JOSEPH CAMPBELL

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Helped by invisible hands?

The American academic Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, wrote:

"It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world."

Campbell writes about people going on a journey, overcoming various challenges, achieving greater wisdom, and then spreading this wisdom.

The Hero's journey can be internal.

Joseph Campbell.

Joseph Campbell advises you to "follow your bliss".

Joseph Campbell wanted to get above, or transcend, the world that most of us experience.

He wanted to tune in to the divine and experience bliss or rapture.

Joseph Campbell wrote:

"If you 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 are living.

"Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time."

(Joseph Campbell - Wikipedia)

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Joseph Campbell lived most of his life in an apartment in a building on Waverly Place and Gay Street overlooking New York City's Sheridan Square and Christopher Street.

It can be argued that some people do not need to go on a journey, as they have already tuned in to the divine.

What would people who are 'tuned into the divine' look like?

The American academic Abraham Maslow studied mentally healthy people instead of people with serious psychological problems. 

According to Maslow, mentally healthy people have such qualities as:

Honesty

Goodness and kindness

Spontaneity

Fairness

Joy

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, wrote:

"Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world."

In other words, avoid being a fundamentalist.

As Jesus said - see your own faults, rather than the faults of others.

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, wrote:

"The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth.

"Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.

"As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos.

"Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable (unable to be avoided) void."

The VOID can be seen as being an absence of the selfish personality or self.

Understanding the void means understanding that we are all brothers and sisters.

Emptiness: The Most Misunderstood Word.

Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, wrote the following:

"Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination."

"Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late."



"As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself.

"The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny."



"Dream is the personalized myth ... in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer."



"God is love."

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