Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, the San Graal, individualism, and religion

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...from Joseph Campbell's fourth volume of The Masks of God. In that work, he suggests that the civilized West is the growing matrix for a new sense of mythology geared to the creative life of ‘an adequate individual, who seeks his or her own way in the world and, through following this personal path, develops a relationship to the archetypical and mythological powers that inform life. ...Campbell traced this special recognition of the autonomy of the human soul in the Western tradition through the medieval Courts of Love and into the rich mythology of the Arthurian Round Table. ...It was a passage in the twelfth-century La Queste del San Graal, Campbell said, that triggered his insight. Each knight went his own way, "...striking out into the forest, one here, one there, wherever they saw it thickest and wherever path or track was absent," to enact his personal quest-adventure. ...In sum, Joseph Campbell boldly suggested that it is this individual path to the mysteries, not necessarily the collective participation enjoined on us by all the religions, that may well constitute the ultimate human adventure.”

                                    (Stephen Larson, The Mythic Imagination, p227-228)

 It is important to be different; it is the way we give expression to another person of what they are not themselves, and vice versa. By being different we increase the infinity of existence. The differences in each of us expand the cosmos by adding to it. For this we should be grateful.

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These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.