Customer Reviews

Inward Journey: Joseph Campbell Audio Collection, Volume 2: East and West

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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.

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