Joseph Campbell on religion
I remembered this quote today when I was talking about my deconstruction from Mormonism. For background, I landed in the church non-consensually when I was 13, after my biological parents died and I was placed with a TBM foster family. I managed to escape (very dramatically!) when I was 19. I never went back. I've even gone no contact with the foster parents, and with almost everybody else in my ward.
My bio parents were Japanese immigrants, and they followed a secular form of Buddhism. Part of my own journey out of TSCC was trying to rediscover their ... faith? Don't know if you could legitimately call it that, but that's a different discussion.
In the middle of that rediscovery process, I discovered the following quote from Joseph Campbell. Incredibly useful for me. I thought I'd share it with you all. Campbell was talking about the Bible, but I think it applies equally well to the Book of Mormon.
"We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives.
In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences - ever deeper, ever greater - of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence."