I loved this interview! --Joseph Campbell was one of the people who started me thinking out of the box for the first time in my life. Or, perhaps more accurately, helped me towards the awareness that there
was a box.
I began skipping a lot of highschool around the same time I first saw the Campbell/Moyers interview. --A friend had video taped them for some reason, not knowing what they were, and we randomly started watching them. We were utterly fascinated and spent the day absorbing the series. This was back in the early 90's, and around that same time we were watching old re-runs of "The Prisoner", another show which dared us to ask questions about the nature of authority. At 17 or 18 years old, this was a big part of my first crawling towards awakening. There had been glimmers before, but this really helped to train the light; the big idea I took away from Campbell was that of, "Follow your Bliss", essentially, as I interpreted it, "The healthiest and most productive way to live and grow is to trust in that which you are passionate about." --Later on, when I encountered the C Transcripts, I saw that idea reflected. . .
[quote author=transcripts November 7, 1998]
A: D****, your ideas about career are distorted. A job is just that: a
job. A career is your life's work. You have always invested too much
energy in your quest to hold down a "job." Why not consolidate, my
boy? Life would be so much easier.
Q: (BRH) The pursuit of money is the antithesis of my quest, or so it
appears.
A: When one worries first about money, the trap is set. When one
pursues one's passion, all else falls into place. What you do not yet
allow yourself to understand is that this principle never, ever fails.
But you certainly are not alone. The 4th density STS programmers
relish the thought. [/quote]
Another thinker who I find to be quite similar in tone is
Ray Bradbury. I found a lot of encouragement in his words as well. His version of the same message was, (and I'm quoting possibly inaccurately from memory): "Live at the top of your Hysteria." (I remember hearing him say this in one interview, but I cannot find it again. There are similar variations out there, one of which was this piece of advice he offered to aspiring writers, "May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories - science fiction or otherwise. ".
As regards people like Campbell and Bradbury, I saw this quote in Ouspensky's, "In Search of the Miraculous" . . .
"Furthermore, no one can escape from prison without the help of those who have escaped before. Only they can say in what way escape is possible or can send tools, files, or whatever may be necessary. But one prisoner alone cannot find these people or get into touch with them. An organization is necessary. Nothing can be achieved without an organization."
Campbell in the Moyers interview was not exploring, if memory serves me correctly, 4th Way practices, and neither was Bradbury, but if there are prisons within prisons, then hearing these two men speak at length definitely helped me break through a couple of walls.
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I just went to YouTube to see if I could find any clips of Bradbury talking and ran across an old show I was very fond of when I was younger, "Prisoners of Gravity". Bradbury speaks at the end of it, but the whole episode, (broken into three parts), turned out to be very interesting for other reasons. Bradbury's comments (in the third part) do not really capture what I found so similar in his tone and thinking to Campbell, but the show itself is well worth looking at. I'm thinking of writing a piece on how I see fiction mirroring certain broad thought-patterns in society, (a subject I am utterly fascinated by), but for now I'll just post the episode. You'll see immediately why I found it interesting, I think!
1/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mvSfNsOQfA
2/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43RiDtvXHjo&NR=1
3/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA3w2EIQl8M&NR=1