The meaning of Coffee work

"The Power of Myth" where Jospeh Campbell is interviewed by Bill Moyers back in the late eighties, Campbell cuts to the meaning of life quickly:

Campbell : People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experience on the purely physical Plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves.
Moyers: Myths are clues?
Campbell : Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
Moyers: What we're capable of knowing and experiencing within?
Capbell: Yes


Thats on Page 14.

Timothy Ferriss, the author of the Four Hour Work Week, talked similarly about life and its meaning in a video he posted a couple of days ago, basically saying that the goal is experience, and that the goal is to have time and freedom to have experiences. We buy things ultimately to have experiences, but if we have no time to use them because we are too busy working to make the money to buy them, then what good are they?

What is wealth?

I got the chance to visit a friend on his farm. He had been an electronic salesman when he was younger, and traded that life to start a farm. Now he is seeing many of his friends who worked with him in the business world who traded their youth and their health for money. But some have had strokes, some have died from all the stress and unhealthly life that comes with all that work.

While sitting on his farm he asked me - What is wealth? He told me that he has found that it is doing something you enjoy, that you would do without being paid if you could or had to, being healthy, and having a happy family that gets along well.

To that I would add the ability to have the experience that Campbell talks about, this rapture, the feeling of being alive.

Tieing this to coffee, the question then becomes, how can coffee help farmers have 'wealth' in this very broad definition, defined by my friend the electronic salesman turned chicken farmer?

Campbell : People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experience on the purely physical Plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves.


Moyers: Myths are clues?


Campbell : Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.


Moyers: What we're capable of knowing and experiencing within?


Capbell: Yes


pg. 14


The whole living world is informed by consciousness.
I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Wheere you really see life energy, there's consiousness. Certainly as a kid, you can see all these different consciousnesses relating to themselves. There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness, and we share both these things. You eat certain foods, and the bile knows whether there's something there for it to go work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won't work.


pg. 18
Campbell: Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.


Pg 31
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