n his book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, Joseph Campbell writes:
“I’ve lately gotten to know the work of a splendid psychiatrist in Germany named Karlfried Graf Dürckheim. This psychiatrist has summarized the whole problem of health – psychological and physical – with reference to myth, continuing the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Erich Neumann.
There lives in us, says Dürckheim, 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… So the psychological problem, the way to keep from becoming blocked, is to make yourself – and here is the phrase – transparent to the transcendent. It’s as easy as that.
What myth does for you is to point beyond the phenomenal field toward the transcendent. A mythic figure is like the compass that you used to draw circles and arcs in school, with one leg in the field of time and the other in the eternal.” — Joseph Campbell
So here is the recipe for unblocking our vital energy, composed of two intertwined parts. The first one is to become transparent – to release the mind from all fixed notions of how things should be or when they ought to unfold. It is a mind infinitely receptive, free from rigid expectations, petty thoughts, and the anxieties of everyday life.
The second part is to direct this openness toward the transcendent – that which lies beyond this world. And in that moment, the miracle happens. We ourselves become the Compass: one part of us anchored in the Centre of the Infinite and Eternal, while the other creates here on Earth.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
