that the god becomes becomes a final fact and is no longer itself transparent to the transcendent. This is what Lao-tzu means when he says, in the first aphorism of the Tao-te Ching, “The Tao that can be names in not the Tao.”

xviii – This means living, not in the name of success or achievement in the world, but rather is the name of transcendence, letting the energy come through.

xviii – You have to go through your own tradition-the local-to get to the transcendent, or elementary, level, and just so you have to have a relationship to God on both a personal and transpersonal basis.

xxi – Just think: the grass grows. Out of the bliss sheath comes the wisdom sheath an the grass grows. Then, every two weeks, someone comes along with a lawn mower an cuts the grass down. Suppose the grass were just to think, Ah, shucks, what’s all this fuss about? I quit?

That’s mental sheath stuff. You know that impulse, life is painful; how could a good god create a world with all of this in it? That is thinking in terms of good and evil, light and dark–pairs of opposites. The bliss sheath contains all the opposites. The wisdom sheath is just coming right up of it, and it turns into pairs of opposites later on.

xxii – Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.

xxiii – I speak of the present as a moment of free fall into the future with no guidance. All you’ve got to know is how to fall; and you can learn that, too. That is the situation with regard to myth right now. We’re all without dependable guides.

xxiii – But I do know 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. You may not have any money, but it doesn’t matter. When I came back from my student years in Germany and Paris, it was three weeks before the Wall Street crash in 1929, and I didn’t have a job for five years. And fortunately for me, there was no welfare. I had nothing to do but sit in Woodstock and read and figure out where my bliss lay. There I was, on the edge of excitement all the time.

xxiv – For years I’ve watched this whole business of young people deciding on their careers. There are only two attitudes: one is to follow your bliss; and the other is to read the projections as to where the money is going to be when you graduate.

xxiv – Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again. And that will be your Hermes guide, the dog that can follow the invisible trail for you. And that’s the way it is. One works out one’s own myth that way.

xxiv – You’ve got to find the wisdom, not the clothing of it.

xxv – My old mentor, Heinrich Zimmer, had a little saying: 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 is this last kind. When you want to talk about the first kind, that which can’t be said, you use the third kind as communication to the first. But people read it as referring to the third directly; the image is no longer transparent to the transcendent.

3 – Traditionally, 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.

3 – Life is a horrendous presence, and you wouldn’t want to be here if it weren’t for that. The first function of a mythological order has been to reconcile consciousness to this fact.

4 – I’ve studied a lot of the myths of these cultures around the world, and I can’t recall a single negative word in primitive thought with respect to existence or to the universe. World-weariness comes later, with people who are living high on the hog.

4 – The only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base.

4 – Through the bitterness and pain, the primary experience at the core of life is a sweet, wonderful thing.

6 – Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. That’s the first function of mythology, to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

7 – The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. This function we may call the cosmological function of mythology.

7 – What a calamity for our world that we do not yet have anything that can wake people’s hearts the way that those verses do and yet would make sense in terms of the actual, observable universe.

8 – The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared sets of rights and wrongs, proprieties or improprieties, on which your particular social unit depends for its existence.

9 – Finally, the fourth function of mythological is psychological. The myth must carry the individual through the stages of life, from birth through to maturity through senility to death. The mythology must do so in accord with the social order of his group, the cosmos as understood by his group, and the monstrous mystery.

9 – The second and third functions have been taken over in our world by secular orders. Our cosmology is in the hands of science. The first law of science is that truth has not been found. The laws of science are working hypotheses.

14 – Unlike traditional cultures, we do not try to imprint the tradition onto the person with such force that the individual becomes simply a walking copy of what was there before. Rather, the idea is to develop the individual personality–a special and contemporary Western problem, it may surprise you to learn.

16 – The authorities are the old people. We haven’t learned how to handle them today, but in the old traditional societies they had. The reason they’d learned was that nothing much changed from generation to generation. Things passed in the times of the old people just about the as they do in the present. So you could ask the elders how things used to be done, and the answer had some bearing on what should be done now. That’s not true anymore.

17 – Now, it’s a basic mythological principle, I would say, that was is referred to in mythology as “the other world” is really (in psychological terms) “the inner world.” And what is spoken of as “future” is “now.”

18 – Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.

20 – Yet there have been great artists among us who have read the contemporary scene in ways that allow the great elementary ideas to come shining through all the time, portraying and inspiring the individual journey.

20 – Two of the great artists who have guided me in this manner are Thomas Mann and James Joyce. Just take The Magic Mountain and Ulysses. There you have the whole contemporary scene–at least as it was around the First World War–interpreted in mythological terms.

23 – Many of the images–which in our religion are dogmatically affirmed as having had historical reality–are very difficult today to interpret in historical terms. For example, the Assumption of the Virgin or the ascension of Jesus to heaven both lead us to a problem: where is heaven? Somewhere up in the sky? Our contemporary cosmology does not permit us to entertain that thought very seriously. We have a collision between these articles of faith and the historical and physical sciences, which we have to admit are ruling our lives, giving us everything that we live by day to day. This collision has destroyed people’s belief in these symbolic forms; they are rejected as untrue.

24 – Here is a basic theological formula: a deity is a personification of a spiritual power. And deities who are not recognized become demonic; they become dangerous. When you have not been in communication with them, when their messages have gone unheard or unheeded, and when they do, inevitably, break through, your conscious life is overthrown. There is, literally, hell to pay.

25 – These practical and scientific and sociological processes are riding along, evolving on their own, whether you like it or not. The basic psychological problems of youth, maturity, age, and death–and the mystical problem of the universe–these, however, remain essentially unchanged. Consequently, it is largely from the psychological standpoint that one can reinterpret, reexperience, and reuse the great mythic traditions that science and the conditions of modern life have rendered useless, uncoupled as they are from their cosmological and sociological reference points.

30 – A culture’s rites repeat the underlying myth of that culture. One could–as I have–define a ritual as the opportunity to participate directly in a myth. It is the enactment of a mythical situation, and, by participating in the rite, you participate in the myth.

35 – Around the ninth millennium B.C., these societies take root and develop based on agriculture and animal husbandry. Suddenly, the tribe is cultivating food, not foraging it.

35 – As I said earlier, the high cultures begin to emerge in what is known as the “nuclear” Near East beginning around 4000 B.C. Villages became towns, cities, and city-states. Trade and various new crafts and arts of civilizations flourished; the individuals no longer controlled the whole communal heritage. They became “part” people, specialists.

35 – This idea of a great cycle, ever returning, struck the watchers of the heavens as a revelation, altogether more wonderful than the revelations either of the plant or animal kingdoms, superior to these, and to whose laws all things were bound. It was the revelation, namely, of a universal process, an impersonal, implacable power. You can’t pray to the sun to stop–you can’t pray to anything to stop. It’s a process, absolutely impersonal and mathematically measurable, to which the ordinances of civilization should be brought into accord.

40 – The mystery of the existence of your chair is identical with the mystery of the existence of the universe itself. Any object, then–a stick, a stone, a human being, an animal–can be placed in the center of a mystery circle of that kind to serve as a perfectly proper source for meditation.

40 – The commonsense view of the world is dualistic: I behold my body, I am not my body; I know my thoughts, I am not my thoughts; I experience my feelings, I am not my feelings. I am the experiencer, I am the witness. Then Buddha comes along and says there’s no witness either. You can drive yourself out the back of the wall in this way.

40 – West of Persia, in the traditions that have come from the Near East–namely, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam–that is the prime heresy against the unbending truth: God has created the world; creator and creature are not the same.

41 – Yet our official religions condemn as blasphemous anyone who says, “I and the Father are one.” Jesus said it, and he was killed for that. That’s what he was crucified for: blasphemy.

- Nine hundred years later, the great Sufi mystic al-Hallaj said the same thing; he was crucifies for it too. And what did al-Hallaj say about this? He said this is what the mystic longs for: the orthodox community is there to unite the lover with his beloved, to unite the mystic with his god.

50 – When an individual is full of anxieties and fears in a situation that is not fearful, these are not real anxieties. They are imagines punishments from invisible parental disciplinarians for prohibited desires that the individual has secretly enjoyed.

- Now, when there have been an excessive number of frustrations, of prohibited desires, there is an irresistible down-pull in the psyche; that is to say, there is too much going on down below, and the individual may become incapable of action up in the conscious world. If the unconscious content piles up tremendously, you can have what is a called a psychosis: the individual loses contact with the outside world altogether.

51 – The mother gives birth to the physical body; the father, to the spiritual being. These are motifs that occur over and over again in myths from the most sophisticated cultures and most primitive.

53 – According to Freud, ego is the function that relates the individual to reality. Reality in this terminology is nothing metaphysical whatsoever. It is empirical reality: what is here around you now, what you are doing, what your size is, what your age is, what people say to you and about you. Ego is a function that relates you to reality in terms of your personal judgement–not the judgments that you have been taught to make but the judgement you do male.

56 – One could summarize the basic religious view of the East somewhat as follows. The ultimate truth, the ultimate mystery of life and being, is absolutely transcendent. One cannot define the absolute. One cannot picture it. One cannot name it. Nevertheless, that which is absolute being and absolute mystery is also one’s own inner reality: one is that. The absolute is both transcendent and immanent; that is to say, both beyond the universe of the senses and within each particle of that universe. All that can be said about it is…nothing. All that can be said points to it. There, the symbols, the rites, the rituals, and the acts are involved in a world of human experience but point past themselves to that transcendent, immanent force; the rites and symbols lead one to the realization of one’s identity with that absolute. Identity with the transcendent is one’s essence; consequently, in Eastern philosophy, the mere accident of the ego, of the personality, is secondary.
- Over in the Occident, there is a totally different idea. It came in around 2500 B.C., with the Semitic empires of Sargon and Hammurabi. The idea, which we still adhere to, is that God makes man. God is not man, and man is not of the same substance as God: they are ontologically, fundamentally different.

58 – There is no path. Particularly now, we are in a sort of free fall into the future.

61 – In the West, we celebrate the scientific mind. But the symbols of our inherited traditions lie broken around our feet.

62 – The business of being made to feel gratitude to the being who has either voluntarily or involuntarily given up its own life to be your life, your food and drink, spiritual or physical–this is a motif that has great significance. The call of a hero on the battlefield, giving his life for his country–this is a hero act equivalent to Crucifixion. And I think images like this can still activate within you that aspect of your own consciousness and potentialities, which is the noble, the heroic, and the great.

63 – Among psychologists, the first challenge to Freud’s theory came not from Jung but from Alfred Adler. Adler said that the main drive in the individual is not sex but the will to power.

64 – In some people–possible due to infant relationships–the stress manifests in a struggle for individual power, in which case the sexual life takes a secondary position. This type of person, oriented primarily toward power, is always asking, “How am I doing? Am I making it?” Jung calls this person the introvert. His meaning is somewhat from the common use of the word. Jung defines the introvert as a power-oriented person who wants to put through his own internal image of how things should be.
- The sex-oriented person, on the other hand, turns outward. Falling in love means losing yourself in another object. This person calls the extrovert. Now, he says, every individual is both, with an accent on one or the other. If you have your accent 60 percent over in the power arena, it’s only going to be 40 percent over in the eros area.
- Now when you run into a situation where your normal orientation doesn’t function, where it isn’t carrying you through, you are thrown back on the secondary drive. Then this inferior personality emerges. The characteristic of the inferior personality is compulsiveness–you can’t control yourself, your voice quivers, you blush, you get angry, and so forth. You are out of control; the inferior character has taken over. It is more primitive than the developed side of the personality.

65 – Now, the interesting thing about middle life is that, quite often, a chronic enantiodromia takes place. You have been, let us say, a power man: you’ve had it all, you have achieved what you set out to achieve, or at least your wits have been about you and you’ve realized it isn’t worth achieving.

65 – The problem is, when this enantiodromia comes, are you going to be able to absorb and integrate the other factor, the other side of your personality.
- Jung calls the problem of this so-called midlife crisis integration: the integration of the two sides of the personality in terms of an individual culture experience. Jung’s whole approach to psychology is based on the idea of these interactions.

66 – Jung calls the first duad sensibility (or feeling) and intellect. There are two ways of analyzing what you perceive around you. You can base your life on evaluating things by how they feel; then you will have a wonderfully differentiated and developed sensibility. Your appreciation of the arts, and the nuances and richness of life will be great. On the other hand, you can judge things in terms of intellectual decisions–right and and wrong, propitious and unpropitious, prudent and imprudent. If you make your decisions on only one basis, the other is not being developed.

67 – The other duad offers two ways of having an experience: Jung calls the first way sensation (different from feeling); he calls the other way intuition (also different from feeling).

67 – Intuition is the primary political talent. It is the tact for time, the sense of the possible. The intuitive person sees the future and past stretching out like ribbons of probability.

67 – Now, instead of of simply going into the forest when middle age hits and canceling the whole darn show, as in the Indian tradition, Jung says the Occidental approach to the transition from responsibility to old age is that of achieving wholeness, of individuation. This is exactly the Greek idea. He felt you have to balance out these competing functions–sex versus power, intellect versus sensibility, intuition verses sensation–in order to escape the enantiodromia of the midlife crisis.

69 – Now, when your ego has a plan, and you commit some absurd fumble that breaks the plan up, it’s as though someone had intruded and destroyed your plan. You’re interrupting yourself; you forgot something. Freud dealt with this very well; this semi-intentional forgetting is now known as a Freudian slip. You are simply keeping yourself from doing what you only thought you wanted to do. The other side of you is talking. This is coming from that unconscious aspect of the self.

72 – What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it’s not you. It’s a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, separating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role.

72 – The persona is merely the mask you are wearing for this game.

72 – Just remember, Adam and Eve fell when they learned the difference between good and evil. So the way to get back is not to know the difference. That’s an obvious lesson, but it’s not one that’s very clearly preached from the pulpits. Yet Christ told his disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” You judge according to your persona context, and you will be judged in terms of it. Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dictates of what is right and what is wrong, you are not a complete human being. You’re just a part of that particular social order.

73 – The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that are are repressing–all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet is is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.

73 – If your personal role is too thing, too narrow–if you’ve buried too much of yourself within your shadow–you’re going to dry up. Most of your energies are not available to you. A lot can get gathered there in the depths. And eventually, enantiodrama is going to hit, and that unrecognized, unheeded demon is going to come roaring up into the light.

74 – Now, typically, all these archetypes come out personified in myths and dreams. We personify the mystery of the universe as God. The ego becomes the hero or heroine figure. The unconscious self becomes the wise man or woman. The shadow becomes personified, too, as a kind of Mephistophelian figure. Evidently the shadow holds not only what is good for you but what is bad as well. It swallows those things it would be dangerous for you to express, such as the murderous intent that you have for that sun of the gun over there who’s been interrupting you all evening, the urge to steal, to cheat, to destroy, and so on. But it also holds potentialities that your ego and the persona system don’t want to accept.
- In your dreams, and in the myths of your society, these urges are represented in te shadow, and the shadow is always of your own sex; it is always to be seen as a threat.
- You can recognize who it is by simply thinking of the people you don’t like. They correspond to that perso whom you might have been–otherwise they wouldn’t mean very much to you. People who excite you either positively or negatively have caught something projected from yourself.

75 – I remember hearing one clergyman say to me, “If I didn’t believe in God and Christ and the Church, I would be a terrible person.” Well, I said, “What do you think you’d do?” He couldn’t think. I said, “I bet I can tell you what you think you’d do, but I won’t tell you. All I can tell you is you’d get tired pretty soon, and you’d find you’re just another old drag in the world, and you wouldn’t have blown it up at all. And even if you did blow up some little portion of it, that would soon be built up and you would have been no great menace to the world. So let yourself go. Do some of those things. You’d find that they’re not all so bad at all either, and you won’t be saying things like that anymore.”
- You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow.
- Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man, and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.
- Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself.

76 – Now the one undeniable fact: this disillusion is inevitable. You had an ideal. You married that ideal. You suddenly notice things that don’t quite fit with your projection. So what are you going to do when that happens? There’s only one attitude that will solve the situation: compassion. This poor, poor fact that I married does not correspond to my ideal; it’s only a human being. Well, I’m a human being, too. So I’ll meet a human being for a change; I’ll live with it and be nice to it, showing compassion for the fallibilities that I myself have certainly brought to life as a human being.
- Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love–and I mean love, not lust–is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say, This is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here. You might begin to be quit of your fix on your anima. It’s just as bad to be fixed on your anima and miss as to be fixed on your persona: you’ve got to get free of that. And the lesson if life is to release you from it. This is what Jung calls individuation, to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are, not in terms of all these archetypes that you are projecting around and that have been projected on you.

77 – Tonio is a young man who is stuck between two worlds: the world of unimaginative doers that he was born into and the world of intellectual bohemian critics with whom he has been wandering. He ultimately discovers that anybody who is in the world is imperfect, and that imperfection is what keeps the person here. He realizes that nothing alive fits the ideal. If you are going to describe a person as an artist, you must describe the person with ruthless objectivity. It is the imperfections that identify them. It is the imperfections that ask for our love.
- The thing that turns what Mann calls a litterateur–that’s a person who writes for a New York magazine, say–into a poet or an artist, a person who can give humanity the images to help it live, is that the artist recognizes the imperfections around him with compassion. The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. So when the fat shows through the animus or anima, what you must render is compassion. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to–as well as demand of– the world.

79 – Well, one of the boldest things you could possibly do would be to marry that ideal you’ve fallen for. Then you face a real job, because everything has been projected onto him or her. This goes beyond lust; this is something that goes way down. It pulls everything out. This anima/animus is the fish line that has caught your whole unconscious, and everything’s going to come up–the Midgard Serpent, everything down in the bottom.

79 – But what goes one when you marry this love-at-first-sight situation? Well, what you have married is a projection. You have married something that has been projected from yourself: the mask that you’ve put over the other person.
- What is the sensible things to do in a circumstance like this? What is the pedagogically advisable thing to do in a situation like this? What shows istelf through the mask of the projection is a fast. The mask is your ideal. This fact does not coincide with the ideal; it is imperfect. What do you do about what is imperfect?
- Jung believed that the idea is to reject all projections. Not to identify the women you meet with your anima projection. Not to identify yourself with your persona projection. To release all projections and ideals. This is what Jung means by individuation. Jung calls the individual who identifies himself with his persona a mana personality; we would call him a stuffed shirt. That’s a person who is nothing but the role he or she plays. A person of this sort never lets his actual character develop. He remains simple a mask, and as his powers fail–as he makes mistakes and so forth–he becomes more and more frightened of himself, puts more and more of an effort into keeping up the mask. Then the separation between the persona and the self takes place, forcing the shadow to retreat further and further into the abyss.
- You are to assimilate the shadow, embrace it. You don’t have to act on it, necessarily, but you must know it and accept it.
- You are not to assimilate the anima/animus–that’s a different challenge. You are to relate to it through the other.

83 – You are to put your morals on and them them off according to propriety, the propriety of the moment; you are not to identify these morals with cosmic truths. The laws of society, therefore, are social conventions, not eternal laws, and they are to be handled and judged in terms of their appropriateness to what they are intended to do. The individual makes his own judgments as to how he act. Then he has to look out to be sure that the guardians of the social order do not misunderstand or make things difficult for him because he is not totally playing their game. But the main problem of integration is to find relationships to the outside world and to live a rich life in full play.
- In effect, the individual must learn to live by his or her own myth.

87 – I don’t think there is going to be anything like a unified mythology for mankind for a long time, if there ever is again. I think that our social life–that covered by the third function of myth–is now being handled in another, better way. I think, however, that the individual is left without a sense of his conscious and unconscious in communication with each other.

88 – I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his books, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self-development. I looked at that list and wondered why it should seem strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.
- Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development–in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythologically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development. He will give himself entirely to his myth.

89 – “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.”

90 – When Jung said he wanted to find out what the myth was by which he was living, what he wanted to find out was what that unconscious or subliminal thing was that was making him do these peculiar, irrational things and giving him problems that his consciousness then had to resolve.

91 – With communication, the mystical experience begins.

92 – I’m sorry to say that things are so infinitely soft for us these days that we’re drifting apart. There is no aspiration that’s been put in front of us to pull people together, nor any overwhelming fear to drive us together.

94 – Now, what did Jung do when he decided to seek out his myth? His process of discovery is interesting in that it was so childish. Here he was, thirty-seven years old or so, and he asked himself, What was it I most enjoyed doing as a little boy when I was alone and allowed to play? As it turned out, what he liked to do was put rocks together and make little cities out of stone.
- So he said, Why, I’m a big man now, so I’ll play with big stones. He bought himself a piece of property in a beautiful place on the lake opposite the city of Zurich. He began planning and building a house in this lovely place, Ascona, and as he worked with his hands, he activated his imagination.
- Now, that’s the big thing, to activate your imagination somehow. You can’t do this by taking suggestions from somebody else. You must find that which your own unconscious wants to meditate on. With his imagination activated, Jung found all kinds of new fantasies coming, dreams of all kinds. He began making records of what he had dreamed and them amplifying it by all kinds of associations.

95 – If you keep a dream journal, you’ll find the dreams begin piling in on you. You want to go to sleep again and have some more. And you’ll find a story is building itself up there.

95 – Little dreams comes from a level of dream consciousness that has to do with quite personal complications. They emerge from the level that has come to be knows as the Freudian or unconscious. Little dreams are essentially autobiographical in their character, and there will be nothing in these particular dreams of yours that you would share with others–you are sorting through the expansion of consciousness as it bumps up against the taboos and “thou shalt nots” of your childhood and infancy.
- Then comes another kind of dream, where you find yourself facing a problem that’s not specific to your peculiar life or social age situation. Rather, you’ve run up against one of the great problems of man. These are what Jung called big dreams.

97 – The way to find your own myth is to determine those traditional symbols that speak to you and use them, you might say, as bases for meditation.

97 – First, think about your own childhood, as Jung did–the symbols that were put into you then remain. Think now how they relate to an institution, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, activating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

104 – 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.

108 – So, I say the way to find your myth is to find your zeal, to find your support, and to know what stage of life you’re in. The problems of youth are not the problems of age. Don’t try to live your life too soon. By listening too much to gurus, you try to jump over the whole darn thing and back off and become wise before you’ve experienced that in relation to which there is some point to being wise. This thing, wisdom, has to come gradually.

108 – It is this quality of the Occidental spirit that strikes other cultures as so silly and romantic. What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.
- There’s nothing you can do that’s 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.

112 – In a wonderful essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that, once you have reached an advanced age, as I have, as you look back over your life, it can seem to have had a plot, as though composed by a novelist. Events that seemed entirely accidental or incidental turn out to have been central in the composition.

112 – But what if you want to gain some idea of what your myth is while you are living it? Well, another way to try to discern your destiny–your myth–would be to follow Jung’s example: observe your dreams, observe your conscious choices, keep a journal, and see which images and stories surface and resurface. Look at stories and symbols and see which ones resonate.

113 – The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

115 – Then he gave me a little meditation–and it’s a good one: where are you between two thoughts? You’re thinking of yourself all the time, everything you do. You know, there’s the image of yourself-your ego. So, where are you between two thoughts?

119 – The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself. The whole point of this journey is the reintroduction of this potential into the world; that is to say, to you living in the world. You are to bring this treasure of understanding back and integrate it in a rational life. It goes without saying, this is very difficult. Bringing the boon back can be even more difficult than going down into your depths in the first place.

121 – But you will find, if you make one little hook into the society, that you presently will be able to deliver your message. I know it.

121 – For myself, I was out in the woods in the middle of the Depression with nothing to do but read, and I read for five years without a job. You see, in my youth, in the days of the Depression, people who were what might be called counterculture had been kicked out of the society entirely. There was no room for them. That’s different from the ones who leave out of resentment or with the intention to improve it.
- What did I do? I read. I followed the path from one book to another, from one thinker to another. I followed my bliss, though I didn’t that that was what I was doing.
- Then I got a job. I’d been immersed in Spengler and Jung and Schopenhauer and Joyce, and finally this little message comes: would you like a job teaching literature at Sarah Lawrence? Well, when I saw those girls, I know I wanted the job. And the salary was $2,200 for the year.
- I was willing to get back into the world and share what I had learned. I had been following a star; I really found everything that I am sharing here during those five years.

132 – Artists are magical helpers. Evoking symbols and motifs that connect us to our deeper selves, they can helps us along the heroic journey of our own lives.

140 – Myths may seem to be functioning on quite another level, but let’s just take one opposition: Siegfried and Fafner, the dragon that he kills–the typical dragon-killing deed of the hero crossing the threshold. He and the dragon are opposites. but it’s only when he has tasted the dragon’s blood and integrated the dragon character in himself that he hears the birds sing and knows what their song is saying. You don’t get in touch with the nature force that includes both you and the other until you have accepted as part and parcel of yourself the formerly excluded part, that which was seen to be other. It is because of the accidents of your life–your family, your society, the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that human flesh is heir to–that you turned out this way instead of that way. But you have the same potential within you. Jung’s psychology makes the very important point that you don’t have to identify with the other to assimilate the other and recognize that what it represents is another aspect of that which you are.

142 – In marriage, for example, what is the precious thing? Is it the marriage, or is it Tome, or is it Jane? If Tom thinks it’s Tom and Jane things it’s Jane, you don’t have a marriage. But if the two of them, through all their agony of opposition, can maintain the idea that the precious thing is the marriage itself, the precious thing is what lies beyond the pair of opposites, then you’ve got a good position to start from.

142 – The Zen master Dogen, the great teacher of a Soto sect, said that the duality is recognized, but that does not obstruct the knowledge of the unity. You stress the duality, but the duality does not obstruct the realization of the unity. That enriches your humanity.

156 – Now, the adventure is always reckless. There’s always a factor of recklessness in it. And that goes even for the simple things I do in rewriting a book. There is a very interesting letter from the German poet Schiller to a young writer who was suffering from what’s called writer’s block. That’s the refusal of the call for the writer. Schiller said, “The problem with you is, you bring the critical factor in before the lyric factor has had a chance to express itself.” In literature, we spend our youth studying Shakespeare and Milton, picking over their genius and even criticizing them in some cases. Then we start to write our own pitiful little poem, and we think, Oh, my God, out!
- When I’m writing, I think of the whole academic world; I know what they think, and they don’t think what I think. I just have to say, Let the guillotine come down; you’ve got me, kid, but you’re gonna get this message. I always feel as though I were going through a Simpeglades that’s just about to close, but I get through before I let that thought come to me. And it’s a very strange feeling of holding–actually, intellectually, holding–that door open to get this thought out. Now that’s that’s the way to do it. Don’t think about the negative side. There are going to be negatives and they are going to come down and that’s like washing dishes, you know? You’ve got to hold the door open to do anything that hasn’t been done before. You have to do your thing, you have to hold all the criticism in abeyance. I’m sure that that’s an experience that everyone has in life. In writing, you have it all the time in a minor way, getting that sentence out.

158 – When you know, from the heart in the middle, this is when you bring that factor of love in. As long as the dishes aren’t it, you’re just trapped in the chore. When you love the dishes and you think about what they mean in your life, when they’re your family’s food, sustenance, and all, then it’s all transformed into a metaphor and you’re free. And the whole idea of the Bodhisattva is, there is no difference in visual action, in what is seen in action between bondage and release. Two people performing the same act: one is bound, the other’s free. Of course, the extreme example is chores that are put on you when you’re in prison. But there are histories of saints that have found the transcendent even there.