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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
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List Price: $20.00
Our Price: $13.60
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Manufacturer: New World Library
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 201.3019
EAN: 9781577314714
ISBN: 1577314719
Label: New World Library
Manufacturer: New World Library
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2004-10-26
Publisher: New World Library
Studio: New World Library
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Editorial Reviews:
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Joseph Campbell is one of this century's great disseminators of the psychological wisdom of mythology. One of the basic functions of myth, he contends, is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a travel guide to reach fulfillment — a map to discover "bliss." In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell once again draws on his masterful gift of storytelling to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and transformation. Looking at the more personal, psychological side of myth, he begins to dwell on life's more important questions — those that are often submerged beneath the frantic activity of our daily life. With characteristic wit and insight, he draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the Hero's Journey, revealing the way myth helps identify one's heroic path.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: useful but not his best
Comment: This is a strange book. For one thing it's really a series of lectures, but for some reason the cover and jacket don't say so. You have to read the notes at the end to find out why the presentation rambles so.
Secondly, the title and subtitle are misleading. The reader has to get through four lectures--two on the history and purpose of myth and two on Jungian psychology: that's half the book--to get to the discussion on personal transformation. The lectures might be useful to beginners, but I bought this book because I lead classes and workshops on finding one's personal myth (not one's archetype: there's a difference), and all this was was old hat to me.
Although Campbell was a man of his time, as all men are, his biases really show in this book. His grating stereotyping of "the Orient" as authoritarian and so forth recalls Edward Said's penetrating criticism of Western fantasies of Orientalism: Orient as mysterious, backward, and despotic. Campbell's comments about women's psychology are especially culturebound, as when he says women tend not to follow the call of the Hero because of the "natural" and "inevitable" call to duties like childbirth. This sounds less like mythological inquiry than like Republicanism's ongoing obsession with dynasty and reproduction. Maureen Murdock has answered this in part by writing her book The Heroine's Journey.
Here and there, though, we see the Campbell most of us admire. "I think one of the great calamities of contemporary life is that the religions that we have inherited have insisted on the concrete historicity of their symbols" (p. 88). He also remarks that although he admires Abraham Maslow (I do not: I've read his journals), his list of survival values--security, prestige, self-development--"are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn't live for." What does such a person live for? "A calling, a dedication," what seizes us, what drives us beyond mere considerations of comfort or biology or "the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for."
He also gives a number of important suggestions for finding one's personal myth; we are finding, however, that the myth is often a good deal more specific than previously thought. Campbell mentions Jung's quest to understand his myth but does not mention Faust. In Freud's case it was the story of Oedipus, even down to following his daughter Anna out of Vienna just as the old king followed Antigone out of Thebes. On the web is a piece I wrote about Steinbeck living the story of Lancelot. What we do with these stories, how we learn them, deepen them and elaborate them: that is the fascinating part, built on the foundation left by Jung and Campbell.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Follow your bliss!
Comment: I thoroughfully enjoyed this book. It changed my view on reality. And it made me appreciate myths and scriptures for what they truly are: bridges between our mundane lives and the Transcendent. They are not to be taken factually, but they have the power to structure and inspire our personality and our society at large.
This book also contains an interesting introduction to Jung's work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great intro to Campbell
Comment: If you are looking for something more in depth than the Moyers interviews and something less intimidating than Campbell's more academic works- this is a great one to read.
This is a collection of lectures which cover most of Campbell's fascinating work in comparative religion, but in a way that is accessible and entertaining. The editing is fantastic, so it reads very natural and you'll find some of the most complex ideas are clear and easy to understand. Highly recommended for anyone new to the idea of religion as myth.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Even more enlightening than The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Comment: I am grateful for having read this fantastic piece of work that brings together mythology and personal transformation in such a profound and articulate manner. I could notice how it strikes multiple harmonics in my mind as I read on, very much along the lines of Jung's view on the unconscious.
Pathways to Bliss provides both a framework and an inspirational context for anyone interested in the Self as Hero. As such, I have utilized it as a prime reference for my forthcoming work in designing board games and processes that would be useful for furthering the usefulness of the Hero's Journey archetypical metaphor as a tool for personal and group learning, growth, and advancement.
Perhaps it is best to bring forth this excerpt from the book: "There's nothing you can do more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth." (Last paragraph, page 108). In this book, Campbell offers a rich ground for constructing that personal myth, one that would enhance the wisdom, love and inner beauty of a person's Self to mythical proportions!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Mythology Self-Help Book!
Comment: Everyone with the slightest familiarity with Joseph Campbell, of course, knows the famous catch-phrase: "Follow Your Bliss". And everyone pretty much knows what it means, as well: Figure out whatever your passion is, and responsibly and diligently move forward, and pursue it... for the rest of your life... above and beyond anything else.
Sounds like words of wisdom from a worthy and knowledgable teacher.... but how exactly does one go about following their bliss?
That's what this book aims to answer.
Joseph Campbell, of course, died in 1987, yet this book didn't appear on store shelves until 2004. That's because it has been assembled posthumously by the Joseph Campbell Foundation from many of Campbell's unpublished notes/lectures/interviews/drafts/etc... Their aim is to bring the great mythologist's unfinished works into a form suitable for public consumption. With that as their aim, the Foundation had the inspired idea to organize a whole book around the premise: How To Follow Your Bliss.
So, it's the usual brand of Campbell's 'Mythology as Psychological Resource', albeit this time around in the guise of a sort of 'mythological self-help book'. A satisfying one nonetheless.
As ever, Campbell's basic premise is that the grand purpose of mythology is to ground an individual in relation to an order of being that is larger than himself. Through metaphor and through ritual, an individual is brought into accord with:
1. The great mystery
2. The physical world
3. The societal order
4. The appropriate stage in one's own development as an individual
(These you may recognize as Campbell's four functions of myth.)
The book starts by laying out all four of these as the foundation for the overall theme, and then focuses on the fourth one, the 'personal development' function of myth, throughout the remainder of its pages. A typical scenario where the fourth function of myth may be considered is the following:
All is well, of course, when an infant lives in a dependency on its mother. It is not alright, however, when a thirty-year-old man depends on his mother for decision-making capabilities. Obviously, at some point between infancy and maturity must come the realization that the correct value is to become an autonomous being. Often these realizations that come at specific transition points in the lifecycle are challenging for a developing ego to embrace.
And myths are often stories that show us, through metaphor, that it is possible to negotiate these thresholds-- often they even point a way as to HOW these thresholds may best be negotiated. In a nutshell, what the great stories tell us is this: let the you that you are now DIE so that something new can be born in its place. Let your current incarnation go.
Following the development of the above ideas, the book continues on into the territory of Jung and the idea of one's personal myth. Each of us may become sensitive to one particular myth over another because it has something essential to tell us specifically about our own unique particular journey.
Finding one's own myth, and living it, in essence, is one's pathway to bliss. Campbell gives suggestions to his students (and to us readers) as to how to find, identify and live one's personal myth.
So, here you get the flavor of the book. If you like the ideas behind The Power of Myth and/or Hero With A Thousand Faces and find them to be a nourishing resource in your own life journey, here's a book that attempts to express and focus on those ideas in a way that makes them seem much more immediately relevant and applicable to one's own life journey.
So, if that's what you're into, you'll find it in this book. Because 'mythology as resource for one's psychological development' is what primarily compells me above all else when it comes to myth, I devoured this book and then cried like a little baby when I finished the last page because I was sad it was all over. Those who can't stomach Campbell should move along move along, because they'll find more of the same here as to what they're used to.
* As a bonus, for everyone out there who finds Campbell's ideas of the Hero's Journey to be somewhat not inclusive of women, this book tries to address that as well. The final chapter is a transcript of dialogues in which many of Campbell's students (male and female) challenge him to broaden the conception of the Hero's Journey to include women in a fuller way. It brings what many consider a sour omission from Campbell's writings to light and is definitely worth the read for anyone who follows that discussion closely.
- Phil Robinson
http://www.PhilRobinson.net
"Paint the walls of your cage with a dream."
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