The Power of Myth

I ordered a book from Amazon that I thought might be interesting because Sifu Tammy had mentioned it: Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth. It came, and sat nelected by my beside (along with several other "significant" books). This morning I picked it up, opened it to the middle, and read a bit. Mostly I thought I would convince myself that it wasn't what I was looking for at that moment, and I was going to stuff it deeper into a bookshelf to get it out of my way.

I read: "The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for."

Hmmm ... I turned down the corner of that page to return to it later.

Then I read more about what myths involving slaying dragons represent : "Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things." And how those representations apply to our daily lives.

"If the work that you're doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that's it. But if you think, 'Oh no, I couldn't do that!' that's the dragon locking you in . . . . What you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to. It may be all much too small, in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you're certainly going to be nailed down. Your neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from within yourself."

Next came a segment that explains the importance of teachers -- how a good teacher can illuminate the path "like a lighthouse that says, 'There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.'" (This sounds to me very much like a finger pointing at the moon.) Campbell says, "[I]t's nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That's the teacher's job. . . . "

Now I have to make time to read this text from the beginning.