TV Reviews : Moyer Takes Us on a ‘Mythic Journey’

Like most of us, Bill Moyers can be a bundle of contradictions. The same Moyers who can blow the lid off of the Iran-Contra scandal can sit down with Joseph Campbell and get all cuddly behind the sentiment Campbell made famous: “Follow Your Bliss.”

This faintly New Age side to Moyers comes to the surface with “Your Mythic Journey” (tonight at 10 p.m., Channels 28 and 15). But in this wide-ranging interview with philosopher, author and self-dubbed “freelance thinker” Sam Keen, Moyers never gets cuddly.

What’s fascinating is watching how Keen, who believes a person can only attain self-knowledge after telling their life story, brings out both the personal and probing sides of Moyers the interviewer.

One can object to Keen’s cybernetic metaphors for a deeply organic process: We are born, he says, with “biological hardware” only to have “cultural software” plugged into us by our family and society. But beyond his New Age jargon is an essential truth: When we explore our own past, we learn what made us what we are--and perhaps change our course in life.