Joseph Campbell age 83
George Lucas filmed lessons for Star Wars audiences in summer of 1986 / 1987 at the peak of his Hollywood power and influence and published in "Power of Myth" 1988:
Poeple who do not "believe" The Bible and Quran in USA North America, but do not translate: Hamlet's Ghost to magical angels messaging in The Bible. Star Wars 1977 "Force Ghosts" magical burning bush in Torah. Translation at the metaphor to metaphor. Instead, all the atheists I have met in my extensive USA travels and living (including full time RV in dozens of cities studying these topics)... are anti-Bible. They are sick of and angry at the USA Christians for their terrible behavior. They do not study mythology, don't get angry at Thor movies and Marvel comics / films, just The Bible and Christians. Being anti-Bible is not undersanding.
Joseph Campbell went to university in Munich, in Paris, went to the Erenos Conferences in Europe, went to Japan, and was a teacher for 38 years at Sahara Lawrencce College in New York City. He had a lot of travel and exposure, not a "basement dweller".
“Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” ― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor
Half + Half = Everyone gets it wrong.
What would an non-believer believe in?
BILL MOYERS: Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Every moment should be such an experience.
MOYERS: And what we are going to become tomorrow is not important as compared to this experience.
CAMPBELL: This is the great moment, Bill. What we are trying to do in a certain way is to get the being of our subject rendered through the partial way we have of expressing it.
MOYERS: But if we can’t describe God, if our language is not adequate, how is it that we build these buildings that are sublime? How do we create these works of art that reflect what artists think of God? How do we do this?
CAMPBELL: Well, that’s what art reflects—what artists think of God, what people experience of God. But the ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human experience.
MOYERS: So whatever it is we experience we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.
CAMPBELL: That’s it. That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated. Poetry involves a precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the words themselves. Then you experience the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence.
MOYERS: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?
CAMPBELL: That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature. It’s a magnificent idea—an idea that appears in India in the mythic image of the Net of Indra, which is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended.
MOYERS: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe that?
CAMPBELL: I don’t believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.
MOYERS: Not true — not true.
CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, “Follow your bliss.” There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.
MOYERS: I like the idea that it is not the destination that counts, it’s the journey.
CAMPBELL: Yes. As Karlfried Graf Dürckheim says, “When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey.” The Navaho have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. Pollen is the life source. The pollen path is the path to the center. The Navaho say, “Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I’m on the pollen path.”
MOYERS: Eden was not. Eden will be.
CAMPBELL: Eden is. “The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”
MOYERS: Eden is—in this world of pain and suffering and death and violence?
CAMPBELL: That is the way it feels, but this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.
If you don't believe there is an outer-space Allah / Levant God directing our ceation on Earth, this is what you conclude from sceintific observation:
" Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being. "
Joseph Campbell focused his life on writing books, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, giving public NYC lectures at Cooper Union, giving public lectures in Big Sur California, etc, etc, etc.
He may not have believed life had a "purpose", but surely the metaphor of the Tree Of Knowledge mattered to him given how much he spoke, write, teaching. And that's how I view Jesus first and foremost, a teacher / a poet, a person who went around criticizing and educating people. In that sense, Campbell was a teacher, Jesus was a teacher. Faith in teaching / sharing.
.
CAMPBELL: There are some teachers who decide they won’t teach at all because of what society will do with what they’ve found.
.
CAMPBELL: At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image. The bodhisattva represents the principle of compassion, which is the healing principle that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva is one who has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That’s exactly the theme of Paul’s statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think God-hood something to be held to but took the form of a servant here on the earth, even to death on the cross.” That’s a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life. (Philippians 2:6-8)