PNTV - Pathways to Bliss by Joseph Campbell

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss. As always, this great book and 6 page PDF philosopher's note with some of my favorite big ideas. Joseph Campbell is one of my favorite teachers. He is in the grandfather slot in my spiritual family tree. Joseph, what are you doing? And just an awesome guy. This is the third book that we've done a note on. The other two are the Power of Myth and Joseph Campbell Companion. All three rock. And this one, Pathways to Bliss, is all about Joseph Campbell's idea of following our bliss. So if you know Campbell or you've read some of these notes, listen to some of these shows, you know that Joseph Campbell coined the phrase follow your bliss, was a mythology expert who studied the hero's journey, wrote a book called the Hero with a Thousand Faces and how all cultures have very similar mythology of a hero's journey. And one of the things he talked about a lot was following our bliss. And this book is about pathways to bliss and pathways to us to experience the divine within us. And Campbell talks about the fact I've mention a couple times throughout these notes, but that he discovered the idea of bliss as a pathway to enlightenment, as a pathway to our fullest expression when he was studying the Upanishads. And he discovered that they talked about three jumping off points, proper consciousness, proper beingness, and if you followed your bliss, so sat chit ananda in the Sanskrit. So the idea is that the bliss, as Campbell says, and in the note I talk about it here, our bliss is the transcendent wisdom of the divine bubbling up within us. So when we feel good, when we feel totally alive in that rapturous bliss, that's really a sign that we're deeply connected, deeply plugged into our highest selves, which is a good thing. And when we find ourselves not feeling that bliss, we tend to be disconnected from source. In the last episode we did Money and the Law of Attraction by Esther and Jerry Hicks. And I mentioned the fact that they talk about the importance of seeking joy. That's your lifetime career seeking joy. Well, they're talking about the same thing as following your bliss. And they both say the same thing that Esther and Jerry Hicks say, that it's not about shortage of money or shortage of time or shortage of energy. That's not what's going on. That's not the problem. The problem is shortage to the connection to source. Well, same thing here Campbell says that when we're not feeling bliss, we're really just cut off from that divine within us. And we want to find ways to fill up. We want to find ways to feel that bubbling up again. So one of the things we talk about often is what things do you do that make you feel good? What makes you feel most alive? For me, I mention all the time, exercise is a huge one. I'm going to go on a hike as soon as I get done recording this. Meditation is a big one. Eating good foods is a good one. Having awesome conversations and being present with Alexander is a big one for me. So what things really make you feel alive? Do those often. It's a good idea. So that's the idea. Bliss equals the transcendent wisdom within you. Here's a cool idea. Campbell says that. He quotes Schopenhauer, who. Who says that when you get to a certain point in your life, you look at it and you're like, wow, you can almost see it as if it was written by a novelist. And you can see all the things that happened to you in your life kind of sort of start to make sense, that you took this path and then that happened, and then this happened, and none of it really made sense when it was happening at the time. But as you look at it from a broader perspective, you can see that it just kind of. There were similar themes coming up and similar questions you were pursuing or similar episodes that you're going through of lessons you were learning. And he says that from a far enough vantage point, you can see your life as if it was written by a novelist. Really cool idea. And I mentioned in the note here, a friend of mine, Tripp Lanier, talks about. He's got a great show called the New Man. Highly recommended. Google the New man podcast. Tripp and I have had some awesome conversations on his show, and he has this great story, I think we might have been talking about this, actually. And he says, look, one of his friends told him, imagine that your life was a novel, right? And you're reading it. You're reading the story of your life. Would you want to keep on reading it? Would you want to keep on turning the pages and finish it? Or would you be so bored by it that you just want to put it away? Well, a good hero's journey, a good life story, is something that engages us. Something that, if it were a novel, we'd actually want to keep on reading it. And if we wouldn't want to read our own novel, that's a good sign that we probably want to really check in to see what makes us feel most alive and start honoring that more consistently. That's a pretty cool big idea. Campbell talks a lot about the fact that life is calling. There's always this call to the heroic, to the highest within us. And if we don't answer that call, we're going to suffer. We talk about that throughout the notes on his work and throughout all these different books. And he says we need to say yes. Say yes to possibilities. Say yes to our life. Say yes to that call. So we've talked about the hero's journey in a bunch of these notes. The idea of a hero's journey, very briefly is we enter the forest of the unknown. We leave the known, we leave kind of our family and the community as we know it. We go into the forest of the unknown and we fight dragons, the challenges within our own consciousness. And we grow and we explore and all that good stuff. Now, as we do that and as we become more and more vitalized and healthy and fully functioning human beings on that hero's journey, the real point of it is to bring the boon back. He says, the boon, I love that word, boon. But to bring the treasure that we find within ourselves back into the world, it's not about going into the forest of the unknown and then just checking out. The hero's journey is going into that force of the unknown and coming back, coming back to our world as a more enriched, more empowered human being and giving our gifts to the world. And Campbell says that bringing the boon back, coming back into the world as a fully functioning human being living within the challenges and the constraints of our lives and of our culture, is as challenging as the initial departure into the force of the unknown. Really cool idea of bringing the boon back. And ultimately, the whole point is that the whole point is to grow into, expand so that we can give ourselves most fully to the world. And just the simple act of growing and expanding our own consciousness is a gift to the world. It's a really cool idea. But to follow that loop I mentioned often that I have a deal with the universe, or God, whatever you want to call it, that I'm going to be allowed and enabled to learn all the stuff that I can learn to the extent that I share it, there's kind of this harmonic loop for me that is working out pretty well so far, and I'm really excited about it. So he talks about the idea here, too. He said that Alan Watts once asked him, what's your spiritual practice? And Campbell replied, underlining Books. I love that. Campbell actually came back in the early 19th century. He came back from Europe, where he was getting a master's, I believe, and came back. And right when the Great Depression started, a week after he got back into the States, the Great Depression, occ what he decided to do was he went and rented a cabin in Woodstock for nearly nothing and read for five straight years. Eight hours a day, five, six days a week, he read. Isn't that cool? So one of his spiritual practices is underlining books. He says it's all in how you approach it. Anything can be a spiritual practice. It depends on how you approach it. Really cool idea there. In the Note, I talk about the balancing of cosmic power with our own personality. And oftentimes, as we evolve and grow, we want to kind of get rid of our personality. A lot of people talk about annihilating the ego and killing the ego. I'm not a big fan of that. I go off on it in the Note. We'll talk about it more in these episodes and more in the years ahead. But he says the challenge is to align with that cosmic power and to really be almost like a priest for it and to allow it to come through our lives and to come through our unique personality and in a meaningful way. It's not about getting rid of our personality. It's about plugging ourselves into something bigger than ourselves and then shining brightly. Really cool idea. He talks about the fact that we can make anything in our lives. Heroic, changing diapers, doing the dishes, all these things. Doing the laundry. Have an opportunity to be part of our hero's journey. It all depends on the energy we bring to it and consciously choosing to give our best to the world. So that's a big idea there. There's more in the note, a lot more in the book. Highly recommend it. Hope you enjoyed it. Remember, the bliss within is God bubbling up. The divine intelligence within us bubbling up. We want to get in touch with that. We want to express it fully and hope you dug it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have an awesome day. See you.

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