Author: Mike Colagrossi / Source: Big Think

• Joseph Campbell’s monomyth as a guide to finding one’s self.
• Alan Watts explores the notion of symbolically returning to the forest.
• How to set ones own meaning in a world of confusion and chaos.

Joseph Campbell’s life work covered a wide range of the communal human experience.

Campbell explored the various mythologies of our planet and managed to elucidate on the common threads between them all. He’s popularly known for coining the concept, the hero’s journey or monomyth, which is a narrative cycle that is found to some degree in all great legends and stories around the world.

This topic of discussion in an influential television series with journalist Bill Moyers brought Campbell’s idea further into the mainstream posthumously in the latter half of the 20th century.

From this idea stems one of Campbell’s greater points about the universality of experience and need to find your own truth or as his famous saying goes to follow your bliss.

Campbell’s ability to fuse comparative mythologies into one comprehensive world spanning myth can serve as the basis for discovering one’s own personal truth. Human patterns repeat themselves over timescales far and wide. Once you can come to terms with the multifarious iterations of these universal stories, Campbell believed that you need to leave ideology behind once you’ve learned from it.

Alan Watts, had a similar sentiment to this idea, a contemporary and friend to Campbell – Watts explored the implications inherent to Campbell’s view when exploring his early work of Return to the Forest.

Return to the Forest

“You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.” – Joseph Campbell

In Return to the Forest, Campbell explored what it meant to the individual and society when these common myths and systems begin to break down. In this chaos, when there is no central guiding myth, celestial authority or truth to guide us – what will become of the individual seeking meaning or their own truth?

Watts believed that the fundamental force guiding civilizations together has been one not only of mutually shared communication in a common language, but a common viewpoint of the world…

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