Wherever you are --if you are following your
bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
--Joseph Campbell
How to Find Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell on What It Takes to Have a Fulfilling Life
--by Maria
Popova, syndicated from brainpickings.org,
Jun 05, 2015
“You have to learn to recognize your own
depth.”
In
1985, mythologist and writer Joseph
John Campbell (March 26,
1904–October 30, 1987) sat down with legendary interviewer and idea-monger Bill
Moyers for a lengthy conversation at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in
California, which continued the following year at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York. The resulting 24 hours of raw footage were edited down to
six one-hour episodes and broadcast on PBS in 1988, shortly after Campbell’s
death, in what became one of the most popular series in the history of public television.
But
Moyers and the team at PBS felt that the unedited conversation, three quarters
of which didn’t make it into the television production, was so rich in substance
that it merited preservation and public attention. Shortly after the broadcast,
the full transcript was published as The
Power of Myth (public
library) — a dimensional discussion of Campbell’s views on
spirituality, psychological archetypes, cultural myths, and the mythology of
self. The book is nothing short of secular scripture — a trove of wisdom on the
human experience in the canon of such rare masterworks as Thoreau’s journals,
Simone Weil’s notebooks,
Rilke’s Letters
to a Young Poet, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek.
As
Moyers notes in the introduction, Campbell saw as the greatest human
transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.”
This, perhaps, is why the most rewarding part of the conversation deals with the
dictum that has come to encapsulate Campbell’s philosophy on life: “Follow your
bliss.” Decades before the
screaming tyranny of work/life balance reached its modern crescendo, Campbell put a
sympathetic ear to the soul’s cry and identified with enormous elegance and
precision the root of our existential dissatisfaction. He tells
Moyers:
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.
Discerning
one’s bliss, Campbell argues, requires what he calls “sacred space” — a space
for uninterrupted reflection and unrushed creative work. Far from a mystical
idea, this is something that many artists and writers have put into practice by
way of their peculiar
workspace rituals,
as well as something cognitive science has illuminated in exploring the
psychology of the perfect daily routine.
But Campbell sees past the practical rituals of creativity and into the deeper
psychic and spiritual drivers — that profound need for a “bliss station” into
which to root ourselves:
[Sacred
space] is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a
certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that
morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe
anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can
simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is
the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens
there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will
happen.
Our
life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get
older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the
hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is
required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find
it.
Two
centuries after Kierkegaard admonished against the
cowardice of the crowd,
Campbell argues that we often lose our way on the path to our bliss station as
society’s limiting notions of success peer-pressure us into unimaginative, fail-safe pursuits:
It’s
characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective
not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority
is always wrong.
The
majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up
to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and
wealth.
Opening
up to those more meaningful dimensions of bliss, Campbell insists, is simply a
matter of letting
your life speak:
We
are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of
this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you
what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own
depth.
In
a sentiment that calls to mind Mark Strand’s beautiful meditation on the
poet’s task of bearing witness to the universe,
Campbell points to poets as the most attentive of listeners to the language of
bliss:
Poets
are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch
with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get
themselves involved in economic and political activities, or get drafted into a
war that isn’t the one they’re interested in, and it may be difficult to hold to
this umbilical under those circumstances. That is a technique each one has to
work out for himself somehow.
But
most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns
have the capacity that is waiting to be awakened to move to this other field. I
know it, I have seen it happen in students.
Looking
back on how he arrived at this notion of finding one’s bliss, Campbell touches
on the crucial difference between religious faith and secular
spirituality:
I
came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual
language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the
jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word
“Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture.
I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or
not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but
I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring
me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked.
The
religious people tell us we really won’t experience bliss until we die and go to
heaven. But I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you
are still alive.
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
the field of your bliss, and they open the 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
most uncomfortable but essential part of finding your bliss, Campbell argues, is
the element of uncertainty — the willingness to, in the timeless words
of Rilke, “live the
questions” rather than reaching for the ready-made
answers:
The
adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both
negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are
following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way… Life can dry up
because you’re not off on your own adventure.
There’s
something inside you 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 to earn money,
you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money,
you still have your bliss.
This
article originally appeared in Brain Pickings and is republished with permission. The
author, Maria Popova, is a
cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The
Atlantic and Design Observer, and is the founder and editor in chief of Brain
Pickings.
Be The Change: Do something
in the spirit of following your bliss today.
