I have studied Campbell since I first read his book Hero with a Thousand Faces. He has been one of the primary inspirations in my life.

Campbell also talks about the benefit of seeing life mythologically, or as metaphor, which he says myth really is. Myth is art and art is metaphor. Seeing life mythologically is seeing life as a teaching. The teacher is the student of life, and life teachers through myth and metaphor, through art. 

And when your teacher within is liberated from form, then everything becomes the means for the end of learning/teaching. Teaching informs the teacher as well as the student.

Campbell is a study of the integrative mind, a mind that restores unity in the fragmentation of modern society. That unity is the IDEA that breaks forth suddenly without warning, and usually after a struggle, to bring peace to the seeking mind, at least for the moment. The fragmentation continues, so the integrating mind never stops, never settles with a fixed idea of reality. Life is always in flux, always changing. Life is change. Life is time. And the integrating mind gets high on surfing this wave, of maintaining balance of the waver of impermanence.

Campbell integrates the fragmentation of the modern world/mind through a story, and it is only story that can give meaning to the incoming confusing data of the senses. But the story Campbells uses is the story of myth, the ancient stories that integrated the ancient world and the minds that found meaning in them. 

So what Campbell does is integrate the stories so that we can pick up the pattern and in that pattern, in that recipe, find the Story in our own fragmented world. These stories are the universal theme of the conquest of darkness, of consciousness integrating the hidden forces of one’s own psyche. The myths why stories of people and animals are metaphors of our own psychic forces for which we have no maps in our modern world.

Oh, we have psychology—Freud and Jung—but these maps are about things: who am I? What story am I in? Where is my myth? What is my purpose? Science won’t tell me what that is.