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"Following his trip to India, Campbell, at least in his conversations, had began to extol the virtues of individuality, whereas prior to his trip he heaped scorn upon both individuality and the Western way of life that encouraged it. Yet, this transition in his feelings and attitudes was not reflected in his writings since, for example, in the first three volumes of The Masks of God, - published about a decade, or more, after his trip, he not only continued to champion the Eastern model in which the individual seeks to realize her or his essential unity with the cosmos and the Divine principle that animates the cosmos, Campbell also continued to castigate the West for its childish preoccupations with the self-centered world of individuality.

"Up until the fourth volume of his The Masks of God series, Campbell was able to give the public an impression of theoretical consistency throughout his perspective by pushing the psychological interpretation concerning the significance of all myths, in general, and the hero myth, in particular. In other words, Campbell still believed the psychological meaning of myths was, and is, the underlying unity of all of reality, but ontologically, the role of individuality, as the heart and soul of the human condition, had begun, since 1954, to assume more importance in his thinking than that of egolessness.

"Campbell's writings in the Creative Mythology volume of The Masks of God introduced a major shift, that he never explained, in the ontological side of his theory. In this final volume of the series, the character of the hero changed in certain fundamental respects and departed significantly from the Eastern model of the hero that Campbell had been psychologically, but not ontologically championing, since his return from his trip to India.

"In point of fact, this volume of the series provided Campbell with an opportunity to heal an ontological wound that had been festering for the thirteen or fourteen years which had passed between his trip to India and the publication of the fourth volume of The Masks of God. One might even speculate this four volume series was conceived, and undertaken, by Campbell with the implicit intention of providing a progressive, if not evolutionary, conception of the transition from, on the one hand, primitive, oriental and occidental traditions of myth, to, on the other hand, the modern world in which creative individuals, rather than mystic sages, were responsible for generating new myths capable of calling people to discover the wisdom of the unconscious.

"In doing so, the nature of modern wisdom, the modern meaning of unity, and the character of the modern hero would have changed considerably from that of the other three kinds of myth-driven cultures that had been explored in the first three volumes of The Masks of God. Simultaneously, an ontological dimension would have been re-introduced into the theoretical framework that could have permitted Campbell to not only forget, if he wished, about his experiences in India, but actually would have validated those experiences as necessarily pointing in the direction of the importance of the individual over that of an oppressive, marginalizing and impoverished communalism of the ancient worlds, whether primitive, oriental or occidental.

"In the context of Campbell's perspective concerning the notion of modern myth, wisdom is no longer a matter of the Divine enlightenment and concomitant self-realization that becomes possible through an egoless individual. Wisdom has become the province of those individuals who can create the kind of symbols and myths which are capable of engaging the emotions, understandings and actions of modern humans and, thereby, induce us to explore and realize all of the life-potentialities that are within us but which, up to this point in our lives, have not been reclaimed from the unconscious.

"The ontological unity proposed by the modern creator of myths is that of becoming reintegrated with our psychological and biological nature and, among other things, the inherent capacity of this nature for loving others. The love being referred to by Campbell is neither the libidinous desire of Eros, nor the brotherly/sisterly love of agape, but the courtly form of love, amor, that he considers to be a dynamic combination of both Eros and agape and, yet, also involves something more.

"For Campbell, amor is to be considered an end in itself. In addition, Campbell believes, amor ennobles, if not redeems, individual character through its qualities of courage, temperance, courtesy, loyalty, aesthetic sensitivities, conscience, as well as conscientiousness.

"In the mythic worlds of primitives, orientals and occidentals, the journey toward the death of the ego and, therefore, the death of that which drives the individual excesses through which the world's problems are brought into being, is the path to enlightenment. In the modern world of creative mythology, one's willingness to risk physical death - which is the price one often must pay for realizing, and acting on, amor - becomes the path to enlightenment.

"According to Campbell, amor brings a balance to life that combines properties of other-worldliness and this-worldliness. As such, amor is said to allow one to realize the immanence of the Divine in the physical/material world because those who have surrendered to this dimension of their life-potential come to understand the true nature of both themselves and the world, not as a function of what some institution, like the Church, assumes one should be, but as a function of what we are in reality.

"Consequently, Campbell believes, and/or affirms, the value and reality of the physical world in a way that is absent from, if not denied by, the other kinds of mythic world that are explored in the first three volumes of The Masks of God. Accordingly, in the realm of creative mythology, one finds enlightenment and self-fulfilment by undertaking one's journey in the material world rather than by traveling to some other non-material realm.

"The hero of the modern myth is no longer the one who goes to a wondrous, mysterious world and gains Divine enlightenment which permits the hero to become absorbed into the whole and, in the process, reveals the everyday world to be worthless and illusory. The hero of the modern myth is the artist, the creator and the innovator who strives for individual attainment and are willing to believe in the authenticity and legitimacy of their own, unique experiences and understandings, rather than in the arguments of authority issued from religious, political, or cultural institutions.

"The individuality and originality of the modern hero are contrasted with the inflexibility and conformity of the three other mythic worlds. The modern hero is a liberator who is seeking to place faith in oneself and one's own creative understanding of personal experience, in order to fill the vacuum left by, according to Campbell, the failing and oppressive orthodoxies of the primitive, oriental and occidental worlds to which individuals were subordinated previously.

"By the end of Creative Mythology, Campbell believes he has returned to, and restored to prominence, all of the most important themes of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, such as universality, the mystical, selfless sacrifice, and a hazardous or dangerous journey inward. In reality, however, I feel Campbell has succeeded only in resurrecting and entrenching the very same personal ego that the latter book was dedicated to counselling us to eliminate from our lives.

"Campbell has universalized the false self at the expense of the true self. Moreover, the selflessness that Campbell believes he has introduced into the realm of creative mythology is nothing but the delusions of the false self trying to rationalize what are the largely self-serving, selfish and self-centered activities of the ego.

"Amor is the ego manifesting itself through a new mask. Amor is the ego with a thousand faces.

"Moreover, by drawing attention to the realm of magical enchantment that is an important theme in his notion of creative mythology, Campbell feels he has revitalized myth with the mystical dimension that was present in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Unfortunately, he apparently fails to understand there is such a huge difference between the mystical and the magical that the two realms really have nothing to do with one another.

"The magical covers a spectrum of possibilities. At one end of this spectrum are all of the strange and mysterious creations of poets, novelists, artists and musicians that invite the audience to explore all manner of possibilities which can be constructed through the magical nature of conceptual, experiential and emotional combinatorics.

"At the other end of the spectrum of the magical is magic, broadly construed. This not only encompasses the tricks and illusions of those who today are passed off as magicians, but also involves those who actually have the capacity to draw upon a realm of reality in which there are certain, limited powers capable of generating non-ordinary physical phenomena.

"Mysticism has nothing to do with the magical in any of the foregoing senses. Mysticism is, now, and always has been, concerned with helping the individual to know one's essential relatedness to Divinity, as well as to realize one's unique capacity to give expression to that essential relatedness.

"Mysticism is not about the fantasmal or conceptual exploration of that which is phenomenologically alluring, inexplicable or mysterious. Mysticism is not about magical powers or the creation of illusions or the learning of tricks.

"Mysticism beckons us to our essential nature and identity. Mysticism offers the possibility, for those willing to undertake the journey and stay with it until the end of the line, of coming into as close a contact and understanding of ultimate reality as human beings are capable of accomplishing.

"Campbell tries to contend the hero of creative mythology is someone who, like the hero of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, goes on a journey of self-discovery and self-realization involving various kinds of hazard. For instance, by resisting the authority of religious and political institutions, the modern hero opens himself or herself up to the possibility of encountering different kinds of danger - physical, emotional, financial, and social - created by the forces to which the creative individual stands in opposition.

"Apparently, Campbell has forgotten that in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the individual who undertook the inward journey encountered no greater danger than his own ignorance, selfishness and oppressiveness. Indeed, the dictatorship of the ego or false self is far more elusive, tricky, ruthless and difficult to overcome than is any external dictatorship.

"Furthermore, defiance, in and of itself, does not guarantee that either truth or justice is being served through such resistance. Defiance becomes a heroic act only when truth and justice are being served in the context of furthering the essential interests of individual, family, community and all of creation.

"All too frequently, defiance is an act of the ego or false self. More often than not, rebellion is merely a sign of the ego looking after its limited, non-essential, vested interests, and such rebellion is directed against those who are doing likewise but who have the advantage of being in power.

"Among other things, one of the characteristics of the false-self is to attribute to itself what, in reality, does not belong to it. In the mythic world of the modern hero, the artist considers herself or himself to be the creator, and, yet, the artist has absolutely no idea of where the creations come from or how they come into being or what they really mean.

"All the false self knows is that it was present, in some fashion, when the creative or innovative impulse came. Like a country that flies its flag over unknown, but desirable, territory, or like a squatter who lays claim to property simply because the individual is too lazy to make the effort necessary to discover whether there is another who owns the property being claimed, the false self grabs hold of the products of creativity as if they were its very own possessions.

"In Creative Mythology Campbell has come up with a framework in which he meets all the criteria for what he considers to be characteristics of a modern hero. Explicitly, he admires Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Purzival and Gottfried von Strasburg's Tristan.

"Implicitly, Campbell, I feel, admires himself, because like these other modern heroes, he has succeeded in creating, and giving expression to, the myth of the modern hero as the consummate individualist. The modern hero is someone who thinks for oneself on the basis of one's own evaluation and authentication of one's experience and is, as a result, willing to stand up to, and defy, the authority of the institutions that seeks to prevent the free exercise of that individuality.

"The modern hero is one who is prepared to explore the depths of amor against all opposition to such a project, and this modern hero is, if necessary, even ready to risk physical death in order to live in accordance with amor. In reality, the modern hero, in an inversion of the direction of transformation undergone by the hero of a thousand faces, is willing to exchange the infinite domain of Divine wisdom for the limited domain of purely human experience, and, then, the modern hero feels duty-bound to proselytize this inversion through the creation of myths which attempt to justify the exchange as a good bargain.

"As a result, the whole character of metaphysics and ontology changes from what had been the case in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In modern metaphysics, the Divine principle - which, for the hero-of- old, animated and unified the individual and the cosmos - has been supplanted by, if not sacrificed to, the anthropoid principle in which everything becomes a function of, and reduced to, the modern hero's interpretive ignorance and arrogance concerning Divinity, the nature of the universe and the essential character of the human being.

"Everything created by the modern hero may carry the signature of individual uniqueness. Yet, there is no guarantee that any of this creative uniqueness reflects aspects of reality or truth beyond the individual's own description and interpretation of his or her experience.

"In the modern myth, truth becomes a tautology in which conclusions concerning reality merely reflect the assumptions of the creator of a given myth. Ontology becomes a function of the biases and prejudices that color our creative understanding - biases and prejudices that give expression to the limited, but endlessly changing, horizons of conceptual and emotional moods.

"This creative process may lead to a correct or accurate rendering of individual perceptions. However, there is nothing which necessitates that such perceptions constitute an accurate reflection of what the ultimate or essential nature of the cosmos or the human being entails.

"Instead of aspiring to the infinite heights to which an egoless enlightenment and absorption in Divinity invites us, the modern hero insists not only on individualistic separation from Divinity, but wishes to limit the Divine to what we create in our own image within very finite psychological, emotional, sensory and material realms. Whereas the hero of a thousand faces found Self-sufficiency through being unified with the Divine principle, the ego of a thousand faces finds self-sufficiency in its own creative musings.

"In Creative Mythology, Campbell does retain many of the general themes of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but he does so at a great cost. He has jettisoned the substantive heart, soul and spirit of the latter work merely to save the appearances of an outer, superficial, and theoretical consistency in thought concerning the psychological and ontological meaning of myth and its symbols."

When Tammy Winthrop finished speaking, we all seemed to become lost in our individual reflections on, and feelings about, not only what she had been discussing, but also the contributions of Melanie, Ben, Andrea and Colby. I had found the explorations of both Jung and Campbell to be quite informative and interesting, but I also sort of felt a bit like a sort of social or group parasite for not having contributed more to the conversation.

Before having been invited by Vince to join the discussion, I had spent a little bit of time speculating about their group's dynamics. I wondered now, if I had been a part of the group then, how I would have described my relationship to the group that I had been observing from across the lounge.

Sometimes, perhaps a lot of the time, there is a whole spectrum of dynamics going on beneath the surface of behavioral appearances that tie one to a group but which would be difficult to identify merely through observation of who does or doesn't speak. I liked being with these people and enjoyed listening to them, but one might never know this if one were to make judgements based on my level of observable interaction.

Vince broke the silence. "I've got some errands to run, so I'm going to have to leave, but I was wondering if everybody would like to meet for another session this evening, after dinner some time?"

Externally, everyone sort of looked around at one another trying to get some sense of how others felt about the prospect of getting together again. Internally, I'm sure, people were mentally checking their appointment calendars for possible schedule conflicts.

Very little time transpired before we all seemed to agree we would like to get together again. Although the people in the circle may have agreed to a later meeting because they were conforming to some sort of social expectation about such things, I had a good feeling about what I perceived to be the genuine and sincere desire of all the participants to enjoy one another's company, and the discussion, for, at least, a little longer.

Although Vince tried to convince us the discussion should not come to end just because he was leaving, we all decided this portion of the discussion probably had reached a natural point of termination. After arranging a time for meeting back at here at the lounge area, we all went off to our respective short-term destinies.

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