Find Your Bliss and Let the Light in
Living the Mythic way
The moment you are born, you are thrown into a labyrinth. The labyrinth of life. You stumble around in the darkness. Trying to know what all of these means. You long for something you cannot describe even to yourself. Something that your soul cries for in desperation. And you remain lost. Lost to the overwhelming emptiness that surrounds you.
As time flies, slowly you try to cope with this horror show. You completely ignore the cries of your soul and start to take great pleasure in the temporal things. The things you build around so as to gag your soul. And life goes on.
But then one day, you encounter something. Something that felt right. Something that cracked the wall you’ve built around you and it spoke directly to your soul. Something that gave you a sense of overwhelming joy for life itself. Something that reminded you of your mother. Not the mother you knew since you were a child but beyond her. Something cosmical.
That something is your bliss.
Bliss is that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself.
~Joseph Campbell
The Sheath of Bliss
In the Vedantic tradition of India, the Taittiriya Upanisad speaks of five sheaths:
- The first sheath is called annamaya-kośa, the food sheath. That is your body, which is made out of food and which will become food when you die.
- The second sheath is called the sheath of breath, prānamaya-kośa. The breath of life.
- The next sheath is called the mental sheath, manomaya-kośa. This is the consciousness of the body, and it is primarily handled by the ego. It is the you that thinks it is you.
- And the next sheath is called the wisdom sheath, vijñānamaya-kośa. This is the sheath of the wisdom of the transcendent pouring in. This is the wisdom that brought you to form in the mother womb, that digests your dinners, that knows how to do it.
- And the sheath inward of the wisdom sheath is the sheath of bliss, ānandamaya-kośa, which is a kernel of that transcendence in and of itself. Life is a manifestation of this bliss.
But manomaya-kośa, the mental sheath, is attached to the sufferings and pleasures of the food sheath. And so it thinks, Is life worth living? All this suffering and pain, for what? There must be something, right? And so the mind goes asking for meanings; It says: “All these suffering and pain must have some end goal, some meaning to this dreadful existence. It must have. Or else, it was better to have never been born”.
Now, let us turn to our ancestors. Let us listen to their stories and maybe we might find a few answers to the questions we didn’t know existed. Let us turn to mythology.
Mythology is Not History
Myth is not the same as history; myths are not inspiring stories of people who lived notable lives. No, myth is the transcendent in relationship to the present.
~ Joseph Campbell
What myth does is it provides a field in which you can locate yourself. It points beyond itself, towards something indescribable, towards the transcendent. Mythology unites two worlds, the temporal and the transcendent, and the mythic figure stands upon both worlds.
Lord Shiva dwells both in the Himalayas and in heaven.
Mythology loses its meaning when we transform it into history. We start giving more emphasis to the temporal facts and disqualifying the transcendent. We try to define the indescribable. This is what Lao-tzu means when he says: “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.”
Four Functions of Mythology
According to Joseph Campbell, mythology guides us in 4 different ways:
The Mystical Function
This function is all about experiencing the awe of the universe. It’s about the stories that touch our soul and give us a sense of what it means to be a finite being in this infinite vacuum. It is to give some universal meaning to our meaningless existence. It is to make sense and reconcile our mortality with gratitude, love, and grace.
The Cosmological Function
The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. It is to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with the universe around you. It gives us a sense of order to this infinite chaos.
The Sociological Function
The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared value on which your particular social unit depends for its existence. The social orders of a traditional, myth-based society are as authentic and as far beyond criticism as the laws of the universe itself.
In the biblical tradition, God created the universe; and the same God announced the social laws to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments, and so forth.
These stories are the thread that binds people to a certain tribe or social group.
The Pedagogical/psychological Function
The pedagogical order is to bring a child to maturity and then to help the aged embrace death. The myth must carry the individual through the stages of his life, from birth through maturity through senility to death.
These myths touch upon the eternal human themes: love, hate, passion, lust, greed, joy, etc.
Pedagogical myths help to shape individuals to the aims and ideals of a particular social group or tribe, guiding them from birth to death through the course of human life. These myths show us a proper way to live as a human.
Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey is a perfect example of the pedagogical function.
Letting the Light in
To be honest, I don’t think there is any external meaning to life. The cosmos haven’t planned any grand scheme for you. Or maybe it has. Either way, we never know. Maybe the gods have abandoned us, or maybe they were never there to begin with. We will never know. But all I know is that the only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. To stare at the face of the evil we truly are. And once we are past this bitterness, pain, and horror; the primary experience at the core of life is a sweet, wonderful thing.
Mythology gives us the pathway to reach our own unconscious. And in the depths of our unconscious, we see who we truly are. We meet the purity and the evil dwelling inside us. And our ultimate task is to unite them both. And only then do we become whole. We become what we were always meant to be. We become transparent to the transcendent. We become blissful. And this is how the light gets in.
There lives in us a life wisdom. We are all manifestations of a mystic power: the power of life, which has shaped all life, and which has shaped us all in our mother’s womb. And this kind of wisdom lives in us, and it represents the force of this power, this energy, pouring into the field of time and space. But it’s a transcendent energy. It’s an energy that comes from a realm beyond our powers of knowledge. And that energy becomes bound in each of us — in this body — to a certain commitment.
Now, the mind that thinks, the eyes that see, they can become so involved in concepts and local, temporal tasks that we become bound up and don’t let this energy flow through. And then we become sick. The energy is blocked, and we are thrown off center. The only way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself transparent to the transcendent. It’s as easy as that.- Pathways to bliss, Joseph Campbell
