Bonus: Phil Cousineau - The Wisdom of The Odyssey

Phil, it is so good to have you back on the Podcast With a Thousand Faces, and what a timely experience that we will have today because you have a new book, and this new book is, uh, quite nicely aligned with something big that's happening in our popular culture, which is the release of Christopher Nolan's new movie, The Odyssey.

And I would love just to start our, our conversation today by addressing this question o- o- of why The Odyssey was an important book when Homer wrote it in antiquity, and why is it still important today?

Thanks for inviting me back on the podcast, uh, in, in honor of our old friend and, and mentor, Joe Campbell.

So very appropriate overlap there because that very word, mentor, comes from the book that we want to discuss today.

Mentor.

Mo- would fascinate most people to hear that Homer coined it, and the, the reason behind that is so applicable and germane to our topic today.

Mentor originally in Greek means mind maker.

Hmm.

And this was enormously important to our friend, Joe Campbell, because he said, "Compared to the old spiritual and teaching traditions in which you try to honor and replicate and respect the elders who come before you, the guru tradition, the Greeks begin this whole tradition in the West of independent thinking with this notion in Homer that when he, when Odysseus, goes off to war as one of the generals in the Trojan War, he has, he has to leave his newborn son, Telemachus, behind.

And the question then becomes: What do you do when you fly the coop? What, do you take care of business, as we used to say in Detroit, TCB.

In this case, he turned to the family counselor, this character is sometimes called, and says, "Mentor, would you look after my son while I am away?" Now, the beauty of that is that in the Greek tradition, mentor means mind maker.

The mentor is the kind of teacher who looks after your spiritual welfare-

Hmm

...

the condition of your soul, and allows you over and over again to say, "I honor the people who came before me, but I want to honor my own independent thinking." Which, of course, is that is what is laid out so beautifully by Homer in The Odyssey that arguably Odysseus is the first thinking male character in Western literature.

All of the others are mo- are moving, acting, responding by sheer instinct, and this move towards independent thinking, the man of the polytropos mind, the mind that turns around and around and around an issue, is a glorious moment in our history because it's the beginning of what we think of as independent thought.

Hmm.

What do you think? Okay, this is what the Vatican thinks, and this is what your ninth grade English teacher thinks, and this is what your grandfather thought.

What do you think?

Hmm.