The Power of Myth

Intro

“[Igjugarjuk] was the shaman of a Caribou Eskimo tribe in northern Canada, the one who told European visitors that the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.”

“”Why do you need the mythology?” She held the familiar, modem opinion that “all these Greek gods and stuff” are irrelevant to the human condition today. What she did not know—what most do not know—is that the remnants of all that “stuff” line the walls of our interior system of belief, like shards of broken pottery in an archaeological site. But as we are organic beings, there is energy in all that “stuff.” Rituals evoke it.“ (Bill Moyers)

“Preachers err, he told me, by trying to ‘talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.’l

“A story’s the way to tell it. He was a man with a thousand stories. This was one of his favorites. In Japan for an international conference on religion, Campbell overheard another American delegate, a social philosopher from New York, say to a Shinto priest, “We’ve been now to a good many ceremonies and have seen quite a few of your shrines. But I don’t get your ideology.

I don’t get your theology.” The Japanese paused as though in deep thought and then slowly shook his head. “I think we don’t have ideology,” he said. “We don’t have theology. We dance.” And so did Joseph Campbell—to the music of the spheres.” (Bill Moyers)

I. Myth and the Modern World

“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 experiences 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.”

“I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there’s consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious. And when you live in the woods, as I did 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 to work on. The whole process is consciousness. Trying to interpret it in simply mechanistic terms won’t work.”

“Now, can I hold something from the cathedral consciousness? Certain prayers or meditations are designed to hold your consciousness on that level instead of letting it drop down here all the way. And then what you can finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that higher consciousness. The mystery that is expressed there is operating in the field of your money, for example. All money is congealed energy. I think that that’s the clue to how to transform your consciousness.”

II. The Journey Inward

“MOYERS: You say that mythology is the study of mankind’s one great story. What is that one great story?

CAMPBELL: That we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground. And you play the game in the shadow field, you enact your side of the polarity with all your might. But you know that your enemy, for example, is simply the other side of what you would see as yourself if you could see from the position of the middle.

MOYERS: So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama?

CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.”

“If you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.”

“In our tradition it is the monk who seeks the experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community.

I had a friend who attended an international meeting of the Roman Catholic meditative orders, which was held in Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but that it was the clergy of the two religions who were unable to understand each other.

The person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don’t render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven’t had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow.”

“People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.”

MOYERS: Doesn’t that lead to a rather passive attitude in the face of evil?

CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.”

• Don’t like this, something feels off. The world is manifest, finite, bounded. With finitude comes addition or subtraction; we have the ability to add or subtract to the world. Whether we can add to God is another story though.

“Heraclitus said that for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not. When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, “I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God’s view, there is no difference.”

Life lives on life. Story of Shiva and the self-eating monster: one monster attempted to steal Shiva’s wife, so Shiva spawned in another monster to eat the first. The first monster threw itself at Shiva’s feet in mercy, so Shiva saved him and the second monster was made to eat himself instead. Starting from his feet, when just his head was left, Shiva pleasingly affirmed the remaining face as symbolic of what life is all about: of life living on life. He called this face the face of glory, and it sits in the entrance of many of Shiva’s shrines.

“Once in India I thought I would like to meet a major guru or teacher face to face. So I went to see a celebrated teacher named Sri Krishna Menon, and the first thing he said to me was, “Do you have a question?”

The teacher in this tradition always answers questions. He doesn’t tell you anything you are not yet ready to hear. So I said,

“Yes, I have a question. Since in Hindu thinking everything in the universe is a manifestation of divinity itself, how should we say no to anything in the world? How should we say no to brutality, to stupidity, to vulgarity, to thoughtlessness?” And he answered, “For you and for me—the way is to say yes.”

We then had a wonderful talk on this theme of the affirmation of all things. And it confirmed me in the feeling I had had that who are we to judge? It seems to me that this is one of the great teachings, also, of Jesus.”

III. The First Storytellers

“He [a young indigenous boy who received a prophetic vision] says, “I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the highest place, and I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred manner of the world.” And the sacred central mountain was Harney Peak in South Dakota. And then he says, “But the central mountain is everywhere.

That is a real mythological realization. It distinguishes between the local cult image, Harney Peak, and its connotation as the center of the world. The center of the world is the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves. The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience.”

IV. Sacrifice and Bliss

“We’ve lost touch with that kind of concern [regular ritual practice]. The goal of early life was to live in constant consciousness of the spiritual principle. In the Assyrian palaces, you’ll see a composite beast with the head of a man, the body of a lion, the wings of the eagle, and the feet of a bull: four signs of the zodiac that have been put together and made into door guardians.

Those same four beasts, which are associated with the vision of Ezekiel, become the four evangelists in the Christian tradition.

You remember the prayer: “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, bless the bed that I sleep on.” In this prayer, you are in the middle, where Christ is, and the four points of the compass around you are the four posts of your bed.

Now, this mandala represents the Christ appearing from beyond Space-Time. Those four beasts represent the veil of Space-Time, veiling eternity, and the Christ in the center is the break-through, the second birth, the coming of the Lord of the World from the womb of the universal goddess, Space-Time.”

“All final spiritual reference is to the silence beyond sound. The word made flesh is the first sound. Beyond that sound is the transcendent unknown, the unknowable. It can be spoken of as the great silence, or as the void, or as the transcendent absolute.”

“At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image [as the bodhisattva whose fingertips drip ambrosial compassion down to the depths of hell]. The bodhisattva represents the principle of compassion, which is the healing principle that makes life possible. Life is pain, but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuing. The bodhisattva is one who has achieved the realization of immortality yet voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world. Voluntary participation in the world is very different from just getting born into it. That’s exactly the theme of Paul’s statement about Christ in his Epistle to the Philippians: that Jesus “did not think God-hood something to be held to but took the form of a servant here on the earth, even to death on the cross.” That’s a voluntary participation in the fragmentation of life.”

V. The Hero’s Adventure

VI. The Gift of the Goddess

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VIII. Masks of Eternity

“MOYERS: What did you mean by Christ in you?

CAMPBELL: What I meant was that you must live not in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of mankind— the Christ— in you. There is a Hindu saying, “None but a god can worship a god.” You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word.”

“There’s nothing militant about Jesus. I don’t read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear, and Jesus said, “Put back thy sword, Peter.” But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.”

“MOYERS: And yet we’re told God is love. You once took the saying of Jesus, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust”— you once took this to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings. Do you still feel that way?

heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” —you once took this lo be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teach-ings. Do you still feel that way?

CAMPBELL: I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.”

“As a boy, I concretized these thoughts, and I think my teachers did, too. We thought there was really an angel there, and that the angel was a fact, and that the devil was also a fact. But instead of regarding them as facts, I can now think of them as metaphors for the impulses that move and guide me.“

“When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my students’ religious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious traditions, which didn’t mean very much to them, but which were the ones their parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we compared them with other traditions, where similar images had been given a more inward or spiritual interpretation.

I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of Zoroastrian students—they all had this experience.

There’s no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own inward experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience.”

“CAMPBELL: … If you don’t experience [eternity] here and now, you’re not going to get it in heaven. Heaven is not eternal, it’s just everlasting.

MOYERS: I don’t follow that.

CAMPBELL: Heaven and hell are described as forever. Heaven is of unending time. It is not eternal. Eternal is beyond time.

The concept of time shuts out eternity. It is over the ground of that deep experience of eternity that all of these temporal pains and troubles come and go. There is a Buddhist ideal of participating willingly and joyfully in the passing sorrows of the word. Wherever there is time, there is sorrow. But this experience of sorrow moves over a sense of enduring being, which is our own true life.”

• Heaven and earth pass away, but my word doesn’t.

“So if you’re saying that the alternative is hell or heaven, well, give me heaven forever.

But when you realize that heaven is a beholding of the beatific image of God— that would be a timeless moment. Time explodes, so again, eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships.”

• The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

“MOYERS: Explain AUM.

CAMPBELL: “AUM” is a word that represents to our ears that sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are man-ifestations. You start in the back of the mouth “ahh,” and then “oo,” you fill the mouth, and “mm” closes the mouth. When you pronounce this properly, all vowel sounds are included in the pronunciation. AUM. Consonants are here regarded simply as interruptions of the essential vowel sound. All words are thus fragments of AUM, just as all images are fragments of the Form of forms. AUM is a symbolic sound that puts you in touch with that resounding being that is the universe. If you heard some of the recordings of Tibetan monks chanting AUM, you would know what the word means, all right. That’s the AUM of being in the world. To be in touch with that and to get the sense of that is the peak experience of all.

A-U-M. The birth, the coming into being, and the dissolution that cycles back. AUM is called the “four-element syllable.” A-U-M—and what is the fourth element? The silence out of which AUM arises, and back into which it goes, and which underlies it. My life is the A-U-M, but there is a silence underlying it, too. That is what we would call the immortal. This is the mortal and that’s the immortal, and there wouldn’t be the mortal if there weren’t the immortal.“