Becoming Transparent to the Transcendent: Joseph Campbell on Realising Your True Nature
The source of being is the ultimate mystery.
It's been imagined differently across time and cultures, from religious deities to cosmic energy. This inherent wisdom of the universe – that which creates and destroys playfully and pointlessly – is beyond rational understanding. It can't be grasped or articulated, and any attempt to define it reduces its sublimity.
For Joseph Campbell, this unknowable essence of all being is the transcendent.
And as the source of all being, the transcendent is the source of ‘I’. This is the message of the Chandogya Upanishad’s 'Tat Tvam Asi' (You Are That).
So why doesn’t the transcendent seem to flow through us?
Why we don’t seem to recognise or embody the transcendent
The energy of the transcendent inheres in us, but becomes bound and blocked by conceptual thought, sensory experience, and, as I and countless nondual traditions would argue, our dualistic sense of being a self separate from the rest of the world.
In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell writes:
‘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.’
That the dualising mind and conceptual thought separate us from this ‘transcendent reality’ is a core tenet of various nondualistic traditions. The following schools explain the same core principle in different language.
Buddhism
Doctrines sunyata (emptiness) and anatta (non-self) negate the inherent existence of any separate ‘thing’, including the self.
This sense of separateness arises when we fail to recognise the way we superimpose concepts, including ‘me’, on experience. Nothing exists inherently: all things arise through dependent origination.
Training the mind to recognise emptiness mitigates this sense of separateness and its concomitant suffering.
Advaita Vedanta
Vedanta teaches that Brahman is the one, infinite, nondual reality, and the Atman (the true self of each individual) is not separate from this reality.
Dualistic experience obscures this truth, and ignorance of our true nature leads us to mistake the world of name and form for reality.
Enlightenment means recognising one’s true self as this eternal oneness, and can be realised through Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry practice.
Taoism
The first verse of The Tao Te Ching proclaims that anything that can be articulated is not the ultimate truth: ‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.’
The main point: Concepts and worldly concerns block the transcendent
This is a massive oversimplification, but the general point is that ideas, beliefs, and concepts, including ‘I’, prevent us from recognising that we’re of the same nature as the source of being.
Whatever the ultimate reality is, we’re non-separate from it – the play, manifestation, or activity of what Campbell describes as the transcendent. However, conceptual thought creates the illusion of separateness that obscures our true nature.
Let’s go back to Campbell’s point about being blocked:
‘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.’
Referencing local and temporal tasks – space and time, the fundamental dimensions of material existence – Campbell identifies a preoccupation with the worldly as an obstacle to the experience of the transcendent.
And when thought and sensory experience are ‘so involved’ with the worldly, there’s no room for this transcendent energy to pass through us.
Being blocked, whether emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually, makes us sick. This is a core Jungian teaching from which we can deduce more optimal conditions for emotional, psychological, and spiritual wellbeing: openness, non-clinging, and non-attachment.
We exist on the threshold of the worldly and the transcendent: part material, part spiritual; part self, part non-self; part finite, part infinite.
Only openness, measured in an ability to drop the illusion of the primacy of the material world and see beyond the clouds of thought and experience, makes the transcendent accessible.
Campbell has a beautiful spiritual instruction that can help.
Transparent to the transcendent
To keep from being blocked, Campbell states that we must become transparent to the transcendent.
It’s a striking visual metaphor with echoes of all the nondual teachings outlined above, implying the transcendent’s concealed ubiquity.
The opacity of thought, belief, attachment, and other mental and physical percepts obscure the transcendent. ‘Transparent’ is such a fitting word, for it doesn’t deny the existence of material phenomena, or imply that they must wholly disappear, but states that they must be seen through before one can access the transcendent.
It evokes Blake: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite’ – the idea that when you cut through the finitude of phenomenal experience, the infinite, or transcendent, reality is revealed.
This is as relevant subjectively as it is objectively: when you become transparent, the transcendent passes through you. View my article on objective and subjective denials of the self for more info on this.
The role of myth is to point towards the transcendent
Earlier, I mentioned the idea that we exist on the threshold of the worldly and the transcendent. If this is true for us, then it must be true for all things.
I got this idea from Campbell, who said this of myth:
‘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. The image of a god may look like a human or animal form, but its reference is transcendent of that.’
So the function of myth is to point beyond itself, beyond the material world and rational mind, to that which can't be experienced materially or understood rationally.
The main distinction between myth and allegory is that a myth points towards something indescribable, while an allegory is a story or image that teaches a practical lesson.
This is what Joyce calls 'improper art'.
A mythic image always has one foot in the transcendent: its reference is never a fact or a concept, as this is the realm of allegory.
Jung taught that we're all hardwired for the religious experience, that our impulse to transcend is as basic as our impulse for food.
The mythic image is useful as long as it points towards the transcendent, but as soon as it becomes a fact in itself, as is the case with codified religions, it's stripped of its spiritual core. You see this in religions that emphasise proper behaviour as a measure of spirituality, stifling and congealing any true spiritual essence they had.
Campbell had an emphatic response to this: 'Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is.'
The idea is that any god must be beyond our capacity to understand: unknowable, indescribable, and infinite. Once this experience of the unknowable is organised into a religious belief system, the system obscures this transcendent essence, and its transformative capacity is lost.
Buddhist thought admonishes any real attempt to name or define an ultimate reality, recognising that any positive affirmation is a concept, which then reifies that which can’t be known materially.
Campbell’s idea of transparency doesn’t deny all positive assertions about truth as explicitly, but rather argues that concepts must not obstruct the transcendent. We have to live with them, but we must be able to see through them.
Naming anything makes it concrete, and when you mistake the name for the real thing, it becomes finite – no longer an infinite spiritual essence but a worldly object. The transcendent flows freely when you don’t cling to concepts or get stuck in literal interpretations.
The idea is that nothing knowable can be a final truth – only a doorway into the deeper mystery.
Making your life transparent to the transcendent
On this, Campbell writes:
‘Now, when you have a deity as your model, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent, so far as you realize the inspiration of that god. This means living, not in the name of success or achievement in the world, but rather in the name of transcendence, letting the energy come through.’
However, reaching the transpersonal requires passing through the personal. Campbell continues:
‘Of course, to reach the transpersonal, you have to go through the personal; you have to have both qualities there. The nineteenth-century German ethnologist Adolf Bastian talked about there being two elements to every myth: the elementary and the local. You have to go through your own tradition—the local—to get to the transcendent, or elementary, level, and just so you have to have a relationship to God on both a personal and a transpersonal basis.’
The message is clear: you can't skip the human experience – a practice known as 'spiritual bypassing' – to reach the transcendent.
This means you must engage with your personal identity and background before you connect with something universal. Jung taught that self-knowledge is essential for psychological and spiritual growth, and that a commitment to a life of self-discovery and exploration initiates the transcendent function – the key to continuous death and rebirth.
Balancing the personal and the transpersonal
These two categories can be expressed several ways: the personal and the transpersonal; the worldly and the transcendent; the definable and the indefinable.
Engaging with the worldly and personal is easier to offer guidance on: practising self-reflection and building self-knowledge through Jung’s teachings are effective ways of honouring the local portion of life.
Balancing the transpersonal element is trickier. By remaining open to the unknown, not clinging to concepts (including 'I'), and orienting your life towards something beyond material success, you engage with the transpersonal aspects beyond your intellectual understanding of the world.
These instructions are undeniably vague – how can one write with certainty about the uncertain or define the undefinable? – but the idea is that when you engage with the ineffable and yield to the unknowable you surrender the material part of your being that obscures the transcendent.
Psychologically, this amounts to a loosening of the ego’s boundaries – a prerequisite for growth through Jungian individuation. Spiritually, it aligns with the nondual teachings discussed, where the conceptual self can be recognised as something that can be seen through or dissolved in a way that brings about a less dualistic type of awareness that’s more veridical to the way things are.
Like myth, lives should keep one foot in the world and one foot in the transcendent.
The worldly and the transcendent as non-separate
Taking the nondual claim as true, there is no distinction between the worldly and the transcendent.
Great art creates a window between the two seemingly separate entities, making the ordinary transcendent and the transcendent ordinary.
Campbell’s idea of being transparent to the transcendent echoes this idea of non-separateness, but encourages a way of being that allows the transcendent to shine through the worldly.
For this to happen, the worldly must lose some of its lustre or point beyond itself, becoming a gateway to the transcendent.
What this all teaches us
In the same way a mythic image always has one foot in the world and one foot in the transcendent, never wholly reduced to a fixed definition or concept, so our worldly lives must orient themselves towards the ultimate mystery.
This means that, while we must honour the worldly and the personal (through Jungian teachings on individuation, for instance), a portion of our existence has to engage with that which can't be known rationally or materially.
Campbell calls this the transcendent; whatever it is and whatever you call it, the point is that it's only accessible when all attempts at knowing conceptually are dropped.
Recognising this unknowable essence as non-separate from our worldly identities is enlightenment.