This is a summary of the 1988 PBS series The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers (Amazon). There’s also a companion book with bonus material (Amazon):
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is from Joseph Campbell (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
- All content is organized into my own themes.
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Summary Contents:
Mythological Wisdom for the Modern World: The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell (Series Summary)
What is Mythology?
“All of the symbols in mythology refer to you … What all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness. That you’re thinking in this way, and you have now to think in that way … What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.”
Mythology overview:
“The indication is of the notion of a plane of being that’s behind the visible plane, and which is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate. I would say that’s the basic theme of all mythology … that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one. Now, whether it is thought of as a world or simply as energy, that differs from time and time and place to place.”
- “These bits of information from ancient times—which have to do with the themes that have supported man’s life, built civilizations, informed religions over the millennia—have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage and if you don’t know what the guide signs are along the way, you have to work it out yourself … Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.”
- “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life … One can say that the images of myth are reflections of spiritual and depth potentialities of every one of us. And that through contemplating those, we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves … Each incarnation, you might say, has the potentiality, and the function of life is to live that potentiality.”
- “Myth is that field of reference, metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent … It’s the edge, the interface between what can be known and what is never to be discovered, because it is a mystery transcendent of all human research. The source of life: what is it? No one knows … Myths are there to help us go with it, accept nature’s way and not hold to something else.”
Functions of myths:
“The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his life. There are a number of services that myths serve.”
- “The basic one is opening the world to the dimension of mystery. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology, to realize the mystery that underlies all forms.”
- “But then there comes the cosmological aspect of myth, seeing that mystery as manifest through all things, so that the universe becomes as it were a holy picture, you are always addressed to the transcendent mystery through that.”
- “But then there’s another function, and that’s the sociological one, of validating or maintaining a certain society. That is the side of the thing that has taken over in our world.”
- “But then there’s a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think today everyone must try to relate to, and that’s the pedagogical function. How to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.”
Rites/rituals:
“A ritual can be defined as an enactment of a myth, by participating in a good, sound ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that that one can learn to live spiritually.”
- “The function of a ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.”
- “The basic idea is that through the ritual that dimension is struck which transcends temporality and out of which life comes and back into which it goes.”
- “The mind can ramble off in strange ways, and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were means to put the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.”
The mythological experience:
“The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, stillness is eternity, realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal—not moment, but forever—is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, and the experience of the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience is the mythological experience.”
- “The eternal is beyond time; the concept of time shuts out eternity.”
- “Eternity isn’t some later time; eternity isn’t a long time; eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking in time cuts out. This is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere, and the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.”
- (Thinking in mythological terms) “It erases anxieties, it puts them in accord with the inevitables of their life … All of this as it is, is as it has to be, and it is a manifestation of the eternal presence in the world.”
Myth of the future:
“The only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet—not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it.”
- “That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with: the maturation of the individual, the gradual, the pedagogical way to follow, from dependency through adulthood to maturity, and then to the exit and how to do it. And then how to relate to this society, and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about; that’s what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s going to talk about is the society of the planet, and until that gets going, you don’t have anything.”
The Hero’s Journey
“The goal of your quest for yourself is to find that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is fearless and desireless … It’s the coming into being that’s it, and that’s the life point in you, and that’s what these myths are concerned to communicate to you.”
Hero’s journey overview:
“There is a certain typical hero sequence of actions, which can be detected in stories from all over the world, and from many, many periods of history. And I think it’s essentially, you might say, the one deed done by many, many different people … It’s a cycle, a going and a return, that the hero cycle represents … That’s the hero act: departure, fulfillment, return. And on the way there are adventures that can be paralleled also in other traditions.”
- “A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself … The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or saving an idea. He is sacrificing himself for something, that’s the morality of it.”
- “The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it’s really a manifestation of his character. And it’s amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he’s ready for is the one that he gets … Our life evokes our character, and you find out more about yourself as you go on.”
- “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
Death & rebirth/resurrection:
“There is an old story that is still good—the story of the quest, the spiritual quest, that is to say, to find the inward thing that you basically are. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you—have you been reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation? You are God in your deepest identity. You are one with the transcendent … To get out of that posture of psychological dependency into one of psychological self-responsibility requires a death and resurrection, and that is the basic motif of the hero journey: leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer, or more mature, or other condition.”
- “You as you know yourself are not the final term of your being. And you must die to that, one way or another, in giving of yourself to something, or in being annihilated actually physically, to return, you might say, or to recognize. Life is always on the edge of death, always, and one should lack fear and have the courage of life. That’s the principle initiation of all of the heroic stories.”
- “It’s a basic theme: that which dies is born. You have to have death in order to have life … They’re two aspects of the same thing, which is being/becoming.”
- “There is an idea of death to the past and birth to the future in our lives and in our thinking all the time. Death to the animal nature, birth to the spiritual, and these symbols are talking about it one way or another … This is an essential experience of any mystical realization: you die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier.”
Campbell paraphrasing Schopenhauer:
“Schopenhauer’s answer is, this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one. And that the separateness is only an effect of the temporal forms of sensibility of time and space. And our true reality is in that unity with all life. It is a metaphysical truth that becomes spontaneously realized, because it’s the real truth of your life. Now, you might say the hero is the one who has given his physical life, you might say, to some order of realization of that truth. It may appear that I’m one with my tribe, or I’m one with people of a certain kind, or I’m one with life. This is not a concept; this is a realization.”
Follow Your Bliss
“The moral is that the realization of your bliss, your true being, comes when you have put aside the, what might be called passing moment, with its terror and with its temptations and its statement of requirements of life, that you should live this way.”
The programmatic life:
“This is the threat to our lives; we all face it, we all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity, or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … I think that’s the great thing in the West: the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.”
- “If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life, and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off-center; he has aligned himself with a programmatic life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. And the world’s full of people who have stopped listening to themselves … There’s something inside you that knows you’re in the center, that knows you’re on the beam, that knows you’re off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life … Most of our action is economically or socially determined, and does not come out of our life.”
- “Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it. And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority.”
- “Most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns. They all have the capacity that’s waiting to be awakened, to move to this other place … When you are awakened at the level of the heart to compassion and to suffering with the other person, that’s the beginning of humanity.”
Following your bliss:
“I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit—which is the great spiritual language of the world—they know all about it and have known about it for a long time, the transcendent is transcendent. But there are three terms that bring you to the brink, you might say, the jumping off place to the ocean. And the three terms are sat, chit, ananda. And sat, the word sat means ‘being.’ Chit means ‘full consciousness.’ And ananda means ‘rapture.’ So I thought, I don’t know whether my consciousness is full consciousness or not, I don’t know whether my being is proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture and that’ll bring me both being and full consciousness, and it worked … Each person can have his own depth experience and some conviction of being in touch with his own sat-chit-ananda, his own being, true consciousness, and true bliss.”
- “My general formula for my students is, follow your bliss. Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it … If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it .”
- “Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense, nobody can frighten me off from this thing … When you have that feeling, then stay with it and don’t let anyone throw you off.”
- “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you’re living somehow. And well, you can see it. You begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss, and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Your bliss station:
“Where is your bliss station, you know? Try to find it … There you get the ‘thou’ feeling of life.”
- “You can address anything as a ‘thou’, and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it. The ego that sees a ‘thou’ is not the same ego that sees an ‘it.’ Your whole psychology changes when you address things as an ‘it.’ And when you go to war with a people, the problem of the newspapers is to turn those people into its, so that they’re not ‘thous.'”
- “You must have a room, or a certain hour a day or so, where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe to anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you, but 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. And first you may find that nothing’s happening there, but if you have a sacred place and use it, and take advantage of it, something will happen.”
- “We’re having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your joy is. Grab it; no one can tell you what it’s going to be. I mean, you’ve got to learn to recognize your own depths.”
On being alive:
“How much of the beauty of our own lives is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it is conscious intention? That’s a big question.”
- “Any world is a living world if it’s alive, and the thing is to bring it to life. And the way to bring it to life is to find in your own case where your life is, and be alive yourself … What we’re looking for is a way of experiencing the world in which we are living, that will open to us the transcendence that informs it, and at the same time informs ourselves within it. That’s what people want, that’s what the soul asks for.”
- “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 what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that the life experiences that we have on the purely physical plane will have resonances within that are those of our own innermost being and reality. And so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive, that’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves.”
- “What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there. Now we are so engaged in doing things, to achieve purposes of outer value, that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”
Consciousness & God
“The real dragon is in you. That’s your ego, holding you in … Somehow with the diminishment of your own ego, the consciousness expands.”
Religions:
“The word ‘religion’ means religio, linking back, linking back the phenomenal person to a source. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back.”
- “Every mythology, every religion, is true in this sense: it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. But when it gets stuck to the metaphor, then you’re in trouble.”
- “All of the references of religious and mythological images are to planes of consciousness or fields of experience potential in the human spirit, and these are to evoke attitudes and experiences that are appropriate to a meditation on the mystery of the source of your own being.”
- “Jung has a wonderful saying somewhere that, ‘Religion is a defense against a religious experience.’ … That means it has reduced the whole thing to concepts and ideas, and having the concept and idea short-circuits the transcendent experience. The experience of deep mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.”
Duality & nonduality:
“Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites.”
- “The garden is the place of unity, nonduality: nonduality of male and female, nonduality of man and God, nonduality of good and evil. You eat the duality, and you’re on the way out.”
- “You’re in the field of time when you’re man, and one of the problems of life is to live in the realization of both terms. That is to say, I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal apparitions.”
- “What you get in the vegetation traditions is this notion of identity behind the surface display of duality, identity behind it all. All of these are manifestations of the One. The one radiance shines through all things.”
Consciousness:
“The whole thing is consciousness. I begin to feel more and more that the whole world is conscious.”
- “The ground of being is the ground of our being, and the outward turned, we see all these little problems here, but inward, we are the source of them all. That’s the big mystical teaching.”
- “If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than as being thrown in here from somewhere else, you know, thrown out of the earth, we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth.”
- “If one can identify with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, and really achieve an identification with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, not knowing what it is, undifferentiated consciousness, one can let the body go … The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to lose it, is to identify yourself, not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. And when you can do that—and this is something I learned from my myths—what am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? And this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this thing go, like an old car there goes the fender, there goes this. But it’s expectable, you know, and then gradually the whole thing drops off and consciousness rejoins consciousness.”
God:
“God is the ultimate elementary idea or archetype of man.” (Note: “An archetype is a constant form, a basic fundamental form … Expressions of the structure of the human psyche.”)
- “The ultimate word in our language for that which is transcendent is ‘God’ … God is a thought, God is a name, God is an idea, but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought.”
- “That which God refers to is the ultimate mystery of being, which is the mystery of your being as well as of the world … The ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human experience … There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man, and that is what looks like God.”
- “The idea of God as the ‘absolute other’ is a ridiculous idea; there could be no relationship to that which is absolute other … The image of God becomes the final obstruction. Your God is your ultimate barrier. This is basic Hinduism, basic Buddhism.”
Campbell paraphrasing Schopenhauer:
“Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s; he says, ‘When you reach a certain age,’ and he wrote this when he was in his 60s or so, ‘and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order. It seems to have had been composed by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.’ So he says, ‘Who composed this plot?’ And he said, ‘And just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.’ Then he says, ‘Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony,’ he says, ‘everything influencing and structuring everything else.’ And he said, ‘It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature.'”
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