Philosopher's Notes The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

About the Book

Brian's take

Campbell is one of my heroes. A portrait of him passionately teaching hangs on my wall and inspires me daily as I strive to integrate ancient wisdom, modern science, and practical tools to help YOU live Heroically in the modern world. This is the fifth Note I’ve created on one of his books, and if you want to know why I love this man and his wisdom as much as I do, check out my other Notes on his work. As per the subtitle, The Hero’s Journey is “Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work,” and it’s essentially a powerful (auto)biographical tour through the life of the mythologist who mapped the universal adventure of the soul. Campbell dedicated himself to bridging East and West, science and religion, mind and body, and showing us that the Hero’s Journey is not just a story structure, it’s a call to become who we are capable of being. If you’re ready to answer your own call to adventure and live with more courage, love, and purpose, I highly recommend this book. Big Ideas we explore include The Call to Adventure, Campbell’s Path to Mastery, Relationships, Your Ego, and The Goats & The Tiger.

“A ritual is an action that puts the individual not only in touch with, but in the place of, being the agent of a power that is not of his intention at all.”

He has to submit to a power that’s greater than his own individual life-form.

Joseph campbell

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Joseph campbell

“I remember Alan Watts asked me one day, ‘Joe, what kind of meditation do you do?’ I said, ‘I underline sentences.”

Joseph campbell

“You can’t teach Buddhism.”

You can’t teach illumination. You can give different clues to how to get it. But if a person isn’t willing to paddle his own canoe he’s not going to get across the river.

Joseph campbell

“You can get a lot of work done if you just stay with it and are excited and it’s play instead of work.”

I’m rather pleased with [what I achieved], actually.

Joseph campbell

“I got this from the Sanskrit idea, that transcendence is transcendent.”

Now there are three words that come close to it: sat-cit-ānanda, that is: sat is being, cit is consciousness, ānanda is bliss. So ānanda is the only thing you can be aware of. Follow it and it’ll be alright. The probability is that when you follow it everything will work out, even if you think it won’t.

Joseph campbell

“Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.”

Joseph campbell

“I think you can say about some authors that their work is more important than them.”

But with Joe, as great as his works are, there is no doubt in my mind that the body of his work is not as great as the man. He is a really wonderful man and he has become my Yoda.

George Lucas

“As Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, the Japanese Zen master, once said, ‘This world—with all its faults, all its crime, all its horror, all its banality, all its stupidity—is the golden lotus world.”

But you have to learn to see it in that dimension.

Joseph campbell

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed, must not wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.”

And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silence of his personal despair.

Joseph campbell

The Call to Adventure

30:25

Introduction

From the book

“As a mythologist with a metaphysical slant on life, a doctor of things-beyond-appearances, he dedicated his life to mapping out the experience of plumbing those depths, which is the journey of the soul itself.

The cartography, as he drew it, was the geography of the inner or underworld, showing perilous territory to be traversed not by the faint, but by the stout of heart. If myths emerge, like dreams out of the psyche, he reasoned, they can also lead us back in. The way out is the way in. It is a movement beyond the known boundaries of faith and convention, the search for what matters, the path of destiny, the route of individuality, the road of original experience, a paradigm for the forging of consciousness itself: in short the hero’s journey: A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. This ‘monomyth’ lies at the heart of Joseph Campbell’s steadfast belief in one universal mythology. Like the legendary gryphon, the winged lion of the medieval bestiary, it was a composite, taking shape gradually, piece by piece, an innovative assemblage of key ideas from Campbell’s own masters: Joyce, Mann, Jung, Zimmer, Underhill, Coomaraswamy, and Ortega y Gasset, who wrote in an influential passage that the ‘will to be oneself is heroism.’”

Brian's Notes

That’s from the introduction by filmmaker Phil Cousineau, who dedicated a big chunk of his life to making sure the world knew who Joseph Campbell was.

As he says earlier in the intro: “‘Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names,’ Campbell often quoted the Vedas. To synthesize the constant truths of history became the burning point of his life; to bridge the abyss between science and religion, mind and body, East and West, with the timeless linkage of myths became his task of tasks.”

Campbell is one of my heroes.

A portrait of him passionately teaching hangs from my wall and inspires me daily as I, too, strive to integrate ancient wisdom, modern science, and practical tools to help YOU live Heroically in the modern world.

This is the fifth Note I’ve created on one of his books.

If you want to know why I love this man and his wisdom as much as I do (and how his work has so deeply impacted mine!), check out my Notes on The Hero with a Thousand Faces, A Joseph Campbell Companion, Pathways to Bliss, and The Power of Myth.

Also, as you know if you’ve been following along for a while, I am in a documentary featuring Joseph Campbell and the modern hero’s journey. It’s called Finding Joe. I’m in it alongside Deepak Chopra, Sir Ken Robinson, Laird Hamilton, Tony Hawk, Robin Sharma, Rashida Jones and a bunch of other inspiring human beings.

Watch the trailer here. And watch the full movie free here. (Note: I’m very proud of the fact that the director of the film, Pat Solomon, was inspired to create that documentary after reading my Notes on Campbell!)

As per the sub-title, the book is about “Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work.” It’s basically a (auto)biography of Campbell and the Heroic life *he* lived as he integrated the wisdom of East and West and inspired generations to live Heroically. I highly recommend it. Get it.

As you’d expect, it’s packed with Big Ideas. As always, I’m excited to share five of my favorites, so let’s jump straight in!

BIG IDEA

The Call to Adventure

From the book

“The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.

This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delights.”

Brian's Notes

The book is organized by various facets of the Hero’s Journey: The Call to Adventure, The Road of Trials, The Vision Quest, The Meeting with the Goddess, The Boon, The Magic Flight, The Return Threshold, and The Master of Two Worlds.

That passage is from chapter: “The Call to Adventure.”

It’s an excerpt from Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. He published that book in 1949—when he was 45 years old. That book has become THE Bible for creative artists ever since. George Lucas was a student of Campbell and based Star Wars on his Hero’s Journey.

Note: Campbell lived from 1904 to 1987. He and another one of my heroes, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), were working on their separate pieces of the human puzzle at roughly the same time.

Now… Here’s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING (!) you need to know. Well, actually there at last a couple “most important” things you need to know.

First, YOU (yes, YOU!) are the Hero we’ve been waiting for. I mean that literally. Why we are ALL inspired by the Heroic acts we see—whether that’s in the movies or in the sports arenas or in everyday life—is because those demonstrations of Heroic excellence remind us of what WE are capable of and who WE are capable of being. Period.

I repeat: YOU are the Hero we’ve been waiting for.

That’s the first most important thing you need to know. The second most important thing you need to know is this. NOTHING happens (and by nothing I mean nothing good happens!) until YOU, the Hero of the story, ANSWER THE CALL to be your best self.

There’s the “big” call to adventure you might be feeling right now. Perhaps it’s to start a business, or start a relationship, or get in better shape, or conquer a health crisis or any number of other “Heroic” challenges.

Then there are the little “micro” calls to adventure we’re all getting all day, every day.

You gotta know that EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT of EVERY. SINGLE. DAY you are being called to an adventure to be your best self—to close the gap between who you’re capable of being and who you’re actually being. Moment to moment to moment. All day. Every day. Especially TODAY.

You know what happens when you REFUSE that big call and those micro calls? Well… That’s when regret, anxiety, disillusionment and, if you do it long enough, anxiety, hopelessness, and depression come in.

Let’s take a moment RIGHT NOW to slow down. Take a deep breath. Relax your body. Assume the physical posture of you at your best. For me, that’s always with my chest up, my chin down as I strive to sit or stand with dignity.

Shake out any tension that might be present. Slow down your breathing. Breathe in through your nose. Nice and low and slow. Exhale slightly longer than your inhale. Smile. Now focus your attention on living with more wisdom, discipline, love and courage.

Ask yourself: What call to adventure am I receiving in my life right now?

Pro tip: ANSWER THAT CALL.

P.S. In Finding Joe, I tell the story about the importance of answering the call. I reference Campbell’s wisdom I share in our Notes on A Joseph Campbell Companion: “To refuse the call means stagnation. What you don’t experience positively you will experience negatively.”

BIG IDEA

Your Heroic Path to Mastery

From the book

“I think the most important period of my scholarship and study followed my return from Europe.

I came back to the United States about two weekends before the Wall Street Crash. And there wasn’t a job in the world. I went back up to Columbia to go on with my work on the Ph.D. and told them, ‘This whole thing opened out.’ ‘Oh, no,’ they said. ‘You don’t follow that. You stay where you were before you went to Europe.’ Well, I just said, ‘To hell with it.’ My father had lost all his money but I had saved some as a student. I used to play in a jazz band and so I piled up money during a few years. And on that, you might say, I just retired to the woods. I went up to Woodstock and just read, and read, and read, and read, for five years. No job, no money. I learned then that you don’t need money to live if you’re a young man who didn’t get himself involved sooner than he should have, before he had the ability to support what his involvement might be. So during the years of the Depression I had arranged a schedule for myself. When you don’t have a job or anyone to tell you what to do, you’ve got to fix one for yourself. I divided the day into four four-hour periods, of which I would be reading in three of the four-hour periods, and free one of them. By getting up at eight o’clock in the morning, by nine I could sit down to read. That meant I used the first hour to prepare my own breakfast and take care of the house and put things together in whatever shack I happened to be living in at the time. Then three hours of the first four-hour period went to reading. Then came an hour break for lunch and another three-hour unit. And then comes the optional next section. It should normally be three hours of reading and then an hour out for dinner and then three hours free and an hour getting to bed so I’m in bed by twelve…. I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight. You get a lot done in that time.”

Brian's Notes

Joseph Campbell shared that story when he was in his 80’s.

He knew EXACTLY what he did with his days 50 YEARS earlier. I find that INCREDIBLY inspiring.

It reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s wisdom from his GREAT book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

He tells us: “Indeed, it could be said that the most obvious achievement of these people is that they created their own lives. And how they achieved that is something worth knowing, because it can be applied to all our lives.”

It also reminds me of Robert Greene’s Mastery. If you haven’t read those Notes (and the book yet!) and you have ANY desire to become a master at whatever it is you do, I HIGHLY (!!!) recommend you check it out.

Greene tells us: “Let us state it in the following way: At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy. Your Life’s Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. You have a destiny to fulfill. The stronger you feel and maintain it—as a force, a voice, or in whatever form—the greater your chance for fulfilling this Life’s Task and achieving mastery.

What weakens this force, what makes you not feel it or even doubt its existence, is the degree to which you have succumbed to another force in life—social pressures to conform. This counter force can be very powerful. You want to fit into a group. Unconsciously, you might feel that what makes you different is embarrassing or painful…

At all costs you must avoid such a fate. The process of following your Life’s Task all the way to mastery can essentially begin at any point in life. The hidden force within you is always there and ready to be engaged.”

Finally, I’m reminded of Abraham Maslow. As I mentioned, he and Campbell grew up and created in nearly the same era. Unfortunately, we lost Maslow 25 years too soon but they BOTH had an INSANE commitment to making their mark on the world.

And, they were both grad school dropouts. Campbell dropped out of his Ph.D. program while Maslow dropped out of BOTH law school AND med school. (Another reason I love them both—although I only dropped out of law school.:)

Here’s another fun fact you might not have known: Campbell was both a jazz musician AND an elite athlete as a young man. He was one of the fastest sprinters in the country and nearly made the Olympic team in the early 1920’s.

Oh. One more Note I want to mention for those of you seeking greatness in your chosen craft: The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope.

He echoes Campbell, Csikszentmihalyi, and Greene’s wisdom when he tells us: “Frost’s genius—like Thoreau’s, like Goodall’s, like Whitman’s—was at least in part his willingness to create the right conditions for his dharma to issue forth. His dharma required a farm—and so he bought one. His dharma required him to give up teaching—and so he relinquished it. His dharma required a period of intense work in England—and so he went.

Like Frost’s our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.”

Spotlight on YOU. What Heroic quest are you being call to?

Have you created the conditions to fulfill your potential?

P.S. Personally, after dropping out of law school at 23, I spent a couple years reading before starting my first business. After selling that when I was 26 years old, I had enough to take a few years off. I spent that time reading, reading, and reading.

I traveled a bit—studying Socrates in Athens, Jesus in Jerusalem, Aurelius near the Danube of Hungary, and Rumi in Turkey. Then I needed to make some money again. I built and sold my second business when I felt the call to adventure again. This time I moved to Bali for a year and created the first 100 Notes.

Now, I’m answering the call AGAIN. This time, I’m finishing my canon of 1,000 Notes (this is) as I strive to activate our Heroic movement by inspiring 1 million Heroes to answer their call to adventure. My 12-hour-work-day protocol? ~10 hours Philosopher, 2 hours CEO. Let’s go! All of which, to state the obvious, requires me to PRACTICE MY PHILOSOPHY and strive to live my own, unique Hero’s journey so I can serve YOU, my all-time favorite Hero.

P.P.S. Campbell is known for his adage “Follow your bliss.” Later in his life, he joked that he wished people also knew just how important it is to “Follow your blisters.”

In other words, as he modeled in his own life: You’ve gotta work FEROCIOUSLY hard if you want a shot at living Heroically.

BIG IDEA

The Ultimate Heroic Quest (Relationships!)

From the book

“The other possibility is that you see a man who marries and expects a wife.

Well, we have the archetype of what a wife is. And it’s a very helpful archetype. Both lines can develop, but it’s in relationship to the man’s career, principally, and the woman’s with the children. But when you have two careers in the house and the individual developments are on two not always parallel courses, there’s a lot of love required; I mean real pedagogical participation to help the other person to develop as a human being and still hang on to the relationship. The thing that holds them together is making the relationship the top thing. It’s through the relationship that the development of each is taking place. And when you make a sacrifice, you are sacrificing to the other person; you are sacrificing to the relationship. That relationship involves the progression of your own life. When people think of marriage as a continuous long love affair, then they are bound for trouble. Because it isn’t. It is in a proper sense an ordeal. [Laughter.] And the ordeal is that of individual development. And, if there isn’t individual development taking place, well, what’s the good of it?”

Brian's Notes

That’s from a chapter called “Meeting the Goddess.”

First, let’s be REALLY clear about something… If you want to go on THE most Heroic adventure of your life then… GET MARRIED. (Then have kids.:)

I’m reminded of a few things. First, Leo Buscaglia. I went on a first date with Alexandra nearly 20 years ago in part because we’d both read his book Love: What Life Is All About. And, I can ASSURE you that we are still together after all the ordeals (!) we’ve been through because of wisdom from that book.

Especially this wisdom: “One does not fall ‘in’ or ‘out’ of love. One grows in love.”

Wisdom from Jordan Peterson’s great book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life also comes to mind. This is one of my ALL-TIME favorite passages on relationships: “Do you really want to keep asking yourself for the rest of your life—because you would always have the option to leave—if you made the right choice? In all likelihood, you did not. There are seven billion people in the world. At least a hundred million (let us say) might have been good partners for you. You certainly did not have time to try them out, and the probability that you found the theoretically optimal person approaches zero. But you do not find so much as make, and if you do not know that you are in real trouble. Furthermore, if you have an escape route, there will not be enough heat generated in the chamber you find yourself jointly trapped in to catalyze the change necessary in both of you—the maturation, the development of wisdom—because maturation and the development of wisdom require a certain amount of suffering, and suffering is escapable as long as there is an out.”

As I share in my Notes on that passage, the main takeaway is: QUIT GIVING YOURSELF AN ESCAPE HATCH. I used to have a little toe out the door of my relationship with Alexandra. Closing that door 100% and allow the pressure to make us better changed my life.

He adds: “Why would you possibly assume that something as complex as maintaining a marriage could be managed without commitment, practice, and effort?”

Finally, I think of the old school Stoic philosopher, Musonius Rufus. (Fun historical fact: Rufus taught Epictetus who taught the guys who taught Aurelius.)

Here’s some incredibly powerful relationship advice from Musonius Rufus: Lectures and Sayings: “In marriage, there must be, above all, companionship and care of husband and wife for each other, both in sickness and in health and on every occasion. Each party entering into a marriage desires this, after all, just as they desire children. When this mutual care is complete and those who live together provide it to each other completely, each competes to surpass the other in giving such care. Such a marriage is admirable and deserves emulation; such a partnership is beautiful.”

How awesome is that?! Let’s outcompete our partner in just how loving we can be… TODAY.

P.S. Alexandra and I created a Love 101 class together nearly a decade ago. You can watch it and check out my favorite Notes on relationships part of our Love Quest. And.. Check out Alexandra’s Rock Your Goddess Life program!

BIG IDEA

What to Do With Your Ego

From the book

“ AUDIENCE QUESTION: If the journey of the hero is the search for the self, then what is the ego and what is the self?

And what is the relationship between the two? CAMPBELL: The ego is you as you think of yourself. You in relationship to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you’ve never thought of. And you’re stuck with your past when you’re stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you’ve found out about yourself, well, that has already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities…. The problem is not to eliminate the ego, it’s to turn ego, and the judgment system of the moment into the servant of the self, not the dictator, but the vehicle for it to realize itself. It’s a very nice balance, a very delicate one. And an awful lot of so-called ‘spiritual people’ are very much against the ego and they turn themselves into— Well, one of the problems with being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, ‘Be careful in casting out your devils lest you cast out the best thing that’s in you.’ So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There’s no bone there, there’s no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service is the trick.”

Brian's Notes

We don’t have space to talk about all the ways “so-called spiritual people” mishandle their egos but let’s just say I ABSOLUTELY (!) love that.

Check out my Notes on Pathways to Bliss and Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward for more on the subject!

I also want to encourage you to check out my Notes (coming soon) on Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now: The Science of Intentional Transformation.

Campbell once said that, if you ever find an author who GRABS you, you should read EVERYTHING they’ve ever written. I first did that with Dan Millman, and Paulo Coelho, Wayne Dyer, and Steve Chandler. More recently I’ve done it with Abraham Maslow, Steven Pressfield, and Eknath Easwaran. MOST recently, I did that with Ben Hardy. He’s my new favorite thinker/teacher. Check out our Notes on The Science of Scaling and a ton more coming soon.

BIG IDEA

The Goats and the Tiger

From the book

“There’s a moral here, of course.

It is that we’re all really tigers living here as goats. The function of sociology and most of our religious education is to teach us to be goats. But the function of the proper interpretation of mythological symbols and meditation discipline is to introduce you to your tiger face. Then comes the problem. You’ve found your tiger face but you’re still living here with these goats. How are you going to do that? What you will have learned is through all the forms of the world, the one radiance of eternity shows itself. You can regard the appearance of the miracle of life in all these forms. But don’t let them know you’re a tiger! When al-Hallaj or Jesus let the orthodox community know that they were tigers, they were crucified. And so the Sufis learned the lesson at that time with the death of al-Hallaj, around A.D. 900. And it is: You wear the outer garment of the law; you behave like everyone else. And you wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Now that’s the great secret of life. So with that I commit you all to be tigers in the world. But don’t let anybody know it!”

Brian's Notes

Those are the final words of the book.

The story that precedes that passage features a classic tale about an orphaned tiger being raised by goats. Our little tiger learns to eat grass and bleat and run away from tigers. Then, one day, a tiger grabs him and shows him his true identity then teaches him how to ROAR.

You can watch a version of the story in Finding Joe and I share another version in my Notes on Yogananda’s great little book, Living Fearlessly.

For now… My dear fellow tiger, let’s take another deep breath. Commit to living our Hero’s journey as we let out a silent little ROAR!

It’s Day 1. We’re ALL IN. Let’s go!