While browsing through a West Town Mall bookstore Thanksgiving weekend 1986, I made one of the most important discoveries of my thought-life. My in-laws were in town visiting for the purpose of cheering us up. A few days earlier our second attempt of the year to adopt a child had failed. So it was fitting for our family to make a trip to the main shopping area in Knoxville of that time. I don't recall what attracted and impelled me to reach for "Myths to Live By" by Joseph Campbell. It was just what I needed. From then up to the mid-nineties, I purchased and read several thousand pages of his works. This includes his 4 volume "The Masks of God", "The Hero of a Thousand Faces" and other writings. I recorded and listened to all his interviews with Bill Moyers. I'll leave it to the reader to do their own internet search to learn more about him. Where he connected with me was the way he constructed a grand story of how religion developed and evolved in human history. He is both a modern person who accepts and affirms science and one who finds value not only in our Western Christian heritage but the views from the East also of which he was intimately, experientially knowledgeable. He was a Jungian.
He was able to explain to me the evolution of human religious expression. In Primative Mythology he starts his account so deep in our history that homo habilis and homo erectus are included. When I came to his work, I was very frustrated with my internal and external religious life. He greatly relieved my internal pressures by showing me how things came to be the way they were. He gave me a direction for further research and hope.
The quote below is from the the eleventh chapter of "Myths to Live By" titled Moon Walk: the Outward Journey. The chapter gives his thoughts in response soon after the first two trips to the Moon in 1969 and 1970. He was very excited about it and what it would mean. He would live to 1987. By then the Space Shuttle program had long ago supplanted the Apollo program. The quote accents both aspects of his program, he is open both to modern technology and innovation of the outer world and exploration and explication of the inner world.
It is my whole present thesis, consequently, that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery that has ever been taken, or that ever will or ever can be taken.
Showing posts with label Joseph Campbell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Campbell. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Joseph Campbell and Paul Broun
From Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By and the chapter written in 1961 titled "The Impact of Science on Myth", referring to Sigmund Freud he writes:
His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins.
....
And thus Freud, like Frazer, judged the worlds of myth, magic, and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally by science.
.....
An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
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Yes, "imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends". That is why when the literal nature of these important imageries are questioned, some people feel threatened. Prime contemporary examples are such as Paul Broun who recently claimed that 'evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.' Then there is Todd Akin who says evolution is not a matter of science. And these two people sit on the House Science and Technology Committee. Amazing. You see it often, in our postmodern times. In the nineties we were told by the postmodernists, who were usually considered to be leftists, that there is no truth only interpretation. In the US,there is a subset of people who consider thermselves to be conservative who apparently agree with this and who think that if they believe hard enough, things they fear like evolution and climate change, will go away.
We still need to learn to the right way to keep our myths alive while at the same time not lying to ourselves.
His psychology, however, being of an essentially rational kind, insufficiently attentive to the more deeply based, irrational impulsions of our nature, he assumed that when a custom or belief was shown to be unreasonable, it would presently disappear. And how wrong he was can be shown simply by pointing to any professor of philosophy at play in a bowling alley: watch him twist and turn after the ball has left his hand, to bring it over to the standing pins.
....
And thus Freud, like Frazer, judged the worlds of myth, magic, and religion negatively, as errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted finally by science.
.....
An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
==========
Yes, "imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends". That is why when the literal nature of these important imageries are questioned, some people feel threatened. Prime contemporary examples are such as Paul Broun who recently claimed that 'evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.' Then there is Todd Akin who says evolution is not a matter of science. And these two people sit on the House Science and Technology Committee. Amazing. You see it often, in our postmodern times. In the nineties we were told by the postmodernists, who were usually considered to be leftists, that there is no truth only interpretation. In the US,there is a subset of people who consider thermselves to be conservative who apparently agree with this and who think that if they believe hard enough, things they fear like evolution and climate change, will go away.
We still need to learn to the right way to keep our myths alive while at the same time not lying to ourselves.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Myths to Live By
The year was 1986 and it was the Thursday a week before Thanksgiving when we learned that our second adoption attempt of the year had failed. The young woman decided to keep her baby girl. We were devastated. It took five years to get pregnant with our first son. The second one was Trisome 18 and lived five days. We didn't know if we could get pregnant again. Dorothy's folks drove over the next day from Memphis to Knoxville to console us. That was nice. We had a good time with them. I was sad for a number of reasons. One of the others is that I was looking for something else. And I found it at the mall bookstore. A book that propelled me in a mental and spiritual direction I was looking for but did not know existed.
Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell
A week later we found out Dorothy was pregnant again! Happy Ending.
More about Myths to Live By later.
Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell
More about Myths to Live By later.
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