QUOTE : Campbell's work explains what world mythology says about all this. This includes every mythology, every mythic world, not just the Christian tradition. Human beings before the modern era understood these things. The modern world has forgotten how all this works and turned instead to the idea that we can strip-mine this territory. We expect to go in there and get some of that god-energy by strip-mining. This is the heroic modern ego trying to take control of it. We think that we do not have time to make long heroic journeys down into the god-energy and then come back again. We turn spirituality into a West Virginia coal mine, and our fantasy is that we can just mine all this god-energy whenever we need it and then we can manipulate it.