There is a passage in the Old French Queste del Saint Graal that epitomizes the true spirit of Western man. It tells of a day when the knights of Arthur’s court gathered in the banquet hall waiting for dinner to be served. It was a custom of that court that no meal should be served until an adventure had come to pass. Adventures came to pass in those days frequently so there was no danger of Arthur’s people going hungry. On the present occasion the Grail appeared, covered with a samite cloth, hung in the air a moment, and withdrew. Everyone was exalted, and Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur, rose and suggested a vow. ‘I propose,’ he said, ‘that we all now set forth in quest to behold that Grail unveiled.’ And so it was that they agreed. There then comes a line that, when I read it, burned itself into my mind. ‘They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.’

No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. And that is what marks the Western spirit distinctly from the Eastern. Oriental gurus accept responsibility for their disciples’ lives. They have an interesting term, ‘delegated free will.’ The guru tells you where you are on the path, who you are, what to do now, and what to do next.

The romantic quality of the West, on the other hand, derives from an unprecedented yearning, a yearning for something that has never yet been seen in this world. What can it be that has never yet been seen? What has never yet been seen is your own unprecedented life fulfilled. Your life is what has yet to be brought into being.

• And here is something even better, even deeper; a surprising identification because the referent of the romantic has always been presented as a universal, namely—as Jacob Bronowski has pointed out—the identity of the fungible and so generic and universal physical force with the innermost quickening-type force of the subject. Campbell now inverts this. It is not the novelty of the expansive monistic force that the romantic craves, but the novel expression of it through the subject’s life and for which he is responsible. The exciting new thing never before seen is what you yourself must make, and out of yourself.

In this modern world of ours, in which all things, all institutions, seem to be going rapidly to pieces, there is no meaning in the group, where all meaning was once found. The group today is but a matrix for the production of individuals. All meaning is found in the individual, and in each one this meaning is considered unique. And yet, let us think, in conclusion about this: when you’ve lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.

Campbell: … All a teacher can do is suggest. He is like a lighthouse that says, “There are rocks over here, steer clear. There is a channel, however, out there.”

The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, “Man is the sick animal.” Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves? A living myth presents contemporary models.

Moyers: Today, we have an endless variety of models. A lot of people end up choosing many and never knowing who they are.

Campbell: When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model, and it will fit you in a little while. After middle life, for example, you can pretty well tell what a person’s profession is. Wherever I go, people know I’m a professor. I don’t know what it is that I do, or how I look, but I, too, can tell professors from engineers and merchants. You’re shaped by your life.

Moyers: There is a wonderful image in King Arthur where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice.” You’ve interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life -- the individual confronting darkness.

Campbell: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He’ll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn’t be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Moyers: There’s the question Hamlet asked, “Are you up to your destiny?”

Campbell: Hamlet’s problem was that he wasn’t. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle, and it blew him to pieces. That can happen, too.

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave, that was so dreaded, has become the center.