I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, and it is blowing my mind. So much basic, simple stuff that feels so relevant. All these primitive cultures sharing the same stories despite being geographically isolated from each other because they’re trying to describe the same realities in their day to day existence.

– Man is forced to kill to survive, be it plant or animal. What happens to the living thing that we kill to eat? How do we honor the sacrifice of that being? An eternal dilemma for early societies.

– Duality is a by-product of being bound to the physical world. Man, woman; good, evil; past, present. When you transcend these things and commune with God, you see that all are the same and there is only the One.

– In times of danger, man forgets his separation between himself and others. A police officer in Hawaii rushed to save a man about to commit suicide by leaping from a cliff, only to find himself being dragged down as well until both are saved by another police officer. Why did the first officer rush to save the man? Because his instinct tells him that he and this man are the same and to let him die is to die himself.

I am totally buying the bejeezus out of The Hero with 1,000 Faces after this.