A Pedagogical Stunt
January 30th, 2008
A diagram by Joseph Campbell appearing in The Power of Myth, which I have redrawn.
“A pedagogical stunt. Plato has said somewhere that the soul is a circle. I took this idea to suggest on the blackboard the whole sphere of the psyche. Then I drew a horizontal line across the circle to represent the line of separation of the conscious and the unconscious. The dot in the center of the circle, below the horizontal line, represents the center from which all our energy comes… Above the horizontal line is the ego, which I represented as a square: that aspect of our consciousness that we identify as our center. But, you see, it’s very much off center. We think that this is what’s running the show, but it isn’t” (p142).
January 30th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
PS — this diagram epitomizes contemplative geometry. Experiment!
November 6th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Man, it looks like a Poke’Mon ball.
June 13th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Love the simplicity and elegance.
More appreciation of this would eliminate a lot of personal (self imposed) suffering.
June 5th, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Very self explanatory.
October 14th, 2017 at 8:13 am
[…] Perhaps one of the greatest imaginations of all is that of the famous mythologist and writer, Joseph Campbell. Following is a diagram he drew and called “A pedagogical stunt”. […]