how Joseph Campbell can open your eyes and change your life
by Vic Shayne
Toward the end of the 1980s I watched an interview series featuring Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. A few years later I bought the book by the same name: The Power of Myth because I couldn’t get enough of Campbell’s wisdom. This was my introduction to one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century, and it forever changed my life, including my thinking and world view. Up until this point I hardly paid attention to mythology, thinking that it had to do with Greek and Egyptian gods and legends of fantasy. Through Campbell I discovered that mythology has to do with me, you, and everyone else.
who was Joseph Campbell?
Campbell was an American author and professor at the all-female Sarah Lawrence College (the school became coed in 1968) in his home state of New York. Born in New York City in 1904, from early childhood Campbell became interested in mythology, beginning with books and rituals related to Native American culture. He traveled extensively throughout his life and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Campbell died in 1988, a year before the airing of the award winning PBS television series in which he was interviewed by veteran journalist Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth introduced Campbell’s views to millions of people, including me.
And, of course, Campbell was the originator of one of the most famous phrases in western culture: “Follow your bliss.”
changing my life
In life you may find yourself in a boat going down a slow-moving — or sometimes raging — river coming to a fork. And then a seminal idea is the hand that slightly taps the bow of the boat so that it goes this way or that. Campbell was that hand that moved me in a new direction.
Campbell woke me up in a sense. His work led me to think about the world as a whole system of movement and relationships — at once being comprised of infinitely produced expressions as well as existing as a singular, indivisible whole. And this insight led me to find out something about myself beneath my face to the world.
finding a deeper message
While I never found any use in my own life for religion and its divisive, closed, and self-conflicted teachings, Campbell allowed me to see a message deeper than the one presented by mainstream religious leaders. His suggestion was to consider the connotation and not the denotation of stories. If you understand religious teachings as literal events and people then you miss the whole point, he taught. Instead, wisdom comes from the metaphors and mythical motifs hidden in plain sight.
Look beneath the surface and you find the treasure, which is your own essence. Beneath the surface of the ego self is the great unconscious where the depths of life can be known for a hero brave enough to venture into this darkness.
the brilliance of a good story
Of course, I am not alone in appreciating and benefiting from Campbell’s profundity. Just go on the internet or into a book store and you’ll find not only Campbell’s works, but countless others that reference him and expand on his teachings. In fact, the entire motion picture, writing, and story-telling industry has been struck by the Campbell lightning bolt. All the experts now teach that a story must have a series of arcs, steps, points, and turning points, following the framework of the hero’s journey to qualify for excellence and efficacy. And various modalities of psychology address emotional issues using the model of the hero’s journey replete with mythic connotations and archetypes.
When we go far back into time, we can revisit mythology as something amazingly profound, all thanks to the mind, work, and words of Joseph Campbell. If you are not a writer or storyteller, thanks to this remarkable teacher, now at least you can appreciate a good story when you hear one.
A myth is not a lie
Joseph Campbell famously said, “A myth is not a lie.” Of course, when you look in the dictionary and read all sorts of advertisements, slogans, and articles, the word is used interchangeably with “a lie,” out of ignorance. Even the most prolific writers and speakers misuse the word so that over time it has devolved into something well below the brilliant beacon that it really is.
“Mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth — penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”
— Joseph Campbell
A myth is actually a story that offers a way to turn our thoughts back to the source of the self (ego), which is the apparent participant in life. If you look close enough maybe you’ll discover that what the self sees is merely itself as other expressions.And beyond this little world of the self is a totality that can be known through persistent self-enquiry. This is the same message that mystics have taught for millennia. Campbell brings out this truth through analogies that are mythic stories.
“The ego is as you think of yourself…The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with your past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.”
— Joseph Campbell
A myth, then, is a mirror to the self. You see yourself in every character, good, bad or indifferent. You see yourself in everyone and everything you meet. And the storyline is your own. If you pull back far enough, or go in deep enough, you discover that you are all the characters and the storyline itself.
what is your myth?
Consider the mythical character Sisyphus who is forever pushing a giant stone up a hill over and over. I have questioned whether this was me at some point, trudging through life with my every day blending into the next. The movie “Groundhog Day” is such an homage to this myth. The myth can awaken you to your rut.
In another example, consider the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” in the way Spielberg employed the mythic formula to captivate millions of movie fans. The film has all the elements of a hero’s journey, from the moment our hero Indiana Jones is pushed to leave the comfort of his everyday life and then partake in an adventure to eventually return as a transformed hero.
What is your personal myth? Have you ever asked yourself this question?
the profound professor Campbell
As with any true teacher, Joseph Campbell offers an invitation to apply what you have learned through myth to see whether you can find something deeper within yourself. Without this application a teaching is no more than secondhand information, which is great for dinner party discussions, but a tremendous failure if you want to know yourself (and others) better.
“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 that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
— Joseph Campbell
what does life mean to you?
In his book Creative Mythology, Campbell wrote, “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
So, where are you going? How are you going to get there? Maybe you don’t even know, but if you begin to look at your own life as a myth — a hero’s journey — something magical begins to happen: You discover a trajectory that makes sense out of a seemingly chaotic world, and maybe you find out what you are beyond the everyday image of yourself and that you are more than connected to everything, because you actually are everything.
It’s easy to get swept away by ideas and teachings, even those invaluable lessons by Joseph Campbell, but this is not enough. You must look for yourself to see what you are, what life is about, and where you are going as well as where you have come from.
