So, I've been reading Joseph Campbell's Transformations of Myth Through Time, and, I have to say, I have been somewhat disappointed. Not in Campbell's ideas, but in his presentation, which is jarring, to say the least. This is a companion book to a PBS series and I really think it suffers as some type of literal transcription of the series rather than being written as a separate book. Let me give you an example from chapter 7, From Id to Ego in the Orient. To preface this, he is discussing yoga and how yoga is finding our center, akin to Buddha sitting at the immovable point, and is attempting to contrast the center yoga seeks with what we know and understand of daily living. And note, this is one paragraph so one single idea:

The word Buddha means "the one who has waked up, whose eyes have opened." We carry the eye in our pocket all the time. It is on the back of the dollar bill, at the top of the pyramid, where the sides, the pairs of opposites, come together. There the eye of knowledge opens. But in the field of action you are down on the side. You are on this side, and the other guy is on the other side, and so you have action. But this eye is the middle eye, the eye of the referee in the tennis match. It doesn't care which side wins. You can't have a match unless there is some serious intention to knock the other chap out. So time asks for violence. But this eye asks for the recognition behind the violence, of peace, where the lion sits down with the lamb. This doesn't mean the lion isn't going to eat the lamb. Of course he is going to eat the lamb. But it means nothing is happening when that happens. That's just a temporal thing, and you must realize the peace that lies behind the act. So we have the Buddha under the tree. His eyes have opened as a result of the influence of these other Buddhas. These are the meditation Buddhas, Dhyani Buddhas. They are not historical Buddhas; they are subtle matter. It's through their influence that the comes to this knowledge. Ignorance is represented by a pig and is pierced by a lance. With the opening of the eye, ignorance is wiped out.

Transformations of Myth Through Time, Joseph Campbell, p. 138

When I first read this, I had been reading for 20 pages or so without a jarring disconnect and then he tosses in that line about the lion and the lamb. Ok... I can get the point he's making there. That's not a jarring disconnect, that's a "I'm going to throw in something you probably understand in a different context and make you think" statement. There is no violence in the lion eating the lamb, it is just the natural order of things. Not sure how it relates to finding the calm other than the fact that a sated lion is willing to befriend the lamb and invite it over for dinner later but I can chew that one over. But those last two sentences really don't fit in without a better frame of reference, which I suspect the video contains and the book doesn't.

And that frame of reference is a myth he introduced chapters ago and mentioned in passing a couple paragraphs ago but doesn't really provide any clue from the text that this is what he was talking about. The book is filled with loose couplings that really don't tie together well. I'm going to finish it but Mike Amundsen has recommended The Power of Myth, so I think I'll try that next.

I'm going to do a proper book review when I'm done but this is slow going.