Have you read The Masks of God Christine? I think you would really like these books.
I quote from a passage here that affected me- because I think the world is divided into people who accept a belief system and choose to stop searching and people who are on a lifelong quest.
Firstly Campbell has been talking about how most peoples lives are served by their religions giving them kama, artha and dharma (pleasure, power and laws of virtue)- doesn't matter what religion. But there is a 4th way- and here I quote:
"The way of suffering of the Shaman is the earliest example we know of a lifetime devoted to the fourth end:the serious use of myth hermetically, as marga, as a way to psychological metamorphosis. And the remarkable fact is that the evidence points irrefutably to an achievement-at least in many cases-of a perceptible amplification of the individual's horizon of experience and depth of realization through his spiritual death and resurrection, even on the level of these first primitive explorations. This Shaman is in a measure released from the local system of illusions and put in touch with mysteries of the psyche itself, which lead to wisdom concerning both the soul and its world; and he thereby performs the necessary function for society of moving it from stability and sterility in the old toward new reaches and new depths of realization.
The two types of mind, thus, are complementary: the tough minded. representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse- respectively, attachment to the local and timely and the impulse to the timeless universal. In human history the two have faced each other in dialogue since the beginning, and the effect has been that [we progress] from lesser to greater horizons..."
A long time ago I stated that I thought that it was quite possible that human brains are to some extent wired for belief- or not, as the case may be. Those wired for belief would be the tough minded inert force lending stability to society- and from an evolutionary point of view it would make sense to have many of them. But for times when new beliefs are necessary, even imperative, for the survival of the species free thinkers are valuable. I think we are at, or near, such a time now- as did Joseph Campbell. He thought, and I agree with him, that a new myth was necessary: A myth that could take us forward, together, as one planet. |
