The Heroe's Journey

The following quote by Joseph Campbell is quite easy to find on the net, but I've recently a really profound experience that made it really come alive for me. So I thought I'd share it and save you the trouble looking for it ;)

We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us - the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
(Joseph Campbell. The Hero With a Thousand Faces)

The meaning of Myth

I found the following quote a few years ago. It's probably this quote that started me thinking a bit differently about the word "myth". This led to the study of Jung and the concept of symbols and archetypes, Joseph Campbell's awesome understanding of myth and a few other things. It comes from a book I bought for R5 at a second hand theological bookstore. The title is "The Primal Vision". by John V. Taylor. It's a stunning book and in a chapter on "The Language of Myth" he quotes someone by the name of Nicolas Berdyaev:

Myth is a reality immeasurably greater than concept. It is high time that we stopped identifying myth with invention, with the illusions of primitive mentality, and with anything, in fact, which is essentially opposed to reality... The creation of myths among peoples denotes a real spiritual life, more real indeed than that of abstract concepts and rational thought.
Myth is always concrete and expresses life better than abstract thought can do; its nature is bound up with that of symbol. Myth is the concrete recital of events and original phenomena of the spiritual life symbolized in the natural world, which has engraved itself on the language memory and creative energy of the people...; it brings two worlds together symbolically. (Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and Spirit)

talking about God

How do I experience God? God is like the air all around me and in me. I breath it in and breath it out. Without it I would die. I know it is there, but it's only when I'm really still, or desperate for breath, that I seem to notice it at all.

We want to think about God. God is a thought; God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. He's beyond Being, He’s beyond the category of being and non-being. Every religion is true in this sense: it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. He who thinks he knows doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.
(Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth)

The difficulty of communicating experience

I have been tempted to delete the last two posts in this blog because when I read them, they just seem so inarticulate and don't really get across what I've been trying to say. I realise now, though, that this is the whole point. It's a paradox to be writing about how experience is beyond words, when the very thing I'm trying to do is to put into words my experience. Perhaps It's better for me to leave the last two posts and call them poetic licence or something, because they are, in effect, communicating the point I was trying to make.

It's interesting how the Universe speaks to us...
I was thinking about this topic and how to communicate it and I happened to pick up a book I am reading. It's by Joseph Campbell, called "Myths to live by". The chapter I was busy with was on Zen. It just seem to jump out of the page as if the author had been reading my mind. This is what it had to say:

"..it is actually impossible to communicate through speech any experience whatsoever, unless to someone who has himself enjoyed an equivalent experience of his own..

..Life defined is bound to the past, no longer pouring forward into the future......anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life..

..(Zen) holds to the realization that life and the sense of life are antecedent to meaning; the idea being to let life come and not name it. It will then push you right back to where you live - where you are, and not where you are named. "