The Power of Myth, John Lennon and marijuana
My wife and I were rewatching Gilmore Girls for the umpteenth time recently, when we came upon episode 17 of season four. Rory Gilmore and Paris Geller travel to Florida for spring break. Instead of partying, the pair stay in their hotel room and watch The Power of Myth, a six-episode PBS documentary.
The joke here is that while The Power of Myth is excellent, it’s a very staid affair, not at all what you would expect college students to enjoy while their classmates are guzzling alcohol on the beach. The series features journalist Bill Moyers interviewing writer Joseph Campbell about comparative mythology.
Watching Gilmore Girls with my wife, I made a mental note it was about time I revisited The Power of Myth. Approximately 20 years earlier, my uncle had given me a copy of the program on audiocassette. If memory serves, the tapes originally belonged to my maternal grandfather, but I’m unsure.
In my senior year of high school, I’d listen to these. Then I’d put on John Lennon’s greatest hits and smoke massive amounts of pot. There was something about that combination — Joseph Campbell, the former Beatle and marijuana — which provoked a deep spiritual experience in me. It’s a little embarrassing, but that’s how it happened.
The only way I know how to describe the experience was it was like I could see the whole of history and how countless, anonymous people in every generation labored for a better society. It was inspiring and immediately made my other interests seem trivial. I wanted, in my own small way, to be one of those laborers for justice.
I think Lennon’s music, particularly the song Imagine, which I’d listen to over and over, gave the experience a specific political content. I didn’t pay much attention to the lines critical of religion. Maybe I did, but understood them as criticism of organized religion or specific religious metaphors.
Either way, this was definitely a spiritual experience. That came from Campbell. Revisiting The Power of Myth, I tried to figure out what had prompted it. Of course, Campbell talks a lot about protagonists heeding the call to adventure. I was a young man at the time looking for a worthy quest of my own. So there’s that.
However, I also think Campbell’s discussion of common themes across religious mythology resonated with my spiritual upbringing. Readers of the blog know my mother identifies as a Christian, but her favorite religious writer is the Hindu Eknath Easwaran. Perenialism is part of the common ground they share.
Campbell actually helped produce an English translation of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, which was published in 1942. The Indian mystic was a major influence on Easwaran. Ramakrishna was another who believed all spiritual traditions were describing the same essential truth.
As I got deeper into the left, I realized many of the people I looked up to were atheists. I falsely believed a dogmatic materialism was necessary to belong there. I forced religious-inspired leftism from my mind. Still, that spiritual experience motivated me as I think it continues to do today.