OBSERVATIONS ON JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S THE HERO’S JOURNEY

Around 8 PM this evening, May 27, 2023, while browsing Facebook, my attention was drawn to Bill Moyer’s Interviews of Joseph Campbell. The Interviews were done shortly before Campbell died in 1987 (1900-1987).

I had watched the video when it came out and like most people moved on with my life, but, occasionally, thinking about it. So, this evening I began watching the videos, again. There are six of them, each about an hour long, that is six hours altogether. When they came out each ran for an hour, once a week, for a total of six weeks.

The interviews/videos were transcribed into a book, called the Power of Myth; it was a best seller when it came out. I had a copy of it and enjoyed reading it.

This evening, listening to Joseph Campbell from the perspective of my aging self (when the interviews were made, I was just a young PhD but now I could be classified as an aging man), so the narrative of the hero’s journey gave me an opportunity to review my own checkered life.

I listened to the first video, one hour long, and went to my computer to type whatever thoughts that it elicited in my mind (as I am now typing the second video is playing on my smart phone, in the background).

The hero is a person in every human group who, for some reason, finds himself following a calling that most people in his world do not follow. He feels the call and goes off in search of the answers to his questions from life.

The journey could mean leaving one’s primary group and going to other groups to study them or going about learning from mystics and the true teachers of God, or studying oneself to understand who one truly is.

The individual is now questing for answers that he asked of life. He is a hero with a thousand faces, he is a human being like most of us wearing the mask of God but not knowing what that God is (I read most of Campbell’s books as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon, where my then Mentor, Professor George Zaninovich identified me as an original thinker, and assigned numerous books to me to read and come talk to him about them…I literally read most Western philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Leibniz, Pascal, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Hume, Berkeley, Bergson, William James, and Oriental thinkers like Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Sankara, Ramanuja, Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi; I don’t recall reading any African philosopher, there got to be some of them; at any rate, I was a walking, talking mouthpiece of the world’s great philosophers).

The hero to be spends years studying something, away from his people, learns something and returns to his people to share the information he gathered during his journey away from the masses.

Folks like Moses, Gautama Buddha, and Jesus Christ are some familiar heroes who went out and studied something, produced answers to specific questions and came back and were tempted by their inner selves to see if they were ready to perform the function of teaching a new pattern of life.

Moses went up to Sinai Mountain, meditated and God allegedly gave him the ten commandments and he brought them to his people and used those to shape the worldview of Jews and, later, Christians.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Gautama Buddha was born into wealth in Northern India, but found a life of luxury boring and meaningless and went out to understudy Hindu holy men. After years of studying and not finding the answer to the question that he asked life, he sat under the Bo tree and resolved not to get up until he had found the answer to his questions.

Mara (Satan, his ego) tested him. He was tempted by sexual alures, by political power to be the great political leader of the people and by wealth and fame; he told himself that from what he has seen of life it is pointless, purposeless and meaningless despite one having power, sex, and wealth; therefore, there must be a better reason to live. Eventually, he experienced nirvana, oneness with all beings. After which he got up and smiled and folk asked him why he was so happy, and he told them that he found the answer to the questions he asked.

To him, to live as a human being is to suffer and die, why so? He learned that we suffer because we have desire to live as separated from the whole self, from God, to live as ego selves in bodies in space, and time, whereas our true selves are formless ideas in the mind of formless God.

To overcome our suffering, we must give up our desires to be separated selves and meditate and regain the awareness of our true self, formless parts of a formless unified self, spirit, mind, God.

Jesus did the same. He left his Jewish people and disappeared and wherever he was he pondered the nature of being. He concluded that we separated from our real self, the son of God, and live as egos and as egos we feel like we are sinners, guilty; he said that we cannot separate from God and, as such, have not sinned, and that we have to forgive each other what we did to each other, for they were done in dreams and what was done in dreams have not been done.

Forgive and love you, all people and love God and you will live in peace and joy, Jesus taught his followers.

The hero leaves his people and tries to understand a problem or problems that existence presents him. For example, in childhood I felt like I was in hell. My body was constantly inflamed, I felt burning sensation, on fire. I could not understand why this was so. I tried to use my child’s mind to understand it and, of course, could not.

I used my mind to invent a grandiose ego, hoping that its imaginary powers would enable me to solve my problems.

At school I was relatively smart; by the end of elementary school, I fancied myself the smartest kid in the world. I am bright but certainly not the brightest kid in the world.

The salient point is that I felt superior to all kids and later to all adults (if you are not a psychologist, please read Alfred Adler’s individual psychology to understand how some children feel inferior and compensate with false sense of superiority…I will not review psychology here).

Neurosis drove me through elementary, secondary and university. I got a doctorate degree, for an African, at an early age. I began teaching at a university but felt that I was wasting my time, that I was merely repeating what other people taught me.

I had to find the answer to the riddle of my being. I quit teaching and did all kinds of work. Since I was a quick learner, I always rose to the top of whatever organization I worked for. At barely thirty-three I became the executive director of a mental health agency, supervising psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, some old enough to be my father.

After a while, the mental health field became boring to me, and I returned to college teaching. I found college teaching not challenging but hung around universities.

During this time, I studied the religions of the world, such as Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Zen, Islam, and African religions and then decided to think about them and produce my own answers to the riddle of being.

I wrote my thoughts down on paper. I did not have the patience to polish any of my manuscripts and get regular publishers to publish it; moreover, each manuscript seemed unfinished, and I would begin another one as soon as one was done.

I published my books by myself. I self-published over one hundred books, each, at least, five hundred pages. They were all considering the thoughts that my mind was pondering: what is life, why do we live, does life have any meaning?

I am the archetypal hero who went on a quest seeking an answer to the riddle of life. I studied my personality and understood that although the biological antecedent of my psychological issues is real, that my real problem was my egoism.

I had to give up my grandiose ego. I must have written millions of words on how to give up the ego. If you give up your self-concept and self-image, give up your belief that you are separated from God, from the whole self and other people so who are you?

You are a part of one unified life that has no beginning and end, an eternal life that folks call God, but is nameless.

The relevant point is that when I understood my ego and began working to extinguish it, I found some peace and joy that had eluded me all my life. (If you annihilate your ego, you will exit this world and not see you on earth; you need the ego and its body to live in space, time, and matter).

Like all heroes, I found some useful answers to my problems and wrote about them and, hopefully, those with similar problems can benefit from my writing.

My writing can help you, if you choose, to change your self-concept, or keep living from your humongous ego and living in fear, anxiety, depression, mania, delusion and the ultimate mental disorder, schizophrenia.

In what folks call God, heaven, what I call joined state, we are the same and coequal, but on earth people are different; each person has a special function to perform and inherited a body type and social experience that enables him to learn and perform his function.

On earth, people have various levels of intelligence. Some are gifted (IQ of over 132) but most people are average (IQ of 85-115); they need average intelligence because the jobs they came to do can be done with average intelligence and therefore they do not have to be saddled with the pains of having superior intelligence.

In eternity, heaven, in formlessness we are all the same and coequal but in space and time we are different from each other.

DISCUSSION

The hero is you and I, anyone who feels a call to answer a question that his life presents him that contemporary society does not have an answer for him. He studies it and has useful answers, not the entire answer, but enough to help him and other people live relatively harmonious lives in human society.

What was a useful answer in the past obviously may not be useful today and in the future. Science is improving our lives so rapidly that by the time we think that we have understood the problem, innovative ideas about it come along.

What is the answer? I do not know, and no one knows, either.

The joy of life is not in finding the answer but in the journey of trying to find the answer. We are all heroes with thousand faces, each of us inventing mythologies that enable him and some folks to make sense of their life.

I could write twenty or more pages, this evening, on this subject but must force me to stop. I hope that these three pages have given you some understanding of Joseph Campbell’s life’s work, the study of mythologies.

We do not know what the truth is; mythologies, religions (even science is a mythology; soon all our twentieth century science will be dated and thrown out) enable us to make sense of our lives.

The hero goes off trying to understand his problems or the problems of society; he discovers that his conscious self is only a tip of who he is; he has an unconscious self that he does not understand; the unconscious self-influences his conscious behaviors.

There are issues in his unconscious mind that he must dredge up, study, and confront (his fears, for example,) and overcome them.

At the psychological level, I developed an inordinate level of fear.

All animals and people are afraid. Fear alerts animals and people to danger to their physical life. Fear tells you what could harm you and or kill you and forces you to run away from it or fight it; the goal of fear is the survival of your ego and body.

Fear is exacerbated in some children and prevents them from living fully. Their whole life is devoted to avoiding what they anticipate could harm or kill them. This segues to avoidance of people who are perceived to have the ability to reject them.

Deep in our unconscious minds is the awareness that society can reject us and destroy us, so we try not to fail to become rejected and killed by other people.

In my dreams my fears are demonstrated to me. All kinds of things threaten my life in my dreams. Thus, I began analyzing my dreams; by understanding them I understood the enormous fear that shapes my daily behavior. I had to confront that fear.

I learned that if I have a ginormous ego, I will live in fear of making mistakes and failing and not seeming the powerful ego I wish to be. Therefore, I had to let go of my desired huge ego to overcome fear. I had to slay my ego, aka Satan, I had to confront my dark side, my shadow, to reduce my fear.

Most people have loads of issues in their unconscious minds, issues that shape their nightly dreams and daily lives; they must try to understand those issues if they are to improve their lives.

In the meantime, most people live highly circumscribed lives. Less than one percent of humanity can be said to be living fully. This is sad but that is the way it is.

The hero studies what makes him not live fully and shares that information with all people; those who wish to live freely and fully learn from his writings and struggle to change their minds and behaviors; those who choose not to do so have a right to live their distorted existences.

CONCLUSION

By the time I was done typing the above pages, I had listened to two of the six videos on the power of myth. After listening to the other four, and I feel a need to add more to what I wrote above, I will do so; if I did not, please watch the videos and read Mr. Campbell’s books.

Professor Campbell’s was a fascinating man. As a boy his father took him to the museum in New York City and he fell in love with native American and other mythologies.

At age eighteen he went to Columbia University, New York City, and wanted to study mythology, but there was no department of mythology at that university and at other universities. He worked out an arrangement with his professors where he read mythologies and the professors graded him. Eventually, he got a master’s degree in mythologies and went off to teach literature at Sara Lawrence College.

The salient point is that he created an academic discipline for himself so that he studied what he wanted to study. His life’s example is that each of us must follow his bliss; each person must go do what he has aptitude for, is interested in doing, and throw himself into studying and doing it regardless of whether other people value it or not.

Where there is a will there is a way.

Philosophy, psychology, physics, chemistry, biology, astrophysics, geology, and technology are the most fascinating fields of study known to contemporary human beings.

Note:

The writings of Joseph Campbell are not within the frame of reference of science; you cannot prove the reality of mythologies; mythologies are metaphors that folks employ in trying to explain what we have not yet fully understood. The reader must develop the ability to separate science from religion and spirituality; do what I do, write on religions but do also science and insist on observable, verifiable and falsifiable phenomena; play with mythologies, such as religions, but do not take them as truth!