Tag: Reading

The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell

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The Power of Myth

Yesterday I finished reading ‘The Power of Myth’ based on a televised conversation between Comparative Mythologist, Joseph Campbell and TV anchor, Bill Moyers. The book set in the conversational style and makes for an easy read.

The sentence ‘Myths are clues to spiritual potentialities of the human life’ appear in the opening chapter as well as the closing chapter of the book. And that’s one of the key messages that this conveys. The other key theme discussed in this book is the similarity or proximities between myths from different cultures, places and times. The close association, as per Campbell, is due to ‘certain powers in the psyche that are common to all mankind.’ As per Campbell, ‘Every mythology has to do with the wisdom of life as related to a specific culture at a specific time. It integrates the individual into his society and the society into the field of nature.’

Some of the countless nuggets of wisdom from the book:

  • Every religion is true in one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
  • If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.

 

  • Compassion is the fundamental religious experience, and, unless that is there, you have nothing. (A very important observation given the current series of religion based hate crimes).
  • You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature.
  • Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing.
  • It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
  • Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is giving over of oneself to the life of another.
  • Making money gets more advertisement. So the thing that happens and happens and happens, no matter how heroic it may be, is not news. Motherhood has lost its novelty, you might say.
  • Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.
  • Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical.
  • The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth (just brilliant).
  • A legendary hero is usually the founder of something – the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life.
  • In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.

 

  • You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning……. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation.
  • The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. (People carrying out the destruction of the ecology in pursuit of a fat bank account, please take a note.)
  • People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
  • What we’re learning in our schools is not wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. There’s a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

When I was watching the movie Troy, based on Greek epic Iliad, I was struck while watching the scene in which Achilles is killed by an arrow piercing his heel which is similar to a scene from Hindu epic Mahabharata, in which Krishna is killed by an arrow piercing his foot. After reading this book, I now realize that there are countless similarities between mythologies from different parts of the world.

There is one striking conversation in the second chapter in which Moyers reads verses from the creation story in Genesis and Campbell gives equivalent verses from other cultures ranging from the Pima Indians in Arizona, the Hindu Upanishads from India and the Bassari People of West Africa.

There is another conversation in the book about a story from Persia that Satan was condemned to hell because he loved God so much. I remember the The parallel episode to this from Hindu stories where the gate keepers of Vaikuntam, the heavenly abode of God Vishnu, are cursed by a group of saints. On the intervention of God Vishnu they are given an option between staying away from Vishnu for six births if they praise Vishnu in each birth or staying away from Vishnu for three births if they denounce him in each birth. Not able to bear the thought of being away Vishnu for six births, they accept to denounce him and are born as Asoora (Demon-like) kings in their next three births.

Reading ‘The Power of Myth’ is the best way to realize that humanity as whole shares the same roots, shares the same resources, shares the same fears and ultimately shares the same fate on this earth. As they say: ‘God is Love and Love is God.’ Love life and let all life forms live and flourish on this beautiful planet. May the power of sanity be with us and lead us to embrace the God within each one of us.

Print Books vs. E-Books – Part 3

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This is a follow up post to my previous post: Print Books VS. E-Books and Print Books VS E-Books – Part 2.

Amazon might promote Kindle E-Reader as device ‘for the love of reading.’ But we would get locked into Amazon’s system if we buy the Kindle E-reader. A friend of mine reads using his smart phone through Kindle e-Reading app as well as Flipkart’s e-reading app. He says he does comparison shopping and buys from the vendor who offers a book at the lowest price.

Reading only using e-reader also makes it difficult to come across interesting books other than what Amazon’s or other such vendors’s recommendation algorithm would suggest. In one particular instance, I was watching Barry Shwartz’s TED video on my laptop and then decided to buy his book, ‘The Paradox of Choice’. Using only the e-reader would rule out possibilities like these.

While most of the time we come across opinions that portray Social Media as unnecessary distraction, they can be useful too. Most non-fiction authors take between one year and three years to publish a new book. Following them on Social Media sites like Twitter would help us to find out about any follow up research or development after a book (on a particular topic) got published. Professors/Authors like Steven Pinker, Richard Thaler, Dan Ariely and Nassim Nicholas Taleb post about interesting ongoing academic research from their respective Twitter handles quiet often. Some of these ongoing research might act as supplement to the book that we might be reading. As is always the case with any social media we have to have the discipline to selectively browse and read, otherwise we will be wasting our time. This is where a general purpose device like a smartphone or a tablet might come in handy rather than a dedicated e-reader.

Having access social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp will also help us to share with our friends and acquaintances about what book we are reading. Rather than a way of just bragging, we can use these tools to share quotes, anecdotes, statistics, etc. from the book that we are reading. About a few days ago I was reading an article by James Altucher on Pope Francis. I found a quote by Pope Francis about the media very interesting and I shared it via my Twitter handle. What’s the fun of any activity including reading if we cannot assimilate (good) aspects of it into our personality and bring it to the fore in our social interactions? Reading from sources like blogs, forums and websites will also not be possible with a dedicated e-reader.

Having a general purpose device like a smartphone or tablet can be useful in other situations as well. On a couple of occasions, I have taken snaps at the most unlikeliest of places and times using my smartphone and used these snaps later to write blog posts (Examples: Urban Nomads, Free Bird Peeking at Caged Birds and Cloud – awkward wingman). There was another occasion when I was waiting in the reception of a dental clinic while my wife was getting her dental procedure done, I opened the Kindle e-reading app and read a book.

With passage time displays in smartphones and tablets might improve to negate some of the advantage enjoyed by e-readers. There might be some new development such as in spectacles and contact lens that can eliminate or at least drastically reduce the eye strain developed due to reading on smartphone or tablet displays.

Amazon markets its Kindle e-reader with the tagline: “For the love of reading.” In a way, we can assume, any e-reader carries a hidden tagline: ‘For the confinement of reading from e-books alone.”   While there is no doubt that e-books are superior to printed books on a number of utility factors, a dedicated e-reader is not absolutely necessary to enjoy these benefits. Ultimately buying and owning a dedicated e-reader is more a matter of affordability and preference than any technological requirement to enjoy e-books. A general purpose device like a smartphone or a tablet would allow us to read from a myriad sources in addition to e-books. We can actually use a smartphone or a tablet as a device to fulfil and enhance our ‘love for reading’ provided we only have the discipline to do so.

Print Books vs. E-Books – Part 2

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This is a follow up post to my previous post: Print Books VS. E-Books.

A friend of mine introduced me to the idea of general reading during my MBA days. I wish I had picked up this wonderful habit much earlier. I generally used to read non-fiction books in paperback format. One of the problems I have encountered every now and then is that after starting a book and getting the basic message of the book, if the writing style is not to my liking, I tend to discontinue reading further. I also tend to get very restless in reading books that run beyond 300 to 350 pages. I have accumulated so many books over the course of the last ten years that managing them has become a problem (at least the ones that I have not finished reading and don’t foresee reading either). The problem is compounded by the fact that I have lived in four different cities over the course of the last ten years or so and moving and maintaining these books has been a problem.

So the last few books that I have bought have all been in e-book format. I do not own a Kindle e-book reader. I have been thinking about buying one for a long time now. Instead I have continued to read these e-books using the Kindle app in my smartphone or my laptop. The kind of money that I will have to shell out on a Kindle e-reader would transform my book reading experience from simple pleasure to a guilty pleasure. Let’s dig a little deeper in to this.

Amazon has been promoting Kindle e-readers in a big way in India these days. They have stepped up the print and television ads in the last few months. They are also sponsoring a short story writing contest in tie-up with The Times of India. The cheapest Kindle e-reader is INR 5,999, the Kindle Paperwhite is priced at INR 10,999 and the Kindle Voyage is priced at INR 16,499. Most of Amazon’s ads feature the Kindle Paperwhite and to enjoy most of the benefits that are being advertised, one would have to have at least the Kindle Paperwhite. Let’s take the case of Kindle Paperwhite for the sake of this post.

Amazon India sells E-books at a discount compared to paperback versions. The discount is not substantial but let’s assume that the average money saved by buying an e-book is INR 100. If I buy a Kindle Paperwhite, I would have to read at least 110 books to start accumulating actual savings in money when compared to buying all these books in paperback format. On an average I read about one book a month. At that rate it will take me 9 years to realize the above said savings. I am not sure if the e-reader will function fully well till that period (accounting for durability of the product as well as my own handling of it). Amazon itself gives only one year warranty for the product. It’s safe to say that like most gadgets these days it will reach end of life between third and fifth year.

We might argue, the cost benefit analysis is not the right way to look at the Kindle e-reader; it enhances the reading experience. But only as long as I am fine with reading books and/or magazines in black and white. Kindle e-reader is Henry Ford’s equivalent of a gadget: ‘We can read whatever we want to read on the Kindle e-reader as long as its BLACK and White.’ I went to Croma Retail store a couple of days back to check out the Kindle Paperwhite. The children’s magazine (cartoon) that was loaded in the demo version was in black and white. That same magazine (in colorful form) is available for INR 25 in print edition. I am not sure if I or my daughter would ever be interested in reading a cartoon strip in black and white. I can safely say never. If I have to pay INR 10,999 and still make a compromise with my reading experience (on some of the stuff that I would read) then I might as well make a compromise with my reading experience without spending INR 10,999 (by reading on the app on my mobile and laptop). As of now the only person in my circle who owns a Kindle e-reader (basic version) did not actually buy it; his friends gifted it to him!