Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell Book Summary
The Book in 1 Sentences
Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
“There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.” ~ Joseph Campbell
7 BIG Ideas
Pathways to Bliss Book Summary
1. Follow 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. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again.”
“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.”
2. Composed by a novelist
“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 to the composition…
Another astonishing way to look back is to pick up some diary entries or notes that you kept a long time ago. You’ll be astonished. Things you were convinced you had realized more recently will all be pinned down there. These are the driving themes of your life.”
3. Recover your potential
“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 own depths in the first place.”
4. Simple tasks
“But the simple tasks of our life, when you’re doing them because they’re a function or factor in the life that you love and have chosen and have given yourself, then they don’t weigh you down.”
George Leonard -in his book Mastery- also says: “Could all of us reclaim lost hours of our lives by making everything—the commonplace along with the extraordinary—a part of our practice?”
“You bet your life. All life has drudgery to it… In Zen, however, even while you’re washing the dishes, that’s a meditation, that’s an act of life. It’s not a chore, and it’s not what you’ve just been calling it. Sometimes the drudgery itself can become part of the hero deed. The point is not to get stuck in the drudgery but to use it to free you.”
5. Keep the balance
“There is a story—you may have heard me tell it before—of a samurai. His overlord had been killed, and his vow was, of course, absolute loyalty to this lord. And it was his duty now to kill the killer.
Well, after considerable difficulties, he finally backs this fellow in a corner, and he is about to slay him with his katana, his sword, which is the symbol of his honor. And the chap in the corner is angry and terrified, and he spits on the samurai, who sheathes his sword and walks away.
Now why did he do that? He did that because this action made him angry, and it would have been a personal act to have killed that man in anger, and that would have destroyed the whole event.
It is very much like this hunting act of the Pygmy. This is a mythological attitude. You are acting not in terms of your individual, personal life but with the sense of yourself as the priest, so to say, of a cosmic power which is operating through you, which we all are in circumstances, and the problem is to balance yourself against that and have a personality at the same time.”
“We hear so much talk now, particularly from the Orient, about egolessness. You are trying to smash this thing which is the only thing that keeps you in play. There’s got to be somebody up there; otherwise you’re not oriented to anything. The self, that’s the great circle, the ship, the ego is the little captain on the bridge.”
“Of course, to reach the transpersonal, you have to go through the personal: you have to have both qualities there.”
“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.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play the role; it simply means that no matter what you choose to do in life, whether it’s to cop out or to cop in, you are playing a role, and don’t take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you’re wearing for this game.”
6. Do I dare?
“The hero journey is one of the universal patterns through which that radiance shows brightly. What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another.
Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”
7. Being fulfilled
“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.”
That was my QUICK summary of the great book Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell. If you’re interested, get your copy. There is a HUGE amount of life-changing ideas in this book, and we’ve only touched on a tiny bit of it.
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