Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell is a Guru. No matter who you are or what your interests you will be blown away and in awe as he speaks.

Myths boil down to more than the common connotation of old fairy tales. They are like universal human engrams we don't create. They are within us. They are part of all humanity and have been since time immemorial. Like the number of times the human heart beats, the story of the hero -- the same hero, with a different name, in every culture since the dawn of man.

Joseph Cambell has an equal depth of understanding of religions and beliefs the world over. With this knowledge he is able to correlate startling similarities of myths held by disparate cultures thousands of miles or thousands of years apart.

He will blow you away and you will, like me, find in him a guru.

"And it's a bit hard on serpents, too"
Former Roman Catholic scholar Joseph Campbell really throws down the gauntlet to the Christians. Make no mistake about it. There is a wide, *seemingly* insuperable gulf between Campbell's scholarship and contemporary blind faith in vicarious atonement through the Maitreya Buddha, or the Christ, or the prophet which Douglas Adams conjures up in the restaurant at the end of the universe. That said, this gulf is bridged by knowledge, and that Campbell provides in abundance. Campbell maintains that "getting stuck with the metaphor" in a religion is the root of all evil; every thoughtful religious devotee likely agrees.

C: The story is that Jesus ascended bodily to Heaven. That his mother, while still asleep, ascended bodily to Heaven. You don't have to get rid of it - you just have to figure out what it's saying.
M: What do *you* think it's saying ?
C: That he ascended through the INWARD spaces, which is what you must do, too.
M: But aren't you undermining the classical Christian doctrine of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ prefiguring our own, and overcoming death through a higher spiritual truth?
C: Well, *that* is what I would call a mistaken reading of the symbol. That's reading it in terms of prose instead of poetry. That's reading a metaphor in terms of the DEnotation, instead of the CONnotation.

Moyers and Campbell also have a good time reading creation stories from around the globe, and observing similarities. Campbell observes that in most cultures, the snake is positive, and that when one encounters a mythology which regards the serpent as evil, "that amounts to a refusal to affirm life".

Our Mythical Relationships to and within our Universe
Starting with creation myths, Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers explore the ways in which our mythological systems set up a culture's entire way of viewing the universe and our relationship to life within it. Whether we live at one with nature, or whether we see ourselves primarily struggling against it or within it.

In the previous video, "The Power of Myth" Moyers acted more as a prompter for Cambell's extemporaneous associational performance. Here in "The Message of the Myth" the dynamic between Moyers and Campbell really works to create a conversation between the mythology of western thought which Moyers brings out, and the mythologies of other cultures which Campbell brings out. At times I wish that Moyers would have participated even more in this video, but he seems to have occasionally been rendered mute by some sort of awe that he has for Campbell. Regardless, Moyers provided more of an appreciably creative role in this video.

Once again, Campbell zeroes in on the metaphorical signifiers within the mythology as the important messages that they give us. He sees more literal readings of the mythology as revealing physical truths to be a literary mistake, as he says reading poetry as if it were prose. Instead of dwelling on the realities of a hereafter, Campbell proceeds thusly, "Eternity isn't some later time, eternity isn't a long time, eternity has nothing to do with time, eternity is that dimension of here and now, which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere, and the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life." I found myself really appreciating this more common sense and this-worldly approach to religion and mythology.

What Campbell places at the center of the metaphorical system seems to be an inherent duality at the base of our conceptual system which permeates our language. Campbell switches between the goal of transcending this duality, and the goal of successfully living within a system of such duality. Later he says this squarely in psychological and bodily terms by saying that dreams and myths are the manifestations of inner conflicts within us, even bringing it down to the conflicts between different organs. Here his thoughts became for me clearly reminiscent of the later day thoughts and revelations of Lakoff and Johnson in "Philosophy in the Flesh".

Campbell also challenges us to create new myths appropriate to our challenges today. "What the myth has to provide, on this immediate level of pedagogical life instruction, it has to give life models, and the models have to be appropriate to the possibilities of the time in which you are living." He makes some still-relevant issues about our relationship to our machines, which we can easily extend into issues relating to ourselves and the imminence of human genetic engineering today. We need to understand that when we alter our fundamental physiological makeup, we are potentially altering the very basis for understanding our language, metaphors and myths. Perhaps we should pause for a better mythological understanding of our place in this time, before venturing too far down that path.