JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What is the new mythology?

What is – or what is to be – the new mythology?

“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”  So we are told in a little twelfth-century book known as The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers. Each of us – whoever and wherever he may be – is the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at Large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well. For, as I have already pointed out, we are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon. We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space. No wonder then if its laws and ours are the same!  Likewise, our depths are the depths of space, whence all those gods sprang that men’s minds in the past projected onto animals and plants, onto hills and streams, the planets and their courses, and their own particular social observances.

Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it, also, inward. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer hold our loves at home and project our aggression elsewhere; for on this spaceship earth there is no “elsewhere” any more. And no mythology that continues to speak or to teach of “elsewheres” and “outsiders” meets the requirements of this hour.

And so, to return to our opening question: What is – or what is to be – the new mythology?

It is – and will be forever, as long as our human race exists – the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples<” but to the waking up of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large – each in its own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

Excerpt from Joseph Campbell, MYTHS TO LIVE BY (Penguin Books, 1972)

Camp Happiness @ Second Life, Photo by Happiness Merryman

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Take a break from your monkey mind for a few minutes and listen to Era's "Infinity Ocean"...:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ICpuRYTOA