Book notes and lessons learnt: “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell

About society as a servant of the individual

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.

About why we tell stories

To try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality.

The only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting. You love people because of their imperfections.

Aren’t children lovable because they’re falling down all the time and have little bodies with the heads too big? Didn’t Walt Disney know all about this when he did the seven dwarfs?

About marriage interpreted as a myth/ritual

Marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity.

I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

CAMPBELL: Well, to say a word for the other first — one has to recognize that in domestic life there grows up a love relationship between the husband and wife even when they’re put together in an arranged marriage. In other words, in arranged marriages of this kind, there is a lot of love. There’s family love, a rich love life on that level. But you don’t get this other thing, of the seizure that comes in recognizing your soul’s counterpart in the other person. And that’s what the troubadours stood for, and that has become the ideal in our lives today.

CAMPBELL: Like the yin/yang symbol, you see. Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I’m not sacrificing to her, I’m sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life is in the relationship, that’s where your life now is. That’s what a marriage is — whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

MOYERS: I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you’re a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know. CAMPBELL: That’s the information that one gets from being married. That’s the way you get in touch with your feminine side.

About religion

That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe — the powers of your own body and of nature.

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy. Because everybody’s mind is capable of true knowledge, you don’t have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.

You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”

About dreams

All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is.

The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself.

A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

You can interpret a personal dream by association, figuring out what it is talking about in your own life, or in relation to your own personal problem. But every now and then a dream comes up that is pure myth, that carries a mythic theme, or that is said, for example, to come from the Christ within.

About the duality, Adam, Eve and the serpent

The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.

The serpent represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive. The world is but its shadow — the falling skin.

And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites.

MOYERS: Is the story trying to tell us that, prior to what happened in this Garden to destroy us, there was a unity of life?

CAMPBELL: It’s a matter of planes of consciousness. It doesn’t have to do with anything that happened. There is the plane of consciousness where you can identify yourself with that which transcends pairs of opposites.

We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

and transcendent means to “transcend,” to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual. The incarnation appears either as male or as female, and each of us is the incarnation of God. You’re born in only one aspect of your actual metaphysical duality, you might say.

About us coming into being

Fear is the first experience of the fetus in the womb. Before the fear is just a sense of unity.

What is that one great story? CAMPBELL: That we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground.

So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama? CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.

About living life

MOYERS: And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest? CAMPBELL: It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.

You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.

The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge. The hero’s sphere of action is not the transcendent but here, now, in the field of time, of good and evil — of the pairs of opposites. Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing. But the ultimate pair in the imagination are male and female, the male being aggressive, and the female being receptive, the male being the warrior, the female the dreamer. We have the realm of love and the realm of war, Freud’s Eros and Thanatos.

So Jesus says, “Judge not that you may not be judged.” That is to say, put yourself back in the position of Paradise before you thought in terms of good and evil. You don’t hear this much from the pulpits. But one of the great challenges of life is to say “yea” to that person or that act or that condition which in your mind is most abominable.

About getting old and dying

The tradition in India, for instance, of actually changing your whole way of dress, even changing your name, as you pass from one stage to another. When I retired from teaching, I knew that I had to create a new way of life, and I changed my manner of thinking about my life, just in terms of that notion — moving out of the sphere of achievement into the sphere of enjoyment and appreciation and relaxing to the wonder of it all.

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. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another — but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment.

The hero’s journey

The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body.

The god of death is at the same time the lord of sex (creation).

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis.

The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of realization of that truth.

The crisis comes in the “middle of the way of our life,” when the body is beginning to fade, and another whole constellation of themes comes breaking into your dream world.

Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture.

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

The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience — that is the hero’s deed.

In one kind of adventure, the hero sets out responsibly and intentionally to perform the deed. For instance, Odysseus’ son Telemachus was told by Athena, “Go find your father.” That father quest is a major hero adventure for young people. That is the adventure of finding what your career is, what your nature is, what your source is. You undertake that intentionally.

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.

How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn’t help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That’s something else, and it can be done.

Psychologically, the whale represents the power of life locked in the unconscious. Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome and controlled.

You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life.

“Lord, teach us when to let go.”

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are 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 I call “following your bliss.”

She hadn’t known that she was in water. That is to say, that with her marriage she had moved out of the rational, conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious. That’s always what’s represented in such adventures underwater. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events. Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.

Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolized by the father quest.

And so the symbol that most immediately represents this mystery of the pouring of the energy of life into the field of time is the lingam and the yoni, the male and female powers in creative conjunction.

About the virgin birth and the chakras

But what is the meaning of the virgin birth? CAMPBELL: I think the best way to answer that is to talk about a system they have in India that describes stages of spiritual development. In India, there is a system of seven psychological centers up the spine. They represent psychological planes of concern and consciousness and action.

We don’t think that way today about ourselves. But holding on to yourself and not letting yourself become food is the primary life-denying negative act. You’re stopping the flow! And a yielding to the flow is the great mystery experience that goes with thanking an animal that is about to be eaten for having given of itself. You, too, will be given in time.

And as we are given to recognize in the symbolism of the Indian psychological system, the first function, alimentation, is of an animal instinct; the second, procreation, is of an animal instinct; and the third, mastery and conquest, is also of an animal instinct — and these three centers are located symbolically in the pelvic basin.

but here they are represented in gold as symbolic of the virgin birth, that is to say, it is the birth of spiritual man out of the animal man. MOYERS: And it happens — CAMPBELL: It happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, com-passion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That’s the beginning of humanity.

But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?

Heroes and demigods are born that way as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation. This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center. The lower three centers are not to be refuted but transcended, when they become subject to and servant to the heart.

General Quotes

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.

MOYERS: What kind of new myth do we need?

CAMPBELL: We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva — the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises.

And in that yin/yang figure from China, in the dark fish, or whatever you want to call it, there is the light spot. And in the light one, there’s a dark spot. That’s how they can relate. You couldn’t relate at all to something in which you did not somehow participate.

And Dante, like a social scientist, says, “Darling, how did this happen? What brought this about?” And then come the most famous lines in Dante. Francesca says that Paolo and she were sitting under a tree in the garden reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. “And when we read of their first kiss, we looked at each other and read no more in the book that day.”

Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: “When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.” Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension. Man’s tendency, however, is to personify such experiences, to anthropomorphize natural forces.

Even in our minds — when it comes to making a decision, there will be a war. In acting in relationship to other people, for example, there may be four or five possibilities. The influence of the dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal, as well.

Meditation means constantly thinking on a certain theme. It can be on any level. I don’t make a big split in my thinking between the physical and the spiritual. For example, meditation on money is a perfectly good meditation. And bringing up a family is a very important meditation.

We’ve inherited the circle with the four cardinal points and three hundred and sixty degrees. The official Sumerian year was three hundred and sixty days with five holy days that don’t count, which are outside of time and in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens.

“AUM” is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations.