#456: The Power of Myth — The Hero’s Adventure with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

At this altitude, I can run flat.

Out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

Now?

I'd have seen an improvement time.

What if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over metal endoskeleton. Leave him perishable.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, lemurs and squirrels. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is normally my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers of all different types. This episode flips the script, but you get an absolutely masterful interview in the process. Some cheating, I suppose. It features the first program or chapter titled the hero's adventure of the six part series the power of myth, which I recently digested. I'm going to be listening to it again in full. The series is just incredible. I found it odly and profoundly calming and I really wanted to share the first program with you, so I reached out to many different people and had to figure out rights and get it all sorted out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. End of the day, was able to get this for you. Here's the short description and why I'm so excited about it. 40 years ago, renowned scholar Joseph Campbell, you might know that name because George Lucas consulted with Joseph Campbell on writing the original Star wars, sat down with veteran journalist Bill Moyers for a series of interviews that became one of the most enduringly popular programs ever on PBS. In dialogues that adroitly span millennia of history and far flung geography, the two men discuss myths as metaphors for human experience and the path to transcendence. You can listen to the full series on audible. Simply search for the power of myth and it will pop right up. It has an average of 4.7 stars out of five, with nearly 4000 ratings. It's outstanding. I highly recommend you check it out. You will not be disappointed. And in the meantime, here's a taste test. Please enjoy. The first program, the hero's adventure. And without further ado, here are Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers.

Program one the hero's adventure. You I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the goal of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. Joseph Campbell and the power of myth with Bill moyers, the hero's adventure.

Joseph Campbell believed that everything begins with a story. So we begin this series with Joseph Campbell, with one of his favorites. He was in JApan for a conference on religion, and he overheard another american delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, we've been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines, but I don't get your ideology. I don't get your theology. The JapaneSe paused, as though in deep thought, and then slowly shook his head. I think we don't have ideology, he said. We don't have theology. We dance. Campbell could have said it of his own life. When he died in 1987 at the age of 83, he was considered one of the world's foremost authorities on mythology, the stories and legends told by human beings through the ages to explain the universe and their place in it. The 20 books he wrote or edited have influenced artists and performers as well as scholars and students. When he died, he was working on a monumental historical atlas of world mythology, his effort to bring under one roof the spiritual and intellectual wisdom of a lifetime. Some of his books are classics, the hero with a thousand faces, which established his fame 40 years ago, and his four volume study of mythology, the masks of God. Joseph Campbell was one of the most spiritual men I ever met. But he didn't have an ideology or a theology. Mythology was to him the song of the universe, music so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious that we dance to it even when we can't name the tune. Over the last two summers of his life, we taped these conversations in California at Skywalker Ranch, the home of his friend George Lucas, whose movie trilogy, Star wars, had been influenced by Campbell's work. We talked about the message and meaning of myth, about the first storytellers, about love and marriage, gods and goddesses, religion, ritual, art and psychology. But we always came around to his favorite subject, the hero with a thousand faces. Why the hero with a thousand faces?

Well, because there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many, many periods of history. And I think it's essentially, you might say, the one deed done by many, many different people.

Why are there so many stories of the hero or of heroes in mythology?

Well, because that's what's worth writing about. I mean, even in popular novel writing, you see, the main character is a hero or a heroine. That is to say, someone who has found or achieved or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself.

So in all of these cultures, whatever the costume the hero might be wearing, what is the deed?

Well, there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed. The hero who has performed a war act or a physical act of heroism, saving a life, that's a hero act, giving himself, sacrificing himself to another. And the other kind is the spiritual hero who has learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then come BaCK and communicated it. It's a cycle. It's a going and a return that the hero cycle represents. But then this can be seen also in the simple initiation ritual where a child has to give up its childhood and become an adult, has to die, you might say, to its infantile personality and psyche, and come back as a self responsible adult. It's a fundamental experience that everyone has to undergo. We're in our childhood for at least 14 years. And then to get out of that posture of dependency, psychological dependency, into one of psychological self responsibility requires a death and resurrection. And ThAT is the basic motif of the hero journeY, leaving one condition, finding the source of life to bring you forth in a richer or more mature.

Or other condition, so that if we happen not to be heroes in the grand sense of redeeming society, we have to take that journey ourselves, spiritually, psychologically inside US.

That's right. And Oto Rock, in his wonderful,