Living the Questions with Sam Keen

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Nowadays the whole topic of mythology is finally come in to its own. I started doing personal mythology seminars down here 21 years ago, and nobody had heard of mythology on the West Coast. I wrote a book and called it "Personal Mythology", and they wouldn't let me use the title. They said nobody would publish a book with the word mythology in the title. It came out as telling your story. We wanted to call it like the time I filled a bag of apples and climbed on a horse to ride off forever. Now it's redone as "Your Mythic Journey", 20 years later. Of course, Joseph Campbell has been right at the heart of that revival, and at the very heart of that has been the idea of the heroic journey. I think that's what's new in our generation, we brought back the notion that we each have a heroic journey to do.Each of us is on some kind of a quest. And then a life that isn't on some kind of a journey, and a quest, is going to be a life that's a not very interesting life.

Well, if you pick apart the idea of the heroic journey what you find out, I mean, I think that we have to de-mythologize the idea of the mythic journey, or the quest. Because after all, most of us aren't going to take off to, like Burton did, to look for the source of the Nile. The quest is not going to be physical, it's a metaphor. And if you look and you try to translate the metaphor what it really is about, it's about questions. A life of questing is a life of asking questions. And when I start out on a new quest, what's happening is I'm beginning to ask a new question about my life.

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