What Makes a Hero

Check out the Ted.Ed animated illustration “What Makes a Hero” of Joseph Campbell‘s Hero’s Journey, in relation to our lives and also literature and movies. Film by Matthew Winkler.

The Earth Has a Soul

The book we’re going to study this year is The Earth has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life by C. G. Jung, Meredith Sabini, and Joseph Campbell. If you want to get a taste of what the book is about, check out Meredith Sabini’s article about the book on the website EcoBuddhism.

Quote of the Day

“If you take life absolutely seriously, you must realize there’s the counter-play to it, that the world of law is simply an optional world. When you do something you create a pattern that excludes other possibilities, and there comes a time for opening up to all possibility and the creative act.

Actually, everybody who has ever done creative work of any kind knows this moment. You make your plans in terms of what the mind can think of, and if you hold to those plans you’re going to have a dry, dead piece of work. What you have to do is open out underneath into chaos, and then a new thing comes, and if you bring your critical faculty down too early you’re going to kill it.

There’s a beautiful letter that Schiller wrote to a young author who was having the trouble that’s known as writer’s block. This young writer had oh, so much to say, but he couldn’t write. This is a normal situation. Schiller said simply, ‘Your problem is that you’re bringing the critical factor into play before you have let the lyric factor work.’

Look what happens to us in our schools: we learn to criticize Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe and everybody else, and then the teacher says, ‘Now do some creative work.’ You sit down and this bit of spilth begins coming out and you think, Oh, my God! That’s nothing. Of course you can’t write like Shakespeare, but you can write like you, perhaps, if you let yourself go.”

—Joseph Campbell, Goddeses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine

Quote of the Day

“Well, I’m not a mystic, in that I don’t practice any austerities, and I’ve never had a mystical experience. So I’m not a mystic. I’m a scholar, and that’s all. I remember when Alan Watts one time asked me, ‘Joe, what yoga do you practice?’ I said, ‘I underline sentences.’”

—Joseph Campbell, in an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove

Quote of the Day

“What has always been basic to resurrection, or Easter, is crucifixion. If you want to resurrect, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that. They emphasize the calamity of the event. And if you emphasize calamity, then you look for someone to blame. That is why people have blamed the Jews for it. But it is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through the Crucifixion we were unshelled, we were able to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. We must look freshly at this so that its symbolism can be sensed.”
—Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That

The Power of Myth

You can now listen to and download all six episodes of The Power of Myth, Bill Moyer’s classic PBS series with Joseph Campbell from 1988.

Quote of the Day

“The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, ‘Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.”
—Joseph Campbell