The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work (Works)
byThe author of Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Masks of God series, and The Power of Myth here turns his powers of observation and analysis on his own life's journey and conveys the excitement of his life-long exploration of mythic traditions, which he called "the one great story of mankind."
In conversations with poets, anthropologists, and philosophers, Campbell reflects on subjects ranging from the origins and functions of myth, the role of the artist and the need for ritual, to the ordeals of love and romance. Illustrated throughout with photographs from Joseph Campbell's family archive and with a new, revised introduction, The Hero's Journey introduces the reader first-hand to Joseph Campbell the man, his discoveries, his terminology, and his thinking.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242530.The_Hero_s_Journey?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qprnc6lTmA&rank=1
EWR My personal notes February 1
The heroes journey is about leaving the dependency of childhood. It's about the transformation of death and resurrection. It's losing yourself giving yourself over to transformation by trial. It's going beyond yourself.
The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves
Put yourself in situations that evoke your higher spirit.
It's important to live life as a mystery.
It's about saying yes to the adventure of living.
Dragons represent the binding of oneself to one's ego, to be trapped in a cage. The ego is too small it pins us down and makes us do what others want us to do. The antidote is to "follow your bliss".
"In primitive societies the violence delivered to young men in their teens is prodigious and is taming them. The young man is a compulsively violent piece of biology and you've got to integrate that. People talk about looking for the meaning of life; what you're really looking for is an experience of life. In one of the experiences is a good fight."
"in so far as you take the religion seriously, you're living in an immediate relationship to myth; and the problem then is to relate your experiences when you move into the world to this mythological ground, to see the world in terms of those structures which have been put into you in the beginning."
Chakras: the lower chakras are the physical source of power and strength – the upper one of intellect in mind – the heart is the center.
Samsara: there's a place of rest in yourself, a quiet place where the action comes from. A center that must be held. When you are not compelled by desire or fear or social commitments, that is Nirvana.
Campbell's definition of myth: "Transparent to the transcendent". "Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to do what we call transcendence."..." The energies of the universe, the energies of life, that come in the subatomic particle displays that science shows us, are operative. The ultimate ground of being transcends definition, transcends our knowledge. When you ask about ultimates you're asking about something that transcends all the categories of thought, the categories of being and non-being. And the experience is the experience of a truth. An intuitive experience that disregards time in space."
I am astounded by the breadth and depth of Campbell's ken. In chapter 7 he discusses extensively male and female archetypes and how they manifested themselves in different cultures and at different times. I am going to comment further on this but for now I just want to highlight this.
ReplyDelete