by Dave Rioux

     It seems funny when I say it, but everything I need to know... I already do, and I am still realizing it.

     It wasn't until the early 90's when Mickey Hart released "Drumming at the Edge of Magic" did I finally learn of the famed Mythologist Joseph Campbell.  A man who's passion for the mysterious dance of life influenced such monumental efforts as Planet Drum and even Star Wars.  And as it always is when you discover something new and bright his name started to pop up everywhere, and I started to learn from him.

     Although Joseph Campbell had been dead a number of years by the time I had heard of him, he has single-handedly influenced my perceptions as much as any one person can influence another's.  Upon further study, I discovered it was for one concrete reason: He followed his bliss, and encouraged others to do likewise.  This is what I humbly deem as the singular requirement in success and enjoyment of ones life.

     Webster's defines bliss as complete happiness, or Paradise, Heaven.  However, happiness is so completely subjective it is near impossible to nail down what it is in general.  From the obvious observations of happiness, to the elusive descriptions of it.  What of course makes me happy would drive most of you crazy in a short time. Others may find the paths I follow to happiness merely the entrance to ideas and concepts of what/where their own happiness might be found.

     Take for example a movie most of us within Hollywood's grasp may have seen, "City Slickers."  In it the ranch boss Curly gives a small speech on the secret to happiness; it's "one thing" he tells Billy Crystal.  Then he goes on to give vague directions to nothing in particular, all the while stressing the importance that it be a deeply personal choice (something along the lines of "Stick with that, and everything else don't mean shit.").  Now it may seem simple-minded to think I have found the secret to life in a movie by Billy Crystal, or maybe it's not.  It seems to me that the teachers are always there.  "When the student is ready then the teacher will appear."  That is what makes possible that fact that the great influence may come from a famed Mythologist, a ranch hand's movie script, an author, a musician, or even a muppet.

     A Muppet?!  Yes, a Muppet.  Everyone who has seen the original Star Wars trilogy may remember the speech Yoda gives Luke Skywalker during one episode - about us being "luminous beings, not this crude matter," as he gestures to his meager clothing and flesh.  This short scene comes straight from the series of books by Carlos Castaneda on the teachings of the shaman/brujo Don Juan.  Published from the late 50's to the present, Don Juan's lessons were always aimed at the breaking down of Carlos' western learnings.  The initial effort was aimed at getting him to lose his reliance in the physical world, and all of its finite attachments, and reach deeper into himself to realize the spiritual world.  There is an almost word for word speech by Don Juan about luminous beings, that I am convinced inspired Yoda's appropriate insights.  So imagine my surprise when I discovered the similarities in both Yoda's and Don Juan's theologies, and then to discover that Joseph Campbell also influenced the writing of the Star Wars trilogy.  The conjunction seemed more than coincidental to me.  But much more than that, what did the three authors have in common?

     It has proven to be, in hindsight, that George Lucas' lifetime labor of  love was the realization of his sci-fi/fantasy story line for Star Wars (of which he has now accomplished 4 with the rumored total being 9).  All of which have been done for the sole purpose of satisfying the artists inner yearnings - nothing more.  Carlos Castaneda's lifetime achievement has become his series of books on the "Yaqui Way of Knowledge," and his search to become a whole and spiritual being.  A search which has helped him surrender to the eternal ebb and flow of power, and to become one with power, instead of trying to control or force it.      And finally Joseph Campbell himself, who went from a retired teacher into being one of the greatest minds in the gathering of the knowledge and myths of various worlds cultures.  Then realizing, once they were all in one mind,  the deeply rooted similarities in our beliefs and lives.  The common bonds that had become lost by the surface tensions created by shallow observations of such minor facets as skin color, religion, global location, and sometimes even diet.  He became lost and was found in his own meditations of life.  And he did it all for the excitement in the quest, the joy of the journey, to follow his bliss.

     Because of these lifelong, single-pointed meditations to which I have been exposed and influenced, have I myself been able find that my own aim is as mysteriously singular as theirs was.  Since my early teenage years two obsessions have been constant and unwavering in their influence on my development.  The love for music, and the desire to write.

     When I first discovered my love for certain styles of music it was aimed specifically toward The Doors and The Grateful Dead respectively.  There was something that drew me in to their music, and the passion with which the musicians played...  that, and the words!  By the time I was 13 or 14 years old I had memorized Morrison's Celebration of the Lizard, and most of the album An American Prayer.  But it wasn't simply the dark poetry I was attracted to, as a matter of fact aside from an earlier childhood infatuation with the writings of Poe, I refused further exposure to the world of poetry.  That was until I was exposed to three artists who would eventually become the three biggest influences to my own desire to write.  Jim Morrison, Robert Hunter, and some years later Bob Dylan.

Songs like Gates of Eden by Bob Dylan, exposed me to lines like:

The motorcycle black madonna
Two-wheeled gypsy queen
And her silver-studded phantom cause
The grey flannel dwarf to scream

And weeps to wicked  birds of prey
Who pick up on his bread crumb sins
And there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden