For most of you (my imaginary readers), I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t know. All the same…
In the late 1980’s, Bill Moyers interviewed Joseph Campell. These interviews aired as a six-part series on PBS, one of the most popular public television series ever. Experts in their respective fields have plenty of criticisms of Campbell. He dabbled in arguably too many disciplines to have a complete understanding of each. For my part, and for many others who feel drawn to spirituality but repelled by religion, we found a worthy guide through spiritual traditions by his knowledge of myths, ancient and modern, including primitive and modern spirituality and religion, and his ability to find common threads and understand these diverse beliefs as a universal human search for answers to big questions, and a true experience of life.
I first found this work on a roommates bookshelf, which held the companion book to the series. My experience was near constant aha! moments, explosions of insight, mental connections finally jumping the gap, a voice putting words to my half-thought, half-understood, half-expressed concepts of what was true about life but never mentioned, a void definitely not satisfied by organized religion.
Later I found the video footage of the interviews. I bought the box set of discs. I watch it. Often. I like to make myself feel guilty for watching movies and shows, seeing it as passive entertainment. Nothing wrong with deciding to sit back and be entertained now and then, but I do it more often than I should. I’ve started to lean on The Power of Myth series more and more, seeing it as closer to reading, or attending a lecture on a fascinating topic. For me, it’s anything but mindless, but satisfies the urge to sit still and watch something interesting on the screen.
The result: I’ve seen it many, many times. To the point that (sorry Bill), Bill Moyers bugs me more and more. I’m often very distracted by his complete persona as a journalist – flowery speech, speaking in prose, making silly journalist “I’ve practiced this face in the mirror to make it perfect for TV” faces. He means well, and I admire him, but in this topic of the unformed realm, grasping things outside of space and time, beyond concrete religious ideas, he just seems out of his element.
No matter. Joseph Campbell shines through.
As with anything, the more you investigate, the more you find. Some statements and ideas grabbed me right away. Others, after…let’s call it viewing #60, jump out at me for the first time, or something I didn’t at first understand and so dismissed (a trait I need to work on, I know), suddenly clicks.
So here we go. I’m posting a series of essays on some of the more striking (to me) ideas brought up in the series. This is like my own book club with myself. Rather than having flashes of insight and cool discoveries, then going on unchanged, this “discussion” will explore them, cement the ideas in me, keep them front-of-mind. As Joseph Campbell says in one episode, and there are no quotation marks because I’m putting it in my own words: there’s a level of consciousness of a busy city street, a job, the stock exchange. There’s also a level of consciousness of a cathedral, a secluded shrine, a holy place. They are all part of the same consciousness, the same life, they’re simply different levels. The trick is, upon exiting the holy place, can you hold within yourself something of that level as you move about the common level of everyday life with all its concerns? Can you hold your consciousness slightly higher, remembering that spiritual level and its truths?
That’s the idea, anyway.