PNTV: The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell (#16)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do an episode on Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth. As always, great book, Philosopher's Note, where we've got six pages of PDF with about 10 of my favorite big ideas. We've got my handy dandy Philosopher's Notes workbook here with 99 other notes in it. We've got the MP3 player with all of this recorded on it. That's 30 hours of content. I'll have a link below where you can hook yourself up with it if you haven't yet. But the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyer's in Interview. If you haven't seen the DVD series on it yet, I'm going to put a link to that below as well. It's extraordinary. I first watched it I don't know how many years ago, and I literally fell in love with Campbell. He was in his late 70s or early 80s. It was shortly before he passed away. And you can just see how much he loved life. He had this amazing enthusiasm that literally just shined through his eyes, and you could just see the deep sense of wisdom that he had. And his passion for life is just extraordinary. So this book basically came from those interviews, and I don't know how many hours they did. Let's see. I think we have it here. They filmed 24 hours of discussion between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, and I think only like six or eight of them wound up on the DVDs, and a lot of it kind of wound up on the editing floor. And a lot of that wound up in this book, which is extraordinary. So Joseph Campbell, for those who don't know him yet, he was a mythology expert who studied heroes and overall mythology across cultures. He wrote a great book called A Hero With a Thousand Faces, where he documented the fact that all these different cultures have very similar heroic myths and really powerful stuff. So we're going to talk about him and a couple other notes as well. I've done three notes on him. He's one of my favorite teachers. Extraordinary guy. He's actually the grandfather in my spiritual family tree. I love him so much. Now, one of his other big ideas is this concept of following our bliss. So that was one of his guiding principles in us living an extraordinary life and honoring our hero's journey was to follow our bliss. What's fascinating is how he came up with that phrase. I never knew until I read this book where he articulates the fact that he discovered this idea when he was translating the Upanishads from Sanskrit, and as he was a Sanskrit scholar, total stud in that domain. And he discovered that Upanishad said there were three jumping off points into enlightenment, sat, chit, and ananda. Right? So sat means beingness, chit means consciousness, and ananda means rapture or bliss. And he basically said, look, if I'm honest with myself, I don't know what proper beingness is, and I don't know what proper consciousness is, but I do know what my bliss is. I can follow my rapture. I can follow my bliss. And that is how he came up with the idea of follow your bliss as one of the jumping off points into enlightenment. And he likes to say that our bliss is the welling up of the divine energy within us. When we feel most radiantly alive, that's when we're most connected to source. And we talk about this throughout the notes. Abraham Hicks and their emotional guidance system is all about this. They call it joy. The highest expression is joy rather than bliss. But it's the same idea. And they base a lot of their work in inspiration from Joseph Campbell. So that's the basic idea. With follow your bliss, sat chit, ananda, we can follow our ananda, we can follow our bliss. That's God speaking from within us. I love that idea. Tangent on that enthusiasm when we feel most alive. The word literally means entheos. It's Greek for God within. Entheos, enthusiasm. When we're following our bliss, we're enthusiastic. We literally have God circulating through us, which is extraordinary. In the note, I talk about some ways we can tap into our bliss more. For now, just think about what are the things that make you feel most alive when you feel most blissful? Start. Start paying attention to those things and start trusting yourself and following that intuition more and more. You can check out the note for some more ideas on that. So again, remember, this is in the context of Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell. And Moyers asks him, well, how do we find our bliss? What are some ways? And Joseph Campbell says that one way is to sit in a room and read and read and read and really tap into the wisdom that inspires you. And don't read the popular stuff. He says, read what your heart feels called to read, and then read what that author read that inspired him or her. And then read what that author read and kind of follow that thread throughout. And that's a great way to soak ourselves in wisdom, which brings us closer to our own bliss. And he actually spent five Years reading nine hours a day. Five years, nine hours a day. He actually came back from Europe, I think, either a week before or a week after the Great Depression started. Couldn't get a job, so he took what little money he had saved and moved to a little cabin up in the woods and read full time. It's awesome. Deeply inspiring. And I thought of him often when I was in Bali doing something similar. So that's a big idea to read. And not read popular stuff necessarily, but read the stuff that inspires us, that helps us tune into our bliss. Another idea is to have a sacred place, a place we can go and just be with ourselves and with the divine. Whether that's on a hike or in our meditation room or whatever it is, it's essential that we create that space. We don't think of what's going on in our lives, all the challenges or stressors or whatever. We just connect to our highest selves. Really big idea. Campbell was raised Catholic and he went to confession every Sunday. And he has this great idea where he says that Ramakrishna says, you are essentially what you think about most of the time. So why is it that when we go to a priest, he said, we say, forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. Why do we focus on our sins? He says we should go to our priest and say, bless me, Father, for I have been great. These are the good things I've done over the last week and focus on the things we've done that are wonderful. So we are what we focus on. We want to focus on the positive, beautiful things that are going on in our life. That's a great big idea. The next big idea is fantastic. I call it, do you think I can do that? And he was a professor at a boys school for a while and then also at a women's university for most of his career. But he talks about how when he was at a boys prep school, young boys would come to him trying to figure out what they wanted to do with their lives. And many would ask him, do you think I can make it as a writer or do you think I can make it as this or as that? And he said, well, look, if you're willing to put up with 10 years of being ignored, right, and you're still willing to put in the effort, you're still willing to work hard and to go for it, then yeah, I think you can make it. But if you're not willing to put in that level of effort, then I'm not so sure. And I just love that idea. A It's just a powerful idea of persistence and stickability, as we talked about recently from the Magic of Thinking Big. But this whole idea of 10 years and 10,000 hours is something I explore in the note as well. You look at the Beatles, you look at Bill Gates, you look at violinists who are soloists in symphonies. They've all put in 10,000 hours of concerted, diligent effort and practice into their craft. So we need to be willing to put in that kind of effort if we want to reach a level of excellence. It's absolutely imperative. You can also learn more about that in Malcolm Gladwell's awesome new book called Outliers. And I'm going to do a couple other books on this theme of just putting in the effort. 10,000 hours, 10 years of effort. What are you willing to do that for? And the fact is that typically we need to love what we do enough to put in that much effort, which is another reason why following our bliss is so important. So another big idea here is the idea of Amor fati, loving our fate. He talks about how Nietzsche says, we need to love our fate. We, whatever happens to us, we need to say thank you. We need to appreciate the fact that it's been given to us in a lot of ways as a blessing to live our greatest lives. We've got to love our fate, whatever happens to us, say thank you, and realize that it's part of a bigger picture at work. It's an awesome idea. Campbell also talks about the fact that when we're on purpose, when we're following our bliss, doors open that we never could have imagined opening. He calls those. He calls that being helped by hidden hands. It's extraordinary. I'm sure you've felt that. I definitely have in my life. As I get on purpose, amazing things happen that I never could have predicted. And then finally, he talks about the hero. And the hero, ultimately, as he says, is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. He says, when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves in our own self preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. So my question to end this one is, what are you committing yourself to in your life? How do we transform our consciousness by giving ourselves to the world most powerfully? Here's a quick look at the power of myth. Hope you enjoyed it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.