[Many humans need an 'extra large' dose of Joseph Campbell. Anyone not familiar
with the works of the 'late' Joseph Campbell should check into him. Bill Moyers
(PBS) did a six hour series with Mr. Campbell called 'The Power of Myth' which
is available for rent at www.netflix.com For more info on Joseph Campbell,
check out > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell
To View the newspaper article posted below at it's source, go to >
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2002/11/15/notes111502.DTL
Rick.]
Joseph Campbell Saves The World
In which the late, great master of myth reveals just how foolish all our
religious impudence is, again
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Essential items needed right now: internal fortitude, deep belly laughter
that defies war, juicy blasphemy, thick socks, nuanced humanism in the face of
raging and imminent oily conservatism. Red wine, gleaming personal
vibration, hope for the decimated Democratic Party, sexy small cars, extra
vibrator batteries, chocolate, bomb shelters for the soul and carefully
wrought, nimble perspective. And Joseph Campbell. Lots and lots of
Joseph Campbell. To fill that last category. This is mandatory. Such
as PBS replaying the dazzling and still potently relevant 1988 "The Power of
Myth" interview series with Campbell, the legendary and wonderful scholar and
teacher and author, maybe playing it over and over again, drawing more viewers
into its deep charm, its spellbinding web of story and belief and religion and
what, say, the virgin birth really means. (Hint: It ain't exactly Christian.)
This is one of those series you wish would be
immediately replayed across all major networks, every week, for about a year,
every year, right during prime time. Right when Middle America is sitting
down to dinner, right when the bulk of the wary and the fear-pummeled are ready
to hunker down and mutter those prayers and sit in grumbling silence at the
table before the kids scurry off to the PlayStation and the mall. It
should preempt Monday Night Football and preempt "CSI: Overacting" and preempt
"Everybody Loves Schlocky Dumb-Guy Sitcoms" so we can truly revel, just for a
while, just for a rejuvenating change, in the realm of intelligence and story
and mythology and belief and user-friendly intellectual dialogue and true
wonder. Can it be sufficiently emphasized how desperately needed this sort of
thing is right now? No it cannot. Campbell is the famous master of
myth, the warmly articulate weaver of cultural tapestry, the great professor
effortlessly revealing, in these luminous talks with
journalist Bill Moyers, how every culture's consecrated tales of gods and
goddesses, heroes and monsters, angels and demons, Jesus and Buddha and Allah
and Yahweh and Yoda et al., simply represent and illuminate various elements of
the human psyche, the human heart, the human condition. And, more
important, he illuminates, gently, calmly, effortlessly, without prejudice or
bias, without spin or piousness or even heavy resigned sighing, and without
actually saying so, the dangerous absurdity of a people taking these tales --
and gods -- way, way too literally. Of separating the stories and gods from
their own lives and insisting on seeing the culture's deities as something
other than the mere reflection, the personification, of their own internal
lives and spiritual journeys and the need to get off their collective ass and
quit being so hollow and mean and piously self-righteous and eager for war.
There is no superior bearded father-figure God. There
is no Heaven as physical place. There is no literal reading of holy adventures
and Heaven/Hell battles and fluttery cute cherub angels with wings. It is all
story, all literary torque, all metaphor and analogy and personification of
emotion and spirit, a way for the human animal to elevate toward greater and
greater levels of compassion and love and mutual understanding and enough with
the pipe bombs and the indignation and the hatred already. The virgin
birth did not actually happen. It is simply a metaphor for the birth of pure
compassion and spiritual feeling in the heart of man. Christ's body did not fly
out of a cave and rise to the pretty blue sky. It is a symbol for man moving
inward, opening to his spiritual self. Deities and demons do not
exist "out there" in some other space where we will eventually travel and hang
out and romp giddily and watch porn and eat all the pie and candy we want.
They're internal, as facets and aspects of our own
spiritual beings. This is what Campbell teaches. So simple. So beautiful. So
radically misunderstood. From the Bible to the Upanishads, the Koran
to the teachings of the Buddha, Greek myth to American Indian folklore, the
similarities between beliefs, their borrowed deities, their shared iconography,
their reinvented tales and common themes, are all revealed to be so
astonishingly interconnected, so obviously cut from the same internal
psychological cloth, and so beautifully a part of all cultures, that to wage
war in the name of one is to wage war on them all. And to think of
any one as superior to the others is to do violence to the very ideas and
energies they illumine, and only serves to isolate, and enrage, and induce
severe diarrhetic paranoia. Sound familiar? That this revelation,
this lucid insight comes so easily when watching a 14-year-old
public-television series is at once amazing and heartwarming and reassuring,
while at the same
time it induces deep sadness, a bitter sense of just how far away from this
elegant approach much of the world has devolved. PBS has been
rerunning the groundbreaking multihour series as part of its recent pledge
drive, noting throughout just how radical and innovative the show was for its
time, and how the show single-handedly raising a few million dollars for public
TV when it first ran, as people were riveted to their screens, desperately
hungry for luminous, nonpious spiritual insight and knowledge. And lo, they
still are. Probably more than ever. This is exactly what the culture
needs more of. Fewer whiny pundits and fewer talking heads and fewer spin
doctors and analysts and sniper-murder experts and child-molester psychologists
and COPS and Real World Las Vegas and Touched by a Face-Lift. And more
riveting, humorous, absolutely enthralling interviews with the greatest and
(hopefully) most controversial, nimble minds of our time, religious
teachers and writers and juicy poets and weavers of cultural tapestry, artists
and thinkers and myth makers. But more than any of them, maybe all we really
need now is a worldwide broadcast of "The Power of Myth," with Campbell, who
died in 1988 just before the program first aired, reminding us all to get on
our knees and seek some serious divinity where it matters most: In ourselves.
---------------------------------
-- Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
-- Subscribe to Mark's deeply skewed, mostly legal Morning Fix newsletter.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF
Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also
writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and
newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2002/11/15/notes111502.DTL
---------------------------------
©2006 SF Gate
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
