Joseph Campbell

And it's really taken me until now to find the name to I agonized over this for the past two years.

But now talk about like I wanted to say to that Joseph Campbell quote, that's like if the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.

When you were talking about everyone like looking the same and having the same path.

But that once this name has come through, like now it feels like I've entered the river, you know, and like I had the ideas and but it was like, oh, I couldn't write the intro.

yeah.

I think if people want to learn more about that, check out Joseph Campbell's writing.

There's a great series.

He talks about following your bliss, which I think is sort of misinterpreted these days into a kind of a woo-woo, do whatever you want.

Prestige, fame, money, all that stuff.

It's not meaningful.

Another Joseph Campbell quote, he said that we're not looking for the meaning of life as much as we're looking for the experience of being alive.

Yeah, that's good.

And so how do I thread the needle of doing a very personal story, but still make it cinematically engaging and externalizing it and all that stuff.

So I leaned on Joseph Campbell, my, my mentor.

You know, teacher and guide, and I've read just about everything he's written.

And Campbell is good for this kind of stuff.

And I think that that's really shifted a lot.

So we take the concept of the hero's journey, which was a pattern that existed centuries ago, but Joseph Campbell brought to the Western world and to the general public.

And the whole idea of the hero's journey is to go on this vision quest discover something about yourself and bring that back, right? So the piece that we're missing now in modern society that I find is that we're forgetting to bring it back.

So whether you look at the Greeks who went out on their own journeys, like the Odyssey, for example, right? Or in Japan, you go out on pilgrimages and all these cultures that had these ways of saying, okay, like This is a time bound period where you're going to go on your journey.

And so we had the moonwalk, which opened up a whole new literal horizon for of a boundaryless planet that we live on.

And from there, I sailed on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater with Pete Seeger and attended Woodstock and met Joseph Campbell and had all these amazing experiences.

That really was the way that I found myself in the midst of a journey of transformation in my mid-20s.

I pursued that and continued it on through my academic work for many decades.

And so we had the moonwalk, which opened up a whole new literal horizon for of a boundaryless planet that we live on.

And from there, I sailed on the maiden voyage of the Clearwater with Pete Seeger and attended Woodstock and met Joseph Campbell and had all these amazing experiences.

That really was the way that I found myself in the midst of a journey of transformation in my mid-20s.

I pursued that and continued it on through my academic work for many decades.

And so anyway, all that led me to, as a storyteller, what's the most important thing you can tell as a story and what's the purpose of the story? And my dad had sent me on videos and I watched them until I watched them out.

It was Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth.

And the interview was shot at Lucas's library at Lucas Ranch.

And Lucas would talk about, it was that idea that he shaped Star Wars.

I taught Homer's The Odyssey, and it talks about the hero's journey.

If anyone's familiar, it's Joseph Campbell.

But the hero has to leave his or her place where he physically or she physically lives.

And just like Odysseus did in the Odyssey, has to take a journey out of the physical space.