Amazon.com: Inward Journey: Joseph Campbell Audio Collection, Volume 2: East and West (9781565111882): Joseph Campbell: Books

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JOSEPH CAMPBELL (1904-1987) was a prolific writer, dedicated editor, beloved teacher, inspiring lecturer, gifted storyteller, avid scholar, and a foremost interpreter of myth. Among the many books he wrote and edited, he is best known for The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his four-volume The Masks of God, and his magnum opus, Historical Atlas of World Mythology.

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Joseph Campbell was an American author and teacher best known for his work in the field of comparative mythology. He was born in New York City in 1904, and from early childhood he became interested in mythology. He loved to read books about American Indian cultures, and frequently visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was fascinated by the museum's collection of totem poles. Campbell was educated at Columbia University, where he specialized in medieval literature, and continued his studies at universities in Paris and Munich. While abroad he was influenced by the art of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, the novels of James Joyce and Thomas Mann, and the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These encounters led to Campbell's theory that all myths and epics are linked in the human psyche, and that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities.
After a period in California, where he encountered John Steinbeck and the biologist Ed Ricketts, he taught at the Canterbury School, and then, in 1934, joined the literature department at Sarah Lawrence College, a post he retained for many years. During the 40s and '50s, he helped Swami Nikhilananda to translate the Upanishads and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. He also edited works by the German scholar Heinrich Zimmer on Indian art, myths, and philosophy. In 1944, with Henry Morton Robinson, Campbell published A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. His first original work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, came out in 1949 and was immediately well received; in time, it became acclaimed as a classic. In this study of the "myth of the hero," Campbell asserted that there is a single pattern of heroic journey and that all cultures share this essential pattern in their various heroic myths. In his book he also outlined the basic conditions, stages, and results of the archetypal hero's journey.
Throughout his life, he traveled extensively and wrote prolifically, authoring many books, including the four-volume series The Masks of God, Myths to Live By, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space and The Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Joseph Campbell died in 1987. In 1988, a series of television interviews with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, introduced Campbell's views to millions of people.

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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic and Inspiring talks on Eastern and Western mythology, March 24, 2005

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Laura Lea Nalle (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Joseph Campbell Audio Collection Volume 2: Inward Journey: East and West (Audio CD)

I listened to this series of CD's on my way back from a road trip recently. The poor recording quality of the first cd made me worry that they would all be bad, but whatever the problem was, they seemed to have fixed it for the following lectures because the others sound just fine.

Each cd contains one talk in a series of lectures that Campbell gave on comparative mythology between Eastern and Western traditions. He discusses the nature of myth, its characteristics, domain, uses, and meaning, among many other things. He distinguishes between the emphasis of eastern and western mythology and how they reinforce religious understanding in their respective cultures.

Campbell talks about eastern religion and mythology as supporting the idea that all individuals have the capacity and inherent characteristics of God, or the Divine Consciousness. In eastern religions, everyone has the ability to reach Buddha-hood, or Christ-hood, or God-consciousness. Whereas western religion and mythology externalizes the Divine, and access to its qualities relies upon belonging to a social group that is in relation to that God.

He also talks about the inward journey to the Divine, and how different cultures place different emphasis on this journey. He also draws parallels between experience of the Divine, schitzophrenia, and acid trips. He explains how these are similar and how they differ in great detail and insight.

Campbell uses a number of references and anecdotal stories to illustrate his very thoughtful, profound, and far reaching ideas. His wit, intelligence, and sincerity really comes through in this series. I will come back to these talks to use as inspiration and reference for my own philosophical and anthropological work; there is a wealth of inspiration and insight contained in Joseph Campbell's work, and these lectures are no exception.

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5 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing how much alike we are the world over, August 20, 2005

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Betty Delaney "Bookworm" (Hoschton, GA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Joseph Campbell Audio Collection Volume 2: Inward Journey: East and West (Audio CD)

And Joseph Campbell spent a lifetime showing our similitaries with each other not our diffenences.

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