Culture

I. The convergence — what Campbell and Jung actually claim In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces and made a claim that, if true, should have changed everything. Every mythology, across every culture that has ever existed, produces the same story: departure, initiation, return. The hero leaves the known world, undergoes a transformation in the depths, and returns with something for the community. Campbell’s argument was not that the stories resemble each other by coincidence or by diffusion. It was that they resemble each other because they describe the same thing: a psychological process, available to any human being willing to undergo it. …

There was an eleventh-century Tibetan lama known to his students as Gloomy Face. His given name was Langthangpa Dorje Senge; the nickname came from a vow he had taken never to smile. He was also one of the teachers responsible for transmitting the Lojong mind-training slogans — a collection of pithy instructions whose recurring theme is the danger of taking oneself too seriously. The irony, apparently, was intentional. He lived the joke so completely that he became it. …