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The Secret of Life
It looks like I owe Joseph Campbell an apology of sorts.
I was excited about hearing what a man who had studied every known religion would have to say. When I finally did hear some of Bill Moyers' interviews with Joseph Campbell, I came away thinking that Joseph Campbell had to be the dumbest bitch who ever lived.
Recently, I ran across one Moyers/Campbell interview that I had not seen before in which Campbell referred to Jung's theory of a "universal consciousness" (which is actually the foundation of Buddhism and Hinduism and wasn't invented by Jung). It was the fact that I had not heard Campbell mention anything about a "universal consciousness" or that all religion could be an expression of some genetic information in humans, which lead to my thinking that Campbell was an idiot.
There is a book on Kundalini yoga which describes this event which the religion associates with the Kundalini energy moving up your spine through your chakras. I believe that I had such an experience after I had been a raw foodists for a while and I has much more energy than I knew how to deal with. More or less I came away from the experience with the belief that we humans have a certain amount of knowledge/information that is passed down genetically, i.e. that there actually is a purpose to life on the planet.
It is no big secret that there is genetic materially that is passed to us unchanged from our parents, this material has generally been called mitochondrial DNA. And, since all humans on the planet are more or less genetically identical (in that we all evolved from one, two at the most humans), the theory of information/knowledge being transmitted genetically is not only possible in theory, it would also explain Jung and ancient eastern religion.
Now add to the above the theory among some anthropologist that evolution does not appear to be random, that there appears to be a FACTOR other than environmental forces driving evolution.