Of people who have died in my lifetime, I would have to list Joseph Campbell as one of the ones I wish I could have met – although I’d want to be the age I am now, I think, because of where my thinking about mythology, religion and personal development is. On the other hand, maybe meeting Campbell when I was 20 would have helped get me heading to where I am now more quickly – which is certainly a better spiritually than I was then.

Of course, it’s not like I’ve found spiritual nirvana to date, maybe it would be more accutate to say that I’m spiritually better informed.

When I moved out of home to go to college, one of the things I was happiest to be free of was compulsory church attendance. My dislike of Christianity was a direct consequence of this – starting well before I was really intellectually seeing the issues with religion possessing a four thousand year old cosmology attempting to exist in the modern world. Once I had the knowledge and sense to see the the broader issue, that was just icing on the cake so to speak.

I majored in Physics and Astrophysics – pretty much the hardest of hard sciences as it were – and spent pretty much all of college and grad school eschewing any sort of spiritualism. Sure, I still enjoyed reading fantasy fiction, took a metaphysics course, stuff like that, but it was either for diversion or self-knowledge.

Another problem I have is just that, that I tend to think of it as just a diversion, a way to ignore the ‘real’ issues. On the other hand, we all do things to divert us: reading, RPGs, movies, television, alcohol, drugs, sports, the list goes on and on. So, who’s to say spiritualism or religion are any worse (or better) than the others.

I suppose should explain what I mean when I say religious or spiritual. By religious I mean someone who follows a specific (more or less) faith, usually an organized one. Spiritual is a little harder to define. By that I mean someone who realizes the value of many of the themes and values of religion (and probably adheres to some of them), but does not subscribe to a particular religion.

So, anyhow, once I got out of grad school, I started becoming interested in religion and spirituality again. I’ve read and/or dabbled in a few other religions, Buddhism, Asatru, Wicca, and a couple more, but never found anything that did much for me. Although Buddhism did the most.

Then I came across Campbell, and what he had to say struck closer that anything else so far. Religin and mythology and spiritualism are all the same really. They serve a social and psychology need for humans – but are human constructs. However, this doesn’t lessen their importance or our need for them. If anything, to me (and to Campbell), their psychology and sociological underpinnings make them even more compelling – transcendence still exists, it’s just internal, not external.

I’d heard some of this before, but never presented in such a way, or with so much evidence. So, now, I’m finally taking the time to learn more about it since first discovering it.

When I started this post, I intented to write more about Campbell’s philosophy, but it’s turning out to be more about me, so I’m going to save that for another post. First to keep this to a reasonable length and second because, to be honest, I don’t have a deep enough understanding of it yet to really do that anyway.