I'm at the Opus Archives this week, dipping into the Joseph Campbell materials. What a privilege to spend quiet hours with the ideas and words of someone so original and insightful about the role of myth in our modern (post modern) Western world. Campbell brought the Hero's Journey into popular consciousness and he was passionate about the individual's quest for identity. I find myself thinking a lot about this thing called the "individual," how we define it, what we expect of it. The concepts of "person," "self," and "individual" are dynamic, they have changed over the centuries and have a chicken-and-egg relationship to consciousness. How you learn to view yourself determines to a large degree, how you experience yourself. This is part of our shared subtext, the unexamined assumptions, the mythology.
For Campbell, the quest for the true self was the point of life. Now many of us (myself included) question the current dogma of individualism and wonder how we can recover a vibrant sense of community and collective action. The tensions between these two poles have animated Western culture for centuries and are central, I think, to the mystery of a "new mythos," the story or set of stories that can carry us as a people into the future.
How much we can know or shape our mythos is an open question if you understand mythology as a fluid response to the mysteries of life and ideology. Campbell didn't hold out much hope or even have much interest, in a new collective mythology. But he seems to have found a point of intersection between the myths of the questing individual and the human community in his response to the first moon landing and photos of the earth, taken from space. This accomplishment feels like ancient history in the mad advance of our technologies, technologies that support the globalization that Campbell envisioned. But while we've internalized the mechanics of moving across continents on the internet---how many times do you moan about your slow connection---we've yet to grasp the soul or spirit, the heart based inspiration of the proven, visible fact that we are indeed all one race on a small planet together. Spaceship Earth.
"At
such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one.
