1. Joseph Campbell, Story & Other Maps
of the Human Adventure
Jelly Helm
Curiosity Club
May 13, 2014

2. me
amateur
you
our story

3. “Our Story”
Remind me again – together we
trace our strange journey, find
each other, come on laughing.
Some time we’ll cross where life
ends. We’ll both look back
as far as forever, that first day.
I’ll touch you – a new world then.
Stars will move in a different way.
We’ll both end. We’ll both begin.
Remind me again.
- Wm. Stafford

4. Story is a map
A map is a guide or tool
that helps us navigate & understand
an unknown or partially known landscape or territory
From Latin Mappa Mundi “sheet of the world”
What landscape/territory does story map?

5. The human adventure

6. “From the very beginning we invented stories
that enabled us to put our lives in a larger
setting, that revealed an underlying pattern,
and gave us a sense that, against all the
depressing and chaotic evidence to the
contrary, life had meaning and value.”
Karen Armstrong,
A Short History of Myth

7. Story
mundane
egocentric
revealing
deeper pattern

8. Sanskrit
VEDA
knowledge
Greek/Latin
HISTORIA
finding out
narrative
history
Middle English
HISTORY STORY
Greek
HISTOR
learned,
wise man
shares
root
WIT
Latin
VIDERE
see

9. Joseph Campbell summarized themes common to hero stories across time culture

10. young hero

11. stuck

12. called to a great adventure

13. “no.”
refusal of the call

15. thrown into a strange world

16. friends

17. facing worst fears

18. pow

19. there’s no place like home

20. Each of us is called to an adventure

21. Stay alert for the call – watch for clues
Follow your bliss
Don’t be afraid
First,
you have to
say yes
Bring your
blessing back
to the world
A quest bigger than you
You have what
it takes
You’re not alone -
You’ll have help
***

23. another map by Ken Wilber and others

24. A labyrinth is another map/tool - a walking meditation for
connecting with our path, coming to our center and returning

25. “Accidentally on Purpose”
The Universe is but the Thing of things,
The things but balls all going round in rings.
Some mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
All of them radiant and mighty shiny.
They mean to tell us all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind
In an albino monkey in the jungle,
And even then it had to grope and bungle,
Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
To show the evolution how to steer.
They mean to tell us, though, the Omnibus
Had no real purpose until it got to us.

26. Never believe it. At the very worst
It must have had the purpose from the first
To produce purpose as the fitter bred:
We were just purpose coming to a head.
Whose purpose was it, His or Hers or Its?
Let’s leave that to the scientific wits.
Grant me intention, purpose and design -
That’s near enough for me to the devine.
And yet with all this help of head and brain,
How happily instinctive we remain.
Our best guide upward farther to the light:
Passionate preference such as love at sight.
– Robert Frost

27. Thanks Tobias Will the Curiosity Club, Hand
Eye Supply, Alex, Mark, Brian, Thom Mookie.
Chris MuMu for photos.
jelly.helm at gmail.com
More:
iTunes: Joseph Campbell Bill Moyers,
The Power of Myth
Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell
He by Robert A. Johnson
A Theory of Everything by Ken Wilber
Search for a labyrinth in your town
Walking a Sacred Path by Lauren Artress

28. “What I think is a good life is one hero journey
after another. Over and over again, you are
called to the realm of adventure, you are called
to new horizons.
Each time there is the same problem: “Do I dare?”
And then if you do dare, the dangers are there,
and the help also, and the fulfillment or the
fiasco.
There is always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there is also the possibility of bliss.”
Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss