[drewie]

I think Campbell often appears contradictory because he is talking from several point of views at the same time. The tension of duality is a necessary step for the development of enlightenment whatever that word means. Here is a quote from Pathways to Bliss.

“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.

Bold mine. The way I see it is that field of time is the human experience, trying to survive, feeling sorrow, and eternity is that place where you know all these things… (enter each individuals experience of transcendence.). Now I might not be the best person to explain this but this is what I am getting from him. Duality and transcendence you need to have both to make sense of them. But if you concretize the mysterious aspect of life or transcendence or whatever you wanna call it then its probably not that.