Life In Joseph Campbell: The Meaning Of Life

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Recommended: Religion and the meaning of life

When I first started reading the book, I honestly thought that it was going to be a really boring book. After I was done reading the introduction and I started to read the first chapter, the book wasn’t boring. The introduction to the first chapter already interested me. I never really think about the meaning of life. When Joseph Campbell said that people think they are trying to find the meaning of life, they’re actually trying to gain an experience of being alive. When people find their experiences of being alive they are trying to fulfill their “physical plane” so they actually feel alive. Campbell has an interesting philosophy on marriage. Marriage has two stages Campbell says, “First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interlay of the sexes …show more content…

He tells a story of a boy who brings a singing bird home, and the father kills the bird, and then the father drops dead because he ended life. Campbell says life is a song, it has a beginning and it flows with some ups and downs to an end. Campbell says if you stop the song, you stop life. Without nature there wouldn’t be any life. The cycle of life is ending life to make a new one, or continue another. I love how the number thirteen is connected to everything with life. I never knew that the number thirteen had such a significance. Life, religion, society revolves around the word rebirth. Thirteen is the number that the world was built on. Rebirth is what made the people feel like they were transcendent. Some questions I have: What are myths clues to that Campbell talks about? Why should we read myths from religion rather than our own? Why would lacking myth make people do bad things? What does Campbell mean when he says “The themes are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture”? What does Campbell mean about people becoming mythologized, and how would you become

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