In his book, Paths to Bliss, Joseph Campbell writes:
“I recently became acquainted with the work of a great German psychiatrist named Carlfried Graf Durkheim (not to be confused with the French sociologist Emile Durkheim). This psychiatrist has summarized the whole problem of health – psychological and physical – in view of the myth, continuing the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Erich Neumann.
According to Durkheim, a life-giving wisdom lives in us. We are all manifestations of a mystical power : the power of life that has shaped all living things, that has shaped us all in the mother’s womb. And the wisdom that lives in us is the influence of this force, this energy that flows into the field of time and space. However, it is a transcendent energy; energy that comes from an area inaccessible to the forces of our knowledge.
And the same energy in each of us – in this body – takes on a commitment. But the mind that thinks, and the eyes that look, are sometimes so entangled in concepts and local, temporal tasks that we stiffen and do not let it flow freely through us . And then we get sick. Energy is blocked and we are thrown out of the center – an idea very similar to the principles of traditional Chinese and Indian medicine. Therefore, the psychological problem, the way to protect yourself from blockage, is to become – here is your phrase – transparent to the transcendent. That is all. ..
The benefit of myth is that it points beyond the field of phenomena to the transcendent. The mythical figure is like the compass with which you drew circles and arcs at school – one foot is in the field of time, and the other has stepped into eternity. A god may have a human or animal form, but his essence refers to something beyond that form.
The mythical figure has stepped with one foot into the transcendent. And one of the problems with the popularization of religious ideas is that the deity becomes a final fact and is no longer transparent to the transcendent. This is exactly what Lao Tzu has in mind with his first aphorism from the Daoduzin: “The path indicated by guidance is not the eternal Path. A name called by a name is not a name of the eternal. ”
Make your god transparent to the transcendent; then it will not matter what name it is called.
When a deity serves as a model for you, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent as long as you realize the inspiring power of that deity. This means living not in the name of worldly success and achievement, but rather in the name of the transcendent, letting the energy manifest through you .
Of course, to reach the transpersonal, you must first go through the personal; you have to have both qualities . ”
Joseph Campbell, Paths to Bliss, pp. 15-17
So, this is a recipe for unlocking our life energy, which consists of two parts.
One part is to become transparent – to free your mind from all notions of how things should look and when they should happen. It is an infinitely receptive mind, free from preconceived notions and ideas, from petty thoughts and topical anxieties. The second is to direct this quality of receptivity to the transcendent – the thing that is beyond this world. And then the miracle happens. We ourselves become the Pergel – one part of us permanently settles in the Center of the Infinite and Eternal, and the other creates on Earth.
