Themes of Joseph Campbell - Quimper Unitarian Universalist ...

“Themes of Joseph Campbell, Part III: Follow Your Bliss”
Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship
October 23, 2005
Bruce A. Bode
Quotations for Bulletin
I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own
possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and
then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people
speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or
child.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 163)
The influence of a vital person vitalizes…. Any world is a valid world if it’s alive.
The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own
case where the life is and become alive yourself.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 148)
Call to Worship
Holy and beautiful is the custom by which we gather together on this Sunday
morning.
Here we come to give our thanks, to face our ideals, to remember our loved ones, to
seek that which is permanent, and to serve goodness, beauty, and the qualities of life that
make it rich and whole.
Through this hour breathes the worship of all ages, the cathedral music of all history,
and blessed are the ears that hear that eternal sound.
Lighting the Chalice (in unison)
We are travelers. We meet for a moment in this sacred place to love, to share, to
serve. Let us use compassion, curiosity, reverence, and respect while seeking our
truths. In this way we will support a just and joyful community, and this moment
shall endure.
Responsive Reading
MINISTER: You do not have to be good.
CONGREGATION: You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through
the desert, repenting.
MINISTER: You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
CONGREGATION: Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
MINISTER: Meanwhile the world goes on.

CONGREGATION: Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of rain are moving across
the landscapes,
MINISTER: Over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
CONGREGATION: Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading
home again.
MINISTER: Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your
imagination,
CONGREGATION: Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
MINISTER: Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
("Wild Geese," Mary Oliver)
A Time for All Ages
The last two weeks I have been reading fairy tales to you from this large book of German
fairy tales that were collected by two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. And last
week our story ended with the cat eating the dear, sweet little mouse, which was not a
very happy ending. So let us hope that our fairy tale this morning turns out a little better.
It is titled, “The Donkey.” (The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, pp. 632-635)
Introduction to Reading
My sermon this morning is the third in a four-part series on the life and work of Joseph
Campbell, who lived from 1904 to 1987 and was one of the finest modern scholars in the
area of world mythology and religion. He also achieved something of a national and
international recognition, largely through a six-part PBS interview series with Bill
Moyers, first shown in 1988, the year following his death.
His public recognition was due largely, I think, to his willingness to go beyond the
academic realm to speak personally about what he had learned from his studies that could
be applied to living. And probably the most well known of his life-applications was the
little three-word phrase, “Follow your bliss,” which has made its way into our everyday
vocabulary, including refrigerator magnets.
In my sermon this morning I will try to unpack what was involved for Campbell in this
phrase. And let me begin, as we have the last two weeks, with another reading from
those Moyers’ interviews in which we find Campbell commenting on this phrase.
Sheila Lauder will again take the part of Bill Moyers and I will read Campbell’s part.
Campbell’s commentary on this phrase, “Follow your bliss,” comes up in a discussion
about doing battle with dragons, as in the dragon battles of the medieval knights.

Reading
MOYERS: How do I slay that dragon in me? What’s the journey each of us has to make,
what you call “the soul’s high adventure”?
CAMPBELL: My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it
is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.
MOYERS: Is it my work or my life?
CAMPBELL: If the work that you’re doing is the work that you chose to do because you
are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh, no! I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon
locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly do what
So-and-so is doing.”
MOYERS: In this sense, unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we’re not going on
our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.
CAMPBELL: But in doing that, you save the world. The influence of a vital person
vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have
the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s
on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is
to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your case where the life is and
become alive yourself.
MOYERS: When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have
to go alone?
CAMPBELL: If you have someone who can help you, that’s fine, too. But, ultimately,
the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding
of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the
psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a
larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping
you down.
MOYERS: What’s my ego?
CAMPBELL: What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you
can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may all be
too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors
tell you to do, you certainly are going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your
dragon as it reflects from within yourself….
MOYERS: I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus and Ariadne. Theseus says
to Ariadne, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the
labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the

labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string.
That’s all you need.”
CAMPBELL: That is all you need – an Ariadne thread.
MOYERS: Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or
great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string.
CAMPBELL: That’s not always easy to find. But it’s nice to have someone who can
give you a clue. That’s the teacher’s job, to help you find your Ariadne thread.
MOYERS: Like all heroes, the Buddha doesn’t show you the truth itself, he shows you
the way to the truth.
CAMPBELL: But it’s got to be your way, not his. The Buddha can’t tell you exactly
how to get rid of your particular fears, for example. Different teachers may suggest
exercises, but they may not be the ones to work for you. He’s like a lighthouse that says,
“There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.”
The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities.
Nietzsche says, “Man is the sick animal.” Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to
do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life.
What are we going to do with ourselves? A living myth presents contemporary models.
MOYERS: Today, we have an endless variety of models. A lot of people end up
choosing many and never knowing who they are.
CAMPBELL: When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it
will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what
a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know
what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and
merchants. You are shaped by your life.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 149-51)
Meditation
Let us enter into our time of silence and meditation with these words from poet William
Stafford:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
(William Stafford, “The Way It Is”)

“THEMES OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL, PART III: ‘FOLLOW YOUR BLISS’”
The influence of the East
Joseph Campbell was a great student and a great appreciator of Eastern religion – of
Hinduism and Buddhism. He preferred, for example, the Eastern word “Brahman” to the
Western word “God” to refer to the “unimaginable and unnamable Reality” that both
transcends and grounds all existing things, including the categories of human cognition.
The Eastern word “Brahman” is a neuter, transpersonal noun, akin to energy, whereas the
Western word “God” tends to be construed as a personal being, akin to human beings,
with primarily “masculine” qualities and characteristics.
Campbell also appreciated the Eastern emphasis on this “unimaginable and unnamable
Reality” as being interior to things. In Eastern thought the ultimate mystery of being not
only transcends all things, but, more importantly for daily life, is understood to be present
in each thing as its inner essence … so that what you see in the world about you are not
objects from the hand of a Creator who stands apart from those objects, but, rather, the
creativity itself in its manifold forms and shapes.
Thus, from the Eastern perspective all things are “divine” in their essential character.
“Divinity” is not so much breathed into things from outside and beyond, but, rather, since
each thing is, as it were, an extrusion of the divine mystery, divinity is breathed out from
things, like the fragrance of a flower.
Already in the ninth century, B.C.E., Hinduism had discovered the identity of the exterior
and the interior, and their formula phrase was, Tat tvam asi” – “You are That.” At the
core of your being you are that divine mystery which, heretofore, you may have seen
only as exterior to yourself. Thus, the Hindu prayer greeting to other persons and other
beings: “Namaste” – “I greet the divine in you; I greet the ultimate mystery and power of
all being in you.”
This experience of one’s essential identity with the “Creative Energy” is something that
Campbell appreciated in Eastern thought, and the first function of mythology and
religion, he liked to say, was simply to open one to the mystery and wonder of Being, to
awaken one to the experience of being alive and a part of that “Creative Power” that
imbues all things. For Campbell, religion was first of all related to this experience.
And that’s another thing he appreciated about Eastern religion: their emphasis on
experience over belief. In the West, when you consider “religion,” you tend to think in
terms of belief, of doctrines, of creeds and confessions. But in the East, the emphasis is
more on the experience.
In the interviews with Bill Moyers when Moyers said to Campbell, “But you’re a man of
faith,” Campbell balked … because it wasn’t faith for him in terms of belief. What he
was after had to do with experience, which words, thoughts, and beliefs can only hint at

or point to – the experience of awakening to and meeting the “transcendent Mystery” in
the field of time and space.
There are yet other ways in which Campbell appreciated Eastern religion. For example:
their understanding that there are many paths to this experience, not just one;
their lesser emphasis on institutional religion – religious institutions don’t
hold the “keys to the kingdom,” but are, at best, aids to religious experience,
aids to help you to awaken to what already belongs to you – it doesn’t belong
to the institution.
and, finally, the Eastern understanding of symbols and images, namely, that
they are symbols and images … meant to spring the cognitive mind past itself,
to be windows to the experience, or, as Campbell says, to be “transparent to
transcendence.”
The influence of the West
In all these ways Campbell appreciated the Eastern approach to life and religion. Yet, for
all of this, Campbell was, I would judge, essentially a Western person – not only by
culture and upbringing, but also by inclination and choice. He believed that the West
also had a lot to offer in terms of the life of the spirit – the West was not just materialistic
in its orientation.
And the core thing that Campbell related to in the West was their accent on the unique
individual. The East tends to emphasize the common and universal side of things, but in
the West each individual is a unique expression of that luminous consciousness and
energy that the East saw shining forth in all things. Campbell would agree with Paul
Tillich’s statement, “It’s in the particular that one meets the universal.”
The heart of the Western spiritual tradition is identified by Campbell in a line from one of
the Arthurian romances from the thirteenth century, the Queste del Saint Graal, which has
to do with the quest for the Holy Grail, the Grail being the chalice or cup used by the
Christ at the Last Supper, and also the vessel in which the Christ’s blood was received at
the piercing of the side on the cross.
The Holy Grail represents wholeness, healing, and fulfillment. And in this Arthurian
romance the Grail appears to the knights of the Round Table and then again disappears.
At that point a toast is proposed challenging the knights to go in search of the Holy Grail.
And the story’s narrator then adds these words that so gripped Campbell:
They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group, so each entered the
forest at a separate point of his choice where the forest was darkest and where
there was no way or path.

In other words, each person must find the Grail, the wholeness and blessedness of a life,
in his or her own way, taking the route most appropriate to that individual.
This, for Campbell, relates to the spiritual gift of the West, for, as he says,
…each of us is a completely unique creature and, if we are ever to give any gift
to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and the fulfillment
of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.
For this reason, the teaching method of the traditional Eastern guru did not particularly
appeal to Campbell or, at least, he did not think it was the teaching method most
appropriate to the West. The gurus, say Campbell, expect a student to become like them.
They know the way; they know where you are on it; and they expect you to end up where
they are.
The traditional Eastern student, says Campbell, is “cookie-molded.” The guru gives you
his picture to wear so that you become like him. You don’t question; you don’t critique.
You obey; you imitate.
But that’s no way, says Campbell, for a Westerner. In the West, a teacher would give
you your own picture to wear, thus encouraging you to develop your own interests and
aptitudes.
A baseball pitching coach for example, he says, if he’s any good, doesn’t have all the
pitchers throw the same way. He watches to see what’s most “natural” for the individual
players, and then gives clues as to how they might develop their individual talents. (The
Power of Myth, p. 143)
And, actually, the best of the Eastern teachers recognize this as well … for they
recommend that you stay in your own clothing and retain your own name and culture,
otherwise the force of your power is deflected.
Finding your way
So how do you find your path? How do you recognize and bring forth the divine depth
and beauty of your own particular particle of being?
Well, says Campbell, as in the reading earlier in this service, “My general formula for my
students is, ‘Follow your bliss.’”
Where do you feel the deep sense of being alive? Where are you most at home, most full
of energy, most free, most centered, most real, most related, most happy?
Find out what that is for you and don’t be afraid to follow it … because this is the
creative life-energy stirring within you; this is the mysterious power of all being calling to
you. So move toward it, nurture and develop it, and make your contribution to life and to
your society through it.

Campbell said he came to this idea of bliss through his reading in Hindu scriptures in
which there are three basic terms: sat, chit, and anada. “Sat” means “being;” “chit”
means “consciousness,” and “anada” means “rapture” or “bliss.”
Says Campbell, when I studied this, I didn’t know whether my being was proper being,
and I didn’t know whether my consciousness was full consciousness; but I did know
where my rapture was. So I followed my rapture and found that it brought both larger
being and fuller consciousness.
(The Power of Myth, p. 120)
But for persons who might not be as clear as Campbell was on what or where their
rapture is what clues does Campbell, the teacher, offer for discerning one’s bliss?
Again, Bill Moyers in his interviews with Campbell, once asked him: “If I’m a young
person and I want to be happy, what do myths tell me about happiness?”
Campbell answered:
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.
(The Power of Myth, p. 155)
Thus, Campbell’s approach to discerning your bliss is primarily an intuitive one and may
appeal most to those who tend toward an intuitive approach to life. He says:
There’s something inside that knows when you’re in the center, that knows
when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam just for
the sake of earning money, you’ve lost your life. But if you stay in the center,
and even if you don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.
(The Power of Myth, p. 229)
The bliss level and its danger
But this “bliss” that Campbell is talking about is not always “blissful” in the normal way
of speaking and, thus, can be – and, I think, often has been – misunderstood.
The bliss or rapture that Campbell is talking about, as I indicated from its Eastern
connection, comes from a deeper center than the ego. And it isn’t what brings direct
comfort to the ego, and certainly not security. Rather, the ego’s job is pay attention to
this deeper “bliss level” of its being and to try to find a way to allow that rapture to come
through in its life without destroying its life …
… because this “bliss dimension” can, indeed, destroy your life, for it is the very power

of God, the creative energy of all being. It’s like a live cable of 10,000-volt electricity,
and if you, in your ordinarily ego-self, grab hold of that cable without insulation you’re in
for a world of hurt.
I remember Campbell saying once, “You’ve gotta keep God from pushing you around too
much. You’ve gotta let God come slowly, or you’ll get blown apart.”
In a certain sense, this energy of rapture, this “bliss,” doesn’t care about you in your
human dimension. It’s just fire and wants to burn. And it will burn you up, if you’re not
careful. So you’ve got to protect your life and not let that divine, fiery energy destroy
your earthly being.
Again, says Campbell, being God is not being on earth. In the Christian myth, God, in
order to live on earth, had to get crucified. So the thing to do, says Campbell laughingly,
is to not quite get crucified.
The example of marriage
You can put this dynamic in terms of the heart and the head. You follow the heart, but
the head has got to be there all the way.
Let’s take marriage and holy unions as an illustration of how the heart and the head are
related. Campbell would recommend that you marry, as he did, for love. In other words,
he would recommend that you tap into that electric current, that you connect to the
rapture level of your being.
Indeed, this has become the Western ideal. Marriages are no longer arranged as in
traditional cultures for social, political, or economic reasons, or to protect young persons
from making foolish decisions. Rather, the ideal, which continues to spread throughout
the world, is one in which one enters marriage through the doorway of love – through the
passageway of mutual, personal, and individual attraction.
So marry for love, recommends Campbell – and not first of all for reasons of practicality,
or social standing, or because others think you look good together – but marry for love.
Follow the heart-connection. Let your own heart lead you. Make your life’s journey
with a companion of your heart. But in doing so your rational mind needs to be there too.
And you had better know that if and when you decide to take your life’s journey with a
companion of your heart that many trials lie ahead on that journey. As the traditional
vow puts it, it’s a journey “for better and for worse.”
Campbell even describes marriage as “an ordeal” – not a romantic love affair, which is a
temporary and passing thing, but an ordeal, as in a test or trial. And marriage is an ordeal
because it involves the commitment and surrender of each individual ego to the greater
good of the larger whole. (And so, perhaps, just because the marriage journey is an
“ordeal,” it is even more important that you take that journey with a companion of your
heart.)

At any rate, this is an example of what Campbell means by following your bliss. And, as
you can see, it certainly doesn’t mean that everything is comfortable or easily digestible,
but, rather, as in the example of marriage, it means that whatever happens, that whatever
sorrows of the world come your way, you share those sorrows, you go through those
trials, with a companion of your heart. And as you have the discipline and courage to do
that, the heart-connection becomes deepened, strengthened, and more nuanced. Thus,
you have your bliss whether or not your life is “blissful” in the ordinary meaning of the
word.
A difficult path is this
To follow your bliss, to let your life’s path be determined by your own heart and not
other considerations is, thus, not an easy thing to do. First, you have to quiet the outer
and inner noise to be able to detect the pulse and rhythm of your own heart. And,
secondly, you have to have the courage, discipline, savvy, and resistance to greed to find
and maintain your way in the world.
Perhaps this is the narrow way of which Jesus speaks in the Gospels – not a path that
separates us from others in pride, but rather a humble path that each of us as individuals
is called to traverse, the narrow path of discernment and judgment whereby we find a
way in and through the world and within our society, but all the time listening to an inner
voice and obeying an interior call.
Says the Katha Upanishad: “A sharpened edge of a razor, hard to traverse,/A difficult
path is this – poets declare!”
In other words, following the bliss path is a journey to be undertaken as carefully and as
delicately as walking a razor’s edge. Or, in another analogy Campbell uses, it’s like
crossing a sword-bridge. In both cases, the blades are understood to be upright, not flat.
That’s how carefully and delicately this path is to be taken.
And it’s so easy to lose your balance … because if, on the one hand, you just follow the
energy or rapture of your soul, paying no attention to the structures and conventions of
society or the necessities of putting a life together, then you are blown off the left side of
that sword-bridge, destroying your body, neglecting your human dimension.
If, on the other hand, you only follow the conventions and expectations of society and the
practicalities of putting a life together, then you will tilt to the right and fall off the bridge
to that side, having lost your very soul, having disconnected from your interior, divine
source of energy.
So when you make this journey of the heart you need to know – and you will soon
enough discover – that you don’t have to deviate very far from the conventions of your
social group to run yourself into real trouble. It doesn’t take much to find yourself on the
outside looking in.

Nevertheless, society ought not to be thought of as the ultimate enemy of the individual,
for society, which is the composite of all of us together, is not something apart from us;
rather, it’s the field in which the energy of the individual is brought into play.
Society provides and fashions different roles for us to play and different masks for us to
wear – I’ll speak more about this next week on “Halloween Sunday” – roles and masks
that receive our energy and, which hopefully, we can make our own.
There is no individual without the group. And, thus, the individual has an obligation to
support the group, the community. And, for Campbell, the way that he recommends for
supporting your society – which has now become a “planetary society” – is,
paradoxically, by following your individual bliss.
Find and follow the thing that you love, and then try to find a way to bring that love to
your community. Thus, he says, “The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” That’s what
brings life to the world.
A final theme
One final idea relating to this theme of following your bliss, a little “superstition” that
Campbell said he developed over the years, was the idea that if you follow your bliss, if
you heed the rapture of your soul, then doors will open for you, paths will present
themselves to you in the dark forest of a life. These are doors and paths where there
didn’t appear to be any before. And they are doors and paths that open just for you and
for no one else. They are your doors; they belong to you and not to others. When such a
door opens for you go through it. Don’t hesitate and don’t apologize but make the most
of it, both for yourself and for others.
Campbell believed that if you were on your path and made the effort to stick to that path,
then you would find surprising supports for your journey. Mythologically speaking, little
elves, gnomes, and fairy godmothers would accompany you. This idea was a personal
conviction that grew for Campbell with the passing years and was based on the
experience of the way that he tried to live his own life.
Even from early life Campbell refused to get pulled off his track, which was the study
and enjoyment of mythology. Fortunately, his parents supported and encouraged him in
this, providing him with the kind of literature he needed when he took an early interest in
Native American stories and myths. Nor did his father protest when his son did not
follow him into the family business, though Campbell tried that route for a brief time.
But Campbell showed tremendous resolve in not being pulled off his track or distracted
from it. For example, he simply dumped his Ph. D program at Columbia when it proved
too confining, going off instead to read for five years in the woods in upstate New York
at Woodstock – this was during the Great Depression – renting, with money he had saved
playing saxophone in a band, a little chicken-coop-like cabin for $20 a year – no running

water, just a well and a pump. (The owner wouldn’t install running water, he said,
because he didn’t like the class of people it attracted.) (The Power of Myth, p. 120)
Some years later Campbell was offered a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College, at that
time an all women’s college located in Bronxville, a small town about twenty miles north
of New York City. There he met and later married a woman who shared his artistic
interests, Jean Erdman, destined to become a well-known dancer with the Martha Graham
Dance Company. Together they lived for forty some years in a modest apartment in New
York City, each working in their individual fields and collaborating as well. The
bedroom of their apartment served as Campbell’s study; their living room couch folded
out into their bed.
And following the impulse of his interest and energy, the path opened and opened and
opened before him. When I met him in his late 70’s he was still following the trail of his
interest and loved nothing more than to share that interest. He was about as engaging a
person as you would ever wish to meet, a combination of both courtesy and
combativeness.
At one point in those marvelous Moyers’ interviews, Bill Moyers asked him, “Do you
ever have this sense when you are following your bliss … of being helped by hidden
hands?” Campbell replied:
Benediction
All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me
as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do 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.
When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss,
and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and
doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
(The Power of Myth, p. 120)
Now may peace be in our hearts,
and understanding in our minds,
may courage steel our wills,
and the love of truth forever guide us. Amen.
Extinguishing of Chalice
We extinguish this chalice
But not the light of truth,
The warmth of community,
Or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts
Until we are together again.

(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A.
Bode on October 23, 2005. This sermon is the third in what is planned as a four-part
series. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette at the Fellowship, may differ
somewhat in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)