![]() Joseph Campbell contrasts the disintegration of man's modern religious practices with what he calls "symbolic systems of rebirth in time." For Campbell, the most fascinating systems are "myths to live by," beliefs and practices to help individuals with the frustrations in life that come from not living our "true self." The goal of the ancient discipline of yoga was important to him because it emphasizes the discovery and experience of the true self. And if taken objectively as though there were gods, well then they are the counterpart of your dream-this is a very important point: dream and myth are of the same logic." -Joseph Campbell "The realms of the gods and demons-heaven, purgatory, hell-are of the substance of dreams … The mythology is the dream of the world. Their adoption of the peyote religion encouraged inward visionary experiences and was an example of how a people can find the sacred even when it has been lost to the society.Ĥ. ![]() For Campbell, the response of these people of the Plains is a vivid metaphor for what modern people must do. He presents an illuminating analogy to our present situation in the plight of the Plains Indians near the end of the nineteenth century when the old ways were disappearing with the buffalo and their old wisdom was no longer effective. Observing that the "West" is increasingly disenchanted with traditional religious beliefs and practices, Campbell argues that the time is ripe for the cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western cultures. "Just as for the American Indian the buffalo dropped away, and with it their public social mythology, so for us: the world has moved past, and our mythology has dropped off, and we are turned inward, and are the ones who are teaching us how to turn inward in this adventurous quest of finding again those images in ourselves which the society can no longer render to us." -Joseph Campbell Lecture I.2.3 - Confrontation of East and West in Religion In later years, Campbell would learn that filmmakers George Lucas and Stanley Kubrick modeled their own work on his Hero with a Thousand Faces, the groundbreaking book that explores this "monomyth" of the hero’s journey. He then follows the uncanny parallels between these stages and the "universal formula" of the hero's journey gathered from mythologies of cultures around the world, and reveals how the phases of the schizophrenic's crisis correspond to the separation, initiation, and the return of the shaman's experience during his voyage into other worlds. John Weir Perry's analysis of an individual's descent into madness: the break away or departure from everyday reality, a retreat inward with dark encounters of a symbolic kind, and finally- in the most fortunate cases-a return journey of rebirth and renewal. In the imagery of the schizophrenic's experience, Joseph Campbell recognized a synthesis of mythological motifs similar to Jung's archetypes. The shaman is a person who in his early puberty has cracked off, broken off and gone into what we would today call a psychosis." -Joseph Campbell The source of the imagery of primitive myths is the shaman's psychological crisis. "When one studies primitive mythologies, the imagery of the mythological world derives from the psychological experiences of the shamans. With this review, he provides not only a basis for a philosophy of mythology, but also a metaphor for the crucial decision each individual must make as well: namely, whether to be reconciled with -or to withdraw from-life in all of its terrible glory. Joseph Campbell first discusses the four functions of a viable mythology, then the fundamental difference between mythologies that affirm existence and those that reject it. And the fourth and final function is to harmonize and deepen the psyche-the psychological structure and experience of the individual." -Joseph Campbell The third function is to validate and maintain a certain given moral order, and it is here that the mythologies differ greatly from one place to another. The second function is to present an image of the universe through which the sensed meaning, or power, or nature of life will be rendered. "The first function is to reconcile consciousness to existence or to reject existence. Lecture I.2.1 - The Thresholds of Mythology Provocative and exhilarating, full of wit and wisdom, they are windows into one of the greatest minds of our time.ġ. ![]() ![]() These recordings, which have been remastered, were among those that Campbell kept in his study and used as the basis for later investigations of myth, symbolism, the psyche, and spiritual awakening. These five talks, recorded early in Campbell's career as a public speaker, explore the roots of myth, its psychological manifestations, and the ways in which it has expressed itself differently in India and East Asia on the one hand and Europe and the Middle East on the other.
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