The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [121]
MOYERS: What does that do to faith? You are a man of faith, of wonder, and—
CAMPBELL: No, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
MOYERS: What kind of experience?
CAMPBELL: I have experience of the wonder of life. I have experience of love. I have experience of hatred, malice, and wanting to punch this guy in the jaw. From the point of view of symbolic imaging, those are different forces operating in my mind. One may think of them—wonder, love, hatred—as inspired by different divinities.
When I was a little boy being brought up as a Roman Catholic, I was told I had a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and that the decisions I made in life would depend on whether the devil or the angel had the greater influence upon me. 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.
MOYERS: Where do these energies come from?
CAMPBELL: From your own life, from the energies of your own body. The different organs in the body, including your head, are in conflict with each other.
MOYERS: And your life comes from where?
CAMPBELL: From the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then do you say, “Well, there must be somebody generating that energy”? Why do you have to say that? Why can’t the ultimate mystery be impersonal?
MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. You know there is this tendency in the West to anthropomorphize and accent the humanity of the gods, the personifications: Yahweh, for example, as either a god of wrath, of justice and punishment, or as a favoring god who is the support of your life, as we read, for example, in the Psalms. But in the East, the gods are much more elemental, much less human and much more like the powers of nature.
MOYERS: When someone says, “Imagine God,” the child in our culture will say, “An old man in a long white robe with a beard.”
CAMPBELL: In our culture, yes. It’s our fashion to think of God in masculine form, but many traditions think of divine power principally in female form.
MOYERS: The idea is that you cannot imagine what you cannot personify. Do you think it’s possible to center the mind on what Plato called “thoughts immortal and divine”?
CAMPBELL: Of course. That’s what a meditation is. Meditation means constantly thinking on a certain theme. It can be on any level. I don’t make a big split in my thinking between the physical and the spiritual. For example, meditation on money is a perfectly good meditation. And bringing up a family is a very important meditation. But there is an alone meditation, when you go into the cathedral, for example.
MOYERS: So prayer is actually a meditation.
CAMPBELL: Prayer is relating to and meditating on a mystery.
MOYERS: Calling a power from within.
CAMPBELL: There is a form of meditation you are taught in Roman Catholicism where you recite the rosary, the same prayer, over and over and over again. That pulls the mind in. In Sanskrit, this practice is called japa, “repetition of the holy name.” It blocks other interests out and allows you to concentrate on one thing, and then, depending on your own powers of imagination, to experience the profundity of this mystery.
MOYERS: How does one have a profound experience?
CAMPBELL: By having a profound sense of the mystery.
MOYERS: But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of our own creation?
CAMPBELL: How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.”
The mystery