Asked if he saw myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance he replied.

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life, I don't. What we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will ha ve resonances within our inmost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive

, "

JOSEPH CAMPBELL had a great interest in TV. He considered the very successful Star Wars andStar Trekseries a mine of information. In Star Wars the emphasis was focussed on individual heroism. They combined ultra high tech computers and spaceships with gunfights and combats in one man fighters reminiscent of a generation of matinee westerns or of WWII dogfights.

On a still deeper level there came the swordfights of Jedi knights and the solitary quests of dedicated heroes like Luke Skywalker.

The fundamental cultural message was that a great society is founded on great individuals. One shou/d be onese/f, fighting for oneself and one's friends and comrades alone, except when freely Joining a band of like - minded heroes to lose or rather transcend individual separateness in the mystique of a noble cause - which will be the cause of individualism against tyranny

Star Wars was not really about conquest. The epic showed the ultimate futility of grasping for power. These stories make their way into subjective consciousness because they are about deep level psychic identities - above all, one's own. Campbell believed that all myths are really about oneself, one's profoundest identity, the innermost self still waiting to be found and realised. Myths according to Campbell are not past, but present, embodying the eternal essence of life

ERICH FROMM writing in his book TO HAVE OR TO BE, quoting from