Why is that? I suppose that it is one of those strange occurrences in life that is described by Schopenhauer, wherein when one reaches a certain point in life and then reflects back over that life, the strange phenomenon manifests itself that makes it appear that it was not a series of random events, but it seems more like the conscious construction of an author with intention. I do not claim to fully comprehend this strange sensation, but I have to admit that the course of my life, both in interests and intuitions, seemed to lead me ever upwards on a path of development until I had reached a conscious receptive capacity to encounter Campbell’s writings precisely when I did.
I remember very clearly, back in the 1980s, when I first saw Joseph Campbell speaking on television on the remarkable Public Television series, The Power of Myth, on which journalist Bill Moyers so auspiciously introduced the man and his ideas to the public at large for the first time. As I listened to Campbell speak, I immediately heard a voice that I recognized. Every word that came out of his mouth seemed to me to be a highly evolved, intellectually researched statement of utter clarity, announcing with exacting power and logic, brilliantly articulating in detail thousands of suspicions, hints, suppositions and intuitions that had been forming in my own mind ever since I was a teenager. I couldn’t believe my ears - I was absolutely astonished. Here, finally, was the man who was saying the things that needed to be said, someone who could put all the pieces of the puzzle together in the most logical way possible so that I could recognize and understand the blatant obviousness of all the implications of my most treasured learning and experience. This was him, finally - here was my guru!
I say that somewhat jokingly, but Campbell really did have that powerful and immediate affect upon me. Still, despite while I sat in amazement and listened to what seemed the most radiant truth pouring from this man’s mouth, it would be some twenty years before I picked up one of his books. Then, in one remarkable year, I would obsessively plow through everything the man published in his lifetime, absorbing a massive amount of both fact and theory like an ever-swelling sponge. It is as if I somehow knew that I was not yet ready to receive what he had to say until then. I still had too much to learn and experience elsewhere before I could face this mesmerizing wealth of information and wisdom (two very different things) that would allow me to begin processing all of the data I had been gathering on my own up until my mid-forties.
If this sounds like I experienced something like a religious (or even intellectual) conversion experience, let me disabuse you of that notion. Far from becoming a blind disciple of Campbell’s, I think he merely stimulated me to follow and articulate more clearly my own personal path of life. There are many things that Joseph Campbell believed with which I disagree, and some that I actually know to be false. I even find myself, on occasion, questioning some of his most fundamental assumptions and methods. For the truth is that he did not arrive like a wizard in fairy tale, completely equipped with all the knowledge and truth I would need on my quest. Instead, he stood there like a gatekeeper, holding open a door through which insight after insight, epiphany after epiphany, erupted within me, as he fed me continually, night after night with his collected wisdom of the ages, gathered from all the corners of the globe.
So if it had not been Joseph Campbell, it might have been someone else who showed me a path to follow. Or it could have been no one at all, and I might very well have missed it. But the fact is that Campbell’s brilliant mind and his eye-opening theories that seemed to unite the entire universe of bare facts into a vehicle for knowledge did give me a fundamental platform and direction from which I would subsequently view the world. And I know that no matter how far my future thoughts will wander afield, they will always be held in a position of essential reference to this most remarkable man’s insights.
Now, I know from simple experience that Campbell’s insights are not for everyone. Different people are moved by different stuff, and that is all to the good and should only be expected. But I have come to realize that I cannot properly (or profitably) express anything truly meaningful of my own unless I somehow can address, first and foremost, my relationship with this most remarkable visionary. In short, I cannot tell my story without telling his, because even everything most personal and idiosyncratic about the way I look at life is really not comprehensible unless it can be seen ultimately in reference to him. Where I might shine most brightly on my own is quite possibly only understandable in and how I differ from him. And let’s face it - if you don’t get Campbell - if you don’t grasp the sweeping vision of this most powerful and revolutionary of syncretic thinkers - you’ll never begin to understand me. And that is because whatever direction I take, I cannot see it clearly save in reference to him.
This, I have come to understand, is why I so often struggle to get my meaning across, this is why I stammer and search in vain for the correct words, why I backtrack and keep having to elucidate on some seemingly distant background of thought before I can put into speech (or even into writing) often an idea that seems so basic and obvious to me. It is because, I realize, that the person with whom I am speaking does not know Campbell. Without the fundamental background and shape of this man’s brilliantly revealing orientation to reality, I’m really muttering in the dark.
So before I really speak meaningfully of anything, I really need to speak first of Campbell.
But how do I do that? How do I best begin?
To get an idea as to how to best go about detailing the life and work of Joseph Campbell, I looked up the article they had on him on Wikipedia. Amazingly, whoever wrote it did a very thorough job of explaining his major work and his key concepts. A wicked thought flashed over me. Why don’t I just steal it? I mean, I used to copy articles out of encyclopedias for reports in school, and I still slept nights, so why not go ahead and do it again?
Well, naturally, I was not going to plagiarize, at least not from such a recognizable source. But after giving it a bit of consideration, I don’t see any harm in telling you that I am lifting basic reference material just because it’s less work than having to compose the same material for myself. So what the hell? I’ll just pick and choose from what they have to say, and then add in my own editorial comments. After all, the main thing that I want to get across is just exactly who Joseph Campbell was and why he was important. I’m not going for a Pulitzer here.
So, here we go . . .
Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 - October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work is vast, covering many aspects of the human experience. His philosophy is often summarized by his phrase: "Follow your bliss."
Short and sweet. First off they tell you he was a "mythologist." Now, that doesn’t mean that he made up mythologies (though some of his critics might claim that he did), but rather that he "studied" mythologies. And of course, it goes on to say that his work was in "comparative mythology" and "comparative religion." So what’s the difference? Joe liked to say that the best definition for "mythology" was "other people’s religions." If it wasn’t what you believed, well, then it had to be a myth.
But a "myth" to Campbell didn’t necessarily mean the same thing that it seems to do for a lot of people. There seems to be a common consensus out there that a "myth" is a word for "something that isn’t true." Nuh-uh. Not for Joe. He said that a "myth" was a "metaphor." In other words, when you used what he called "mythical language," what you were really doing was calling something you didn’t have a name for by using something that you did have a name for. Or, then again, you could be putting two ideas or images together to give them additional power and meaning.
Suppose I said something like, "Max is a real bear." What am I saying? Note I am not saying that Max "is like" a real bear. That would be a simile. I am saying he is a real bear. But if Max were a person, then he wouldn’t really be a bear, would he? Not really? So I’m lying.
No I’m not. What I’m saying is that Max is so much like a bear that they’re practically the same thing. I’m using language to illustrate qualities that Max possesses that I really don’t have other words for. But if I say that Max is a bear, and you know what a bear is like, you’ll have a pretty good idea what Max is like. It’s not a lie - it’s more like poetry, using words and image to get a truth across that I couldn’t if I just tried to describe Max on my own. I’m not saying that Max is literally a bear, but I’m saying much more that saying that he’s like a bear. In a sense, I’m giving you a greater and more profound truth than I would be if I tried to describe Max in any other way.
Joseph Campbell would say, look at dreams. When we dream at night, we get visited by all kinds of images: people, creatures, places. And they are not necessarily congruent. In fact, they rarely are. We mix the wrong people together - Kanye West with Abraham Lincoln, for example. We put them at the wrong time - like my parents’ house when I was a kid, only I’m grown and with a family, talking to my dad who’s the same age I am now. And anything can change into anything else - my dog can become a talking rattlesnake who grows to gigantic size and swallows the Eiffel Tower. (What have I been eating?)
In short, dream logic is not the same thing as daylight waking logic. The images and events that we get in dreams aren’t really those things. They are symbols - nighttime representations of ideas and things that come from our waking life. But when they appear in our dreams, when they emerge from our subconscious selves, they are trying to tell us something basic and true about our most basic desires and fears.
Of course, anybody who knows anything about Freud or Jung and depth psychology in general is aware of this general theory about dreams, and whether you believe in it or not, you’re probably still dreaming about a lot of things that either scare you or attract you, am I right? Well there. Joseph Campbell took a lot of inspiration from those psychoanalysts mentioned above. While he didn’t necessarily agree with all their interpretations of dreams, he certainly agreed with them that our dreams represented something to us, something very often important. We may not always be able to figure it out, but in some way, our subconscious mind was trying to give us some very important information.
In short, those dream images that came to us in our sleep, were - in a strong sense - just as real as the images that we saw in waking life. We certainly experienced them as real while we were dreaming them, didn’t we? And if you go along with the psychoanalysts (and probably even if you don’t) those realities meant something that related to our waking life.
So not only were the things we experienced in dreams real, they actually possessed a deeper kind of reality than the reality that we experienced when we were awake. They were much more loaded with vital information and energy about the very basic nature of ourselves. They brought us information not only about the things that we knew and understood when we were awake, but they also gave us vital information that we weren’t even aware of when we were awake. Really, when you stop and think about it like that, the world we experience in dreams is actually realer and more profound than the world we experience when we’re awake! All we have to do when we wake up is to figure out what our dreams are trying to tell us. Well, of course, that’s not always easy to figure out.
So what are dream images again? They are metaphors!
That’s right! They are precisely the same thing as metaphors. They are two or more things at the same time, and they possess a meaning that can’t be expressed in other words. They are the carriers of some of the most vital and direct information that we encounter, only we experience them in a different form, an "artistic form," if you will.
Who would ever say that our dreams are lies? That simply doesn’t make sense. Our dreams contain a deeper truth than our external reality.
Well, thought Joe Campbell, if that’s what dreams are to the individual . . . then perhaps that is what myths are to the collective unconscious!
Think about it. No civilization or culture ever gathered together and said, "Okay, let’s think up some myths now, so we’ll have something to believe in." That’s not how it works. Myths come from the same unconscious world that our dreams do. They serve the same function for the group that dreams do for the individual. They encapsulate our deepest and most profound insights, they mould all our great desires and fears into imagery that has a meaning for every individual within the group. In short, they are metaphors. They are not lies - they carry a much more eternal and profound meaning than simple facts do. Facts are specific and limited. Myths are universal and unlimited. They tell us a far truer and much greater story than the world of common events, people, places and things. They tell us the meaning of our innermost reality!
Okay, so if myths are truer than facts, how is it that people all over the globe have so many mythologies, so many different religions? They all disagree, don’t they? They can’t all be true?
Or can they?
Let’s return to the Wikipedia article on Campbell for a moment. We’ll skip past his personal life history for the moment now, and move on to the really big stuff that he’s known for. That is:
Comparative mythology and Campbell’s theories
Ah, this is where the meat of the matter comes in. And what, in Campbell’s theories, is the first and primary concept that sticks out?
Monomyth
Campbell’s concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. The theory is based on the observation that a common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of most great myths, regardless of their origin or time of creation. Campbell often referred to the ideas of Adolf Bastian and his distinction between what he called "folk" and "elementary" ideas, the latter referring to the prime matter of monomyth while the former to the multitude of local forms the myth takes in order to remain an up-to-date carrier of sacred meanings. The central pattern most studied by Campbell is often referred to as the hero’s journey and was first described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). An enthusiast of novelist James Joyce, Campbell borrowed the term "monomyth" from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Campbell also made heavy use of Carl Jung’s theories on the structure of the human psyche, and he often used such terms as "anima/animus" and "ego consciousness"Okay, that’s a good start. Joseph Campbell first made his mark with the notion of the "monomyth." Is there really such a thing? When we look around the globe, at all the mythic/religious traditions and beliefs, there seems to be quite a varied multiplicity of them, and they all seem to be in conflict, right? Well, that’s because you are only looking at one side of them - specifically you are looking at the outside of them. What do they look like from the inside?
Campbell’s concept of monomyth (one myth) refers to the theory that sees all mythic narratives as variations of a single great story. Now, this is a very basic and fundamental concept to understand, and basically it is the key to Joseph Campbell’s entire view of life, mythology and religion.
Just as all people are different and thus have different dreams, it is nevertheless also true that all people are equally people. And as people, they all share a similar life experience. We all have the same basic equipment, both physically and mentally, we are all born, go through childhood, pass into adulthood, and if we keep on living, we eventually get old. We all are going to die, and we all know it. We all have basically the same hungers, thirsts, drives and energies. We have basically the same fears and desires. When it comes right down to it, we are more alike than we are different. And that means we all are in the same predicament. And when we dream, we dream about the same things. The people and the objects of our dreams may be specific to each of us, but down at the bottom, where it really counts, we have the same situations, the same desires and fears, and our subconscious minds deliver to us fundamentally the same information about the same things that we all have to deal with.
Each of us has a separate and distinct biography. We have different parents, families, friends, childhood experiences, growing pains, interests, ambitions, and so on. But at the same time we can talk about our similarity. While each of us has, to some degree, his or her own unique life narrative, in a larger sense - since we are all people, we have, ultimately, the same basic life story.
In the same way, Campbell would argue, each individual civilization or cultural organization of people has some very basic fundamental similarities, despite the obvious cultural differences that make each on unique.
The Widipedia text references the influence of the 19th-century German theorist Adolf Bastian. Now while Bastian isn’t exactly a household name, some of his ideas not only had a profound effect on Joseph Campbell, but also on the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who used them to develop his famous theory of "archetypes." I think it would pay off if we looked a little closer at Bastian’s theories, because they really are fundamentally important to the the thoughts of both of these extraordinary minds.
Adolf Bastian was born in Bremen, Germany, in 1826. He first studied law, and then medicine, finally becoming a ship’s doctor, which sent him traveling all over the globe for nearly a decade. Extraordinarily interested in "ethnology," Bastian’s journeys gave him enormous opportunities to observe different cultural beliefs, rituals and behaviors all around the world. He kept copious notes, and upon returning to Germany in 1959, he wrote about his travels, along with a three-volume, in-depth examination entitled Man in History, which was very influential in its day. In 1861, he began another four-year trip to southeast Asia, which would result in another ambitious work, the six-volume study, The People of East Asia. An avid collector of artifacts, Bastian helped create a Museum of Folkart in Berlin, and organized lectures and studies in ethnography. He continued to travel and to write - to Africa, and then later to the Americas - until his death in 1905.
I’d say we could presume that Bastian learned quite a lot on his travels, but it was his theorizing about the fundamentals of human cultural history that made him so very influential on many important minds of the new century. Probably, his most important contribution was his concept of what he called "the psychic unity of mankind." What exactly did Bastian mean by this?
Once again, let’s turn to a Wikipedia article, this time on Bastian, and we can get a pretty solid foundation of what he was talking about:
The Psychic Unity of Mankind
In arguing for the "psychic unity of mankind," Bastian proposed a straightforward project for the long-term development of a science of human culture and consciousness based upon this notion. He argued that the mental acts of all people everywhere on the planet are the products of psychological mechanisms characteristic of the human species (what today we might term the genetic loading on the organization and functioning of the human neuroendocrine system). Every human mind inherits a complement of species-specific "elementary ideas" (Elementargedanken), and hence the minds of all people, regardless of their race or culture, operate in the same way.According to Bastian, the contingencies of geographical location and historical background create different local elaborations of the "elementary ideas"; these he called "folk ideas" (Volkergedanken). Bastian also proposed a lawful "genetic principle" by which societies develop over the course of their history from exhibiting simple sociocultural institutions to becoming increasingly complex in their organization. Through the accumulation of ethnographic data, we can study the psychological laws of mental development as they reveal themselves in diverse regions and under differing conditions. Although one is speaking with individual informants, Bastian held that the object of research is not the study of the individual per se, but rather the "folk ideas" or "collective mind" of a particular people.
The more one studies various peoples, Bastian thought, the more one sees that the historically conditioned "folk ideas" are of secondary importance compared with the universal "elementary ideas." The individual is like the cell in an organism, a social animal whose mind - its "folk ideas" - is influenced by its social background; and the "elementary ideas" are the ground from which these "folk ideas" develop. From this perspective, the social group has a kind of group mind, a social "soul" (Gesellschaftsseele) if you will, in which the individual mind is embedded.
In the first volume of his great tetrology The Masks of God, subtitled "Primitive Mythology," Joseph Campbell discussed Bastian’s influence and ideas:
"Jung’s idea of the "archetypes" is one of the leading theories today, in the field of our subject [i.e., comparative mythology]. It is a development of the earlier theory of Adolf Bastian . . . Nowhere, he noted, are the "elementary ideas" to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned "ethnic ideas" through which they are substantialized; but rather, like the image of man himself, they are to be known only by the way of the rich variety of their extremely interesting, frequently startling, yet always finally recognizable inflections in the panorama of human life."
In short, it was through studying Bastian (and Jung) that Campbell came to realize the fundamental insight that charges and informs all of his work: that the different mythological expressions, beliefs, rites and rituals of every culture and civilization, from the stone age to the present day, were all highly individualized variations upon the same basic essential facts of human experience. In other words, all mythologies - all religions - were basically saying the same things in different ways. What appeared radically different on the surface, upon closer examination, became clearly apparent, to be quite similar underneath the surface. Instead of judging one religion to be "correct" or "superior" in regards to all of the others, they instead should all be seen, more correctly, as complementary narratives that all served to express the same basic human condition in different forms.
The chief problem was that people - especially in the Western parts of civilization - tended to look at their own religions "factually" and "historically", rather that as what they actually were, which were complex webs of "metaphors." Remember, in Campbell’s view, a "metaphor" or a "myth" is not a falsehood, but it is, rather, a statement of a more fundamental and therefore "higher" truth. And when it came right down to it, after careful examination, all of the world’s great religions or "metaphors" were in fundamental agreement and harmony, despite all their seeming surface differences.
Campbell often made the distinction between "denotation" and "connotation" in expression. While a "denotation" was intended to convey an explicit and literal meaning, it was a statement’s "connotation" - the implicit and suggested meaning - that gave mythic and religious statements their spiritual and emotional power. In other words, while different cultures might have different names and visualizations for their various pictures of "God" or "the gods" or even an abstract "force," they were still fundamentally talking about the same things. Whether they realized or not, religious peoples in all places and ages were using the same transcendent language of "metaphors" or "myths."
Different religions, therefore, however they looked on the surface, were not in fundamental contradiction, not at least as far as they expressed humanity’s universal "elementary ideas." They only differed in terms of the specific "folk ideas" through which they were expressed, and thus given form. In a larger, specifically mythological sense, Campbell used Bastian’s distinctions, when discussing religion in general (a "elementary idea") to contrast with a specific religious tradition (a "folk idea"). As far as individual religions went, Campbell came up with the term, "Masks of God" to describe each one.
Every religion had its own history, its own customs, its own forms of belief and shapes of ritual that was appropriate to its own time and place. Each one had its own particular "vision" of the transcendent realm, or the so-called "supernatural." And each one of these was basically a "Mask" that each tradition used so that they could approach the same ultimate reality - which Campbell asserted was not only fundamentally "unknown" in and of itself, but ultimately "unknowable."
So instead of asserting that one religion was true and another false - or even worse to claim that all religions were false -Campbell came to the conclusion that each and every religion is, equally and fundamentally true - on a higher "connotative" and therefore deeper "metaphorical" level. And those deeper and higher meanings are the ones that really count in the end.
This did not mean that all religion was "the same." Indeed, in his magnum opus, The Masks of God, Campbell carefully demonstrated the development of each of the major mythological "zones" of the planet earth, highlighting their distinguishing characteristics in all their color and glory. There was a time, a place, and a season for every variety and species of faith to flourish, and he never tired of pointing out the magnificent variegated distinctions that made the human story such a richly fascinating quilt of many patterns. The images of gods, heroes, rituals and rites danced in endless variations on the pattern of the grand human history. But underneath the veil, all of these creatures and customs had the same fundamental source and purpose. The monomyth had many faces, indeed. And that was just all so much more to rejoice in.
But what did it all mean? What exactly did this phantasmagoric pageant represent? Was it all just nonsense? Was there nothing of any substance behind the curtain?
Let’s go ahead an look at the next paragraph in Wikipedia’s article on Joseph Campbell:
As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind and its poetic expression through mythology, Campbell made use of the concept to express the idea that the whole human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world "transparent to transcendence" by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death. To achieve this task one needs to speak about things that existed before and beyond words, a seemingly impossible task, the solution of which lies in the metaphors found in myths. These metaphors are statements that point beyond themselves into the transcendent. The Hero’s Journey was the story of the man or woman who, through great suffering, reached an experience of the eternal source and returned with gifts powerful enough to set their society free.
Let’s look a little more closely at a small part of this paragraph so that we might not trip over it in passing:
. . . the whole human race can be seen as engaged in the effort of making the world "transparent to transcendence" by showing that underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death.
"Transparent to transcendence." What on earth does this mean?
It is, most fundamentally, if understood properly, not a discovery of some fact or another, nor is it an act of faith in something that we cannot know is there or is not. It is, rather, in fact, a way of looking at reality. It is, in fact a way, a method, of opening yourself, your mind, heart and soul into the extraordinary wonder of the mystery of being itself!
"Underneath the world of phenomena lies an eternal source which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of time, suffering, and ultimately death."
"An eternal source?" What eternal source? What is he talking about? Just what exactly is this "eternal source?"
That’s just it. We don’t know what that eternal source is! As a matter of fact, we cannot know exactly what it is. That is the great mystery of reality itself. When we give it a name, assign it a face - well, that’s the job of mythology. We can call it "God," we can call it "Brahman," "the Way," "the Great Spirit," "Nirvana," or "the fundamental ground of Being." It doesn’t really matter. Whenever we speak a name, we’re back to using a metaphor again, and really big one this time - the ultimate one. And remember, a metaphor isn’t a "lie" - it’s a higher and more fundamental form of truth than you can get with the limited conceptual resources and vocabulary of homo sapiens.
Joe liked to use a term for this "eternal source" that he got from another German thinker, this one a theologian and also a student of comparative religion. Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) wrote a very influential and thought-provoking book entitled The Idea of the Holy, which was published in 1917. In that book, Otto used the term "numinous" to define just precisely "the holy" was. And what exactly is the "numinous?" Well, Otto admitted, it was . . . "a mystery."
Come on, is that the best you guys can come up with? The essence of everything, the ultimate power, the purpose and meaning of life and existence, everything that we yearned to understand, the entire fulcrum around which we constructed all of our mythologies and religions . . . is "a mystery?"
Well, that’s the honest answer isn’t it? If we knew more than that - if we knew the final term itself, in all of its power and glory and wonder - wouldn’t we be seeing through the mind of God itself? Wouldn’t we actually be God? Well, we’re not. We’re people. And the truth is that to us, the ultimate truth is . . . well, "a mystery."
Otto called the "numinous" the mysterium tremendum et fascians. That’s just simple Latin for a "mystery that is both terrifying and fascinating." And that’s what the idea of Holy is all about. That’s the fundamental subject of every mythology and religion that has ever presented itself to humankind. It is an idea that basically isn’t reducible to anything else.
So is there a God or not?
You’re missing the point.
"God" is one word for the "numinous" - "the terrifying and fascinating mystery of being itself."
You’re going to argue about whether or not there is a "mystery of being?"
Campbell took it further. In his long detailed studies of Indian mythology and philosophy, he encountered something that the West had not placed a lot of emphasis on. First of all, in all of our experience of phenomena, we are confronted with a world of opposites. Left and right. Up and down. Good and bad. Life and death. Being and non-being. Now what if you went past the world of opposites completely? What if, like many of the Buddhist monks of the Orient, you trained your mind to go beyond the opposites of Being and Non-Being themselves? Then where would you be?
Now, there’s a mystery for you!
Joseph Campbell realized that this kind of thinking wasn’t for everyone. Most people like having a more solid image in your mind of what that "absolute mystery" is really like, in terms that we can relate to that mirror our earthly human experience. So the "mystery" becomes God or "the gods," or perhaps some more abstract, esoteric concept. Good, whatever works for you. Whatever makes your world "transparent to transcendence." That’s what myths are for - that’s what they’re all about. They’re not "lies." They’re "metaphors" for the inexplicable.
What we do have to stop doing, though, is mistaking our "metaphors" for "facts." Myths should always point beyond themselves. They are constantly reminding us that reality is ultimately a "mystery" that is completely beyond our comprehension. Mistaking your particular religion, your particular "Mask of God" for His "Actual Face" is a big mistake. And that’s what gets us in trouble - both with ourselves and with each other.
Joe liked to quote from the Rig-Veda, an ancient Sanskrit text composed over 1400 years ago:
Truth is one - the sages have many names for it.
Oh, yes, there’s lots more about Joseph Campbell. But that’s why you have to read his books.
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