The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [122]
MOYERS: There are many Christians who believe that; to find out who Jesus is, you have to go past the Christian faith, past the Christian doctrine, past the Christian Church—
CAMPBELL: You have to go past the imagined image of Jesus. Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.
You know the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the different centers or archetypal stages of experience. One begins with the elementary animal experiences of hunger and greed, and then of sexual zeal, and on to physical mastery of one kind or another. These are all empowering stages of experience. But then, when the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being, a whole new stage of life in the spirit opens out. This opening of the heart to the world is what is symbolized mythologically as the virgin birth. It signifies the birth of a spiritual life in what was formerly an elementary human animal living for the merely physical aims of health, progeny, power, and a little fun.
But now we come to something else. For to experience this sense of compassion, accord, or even identity with another, or with some ego-transcending principle that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served, is the beginning, once and for all, of the properly religious way of life and experience; and this may then lead to a life-consuming quest for a full experience of that one Being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections.
Now, this ultimate ground of all being can be experienced in two senses, one as with form and the other as without and beyond form. When you experience your god as with form, there is your envisioning mind, and there is the god. There is a subject, and there is an object. But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one’s god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with the ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well. And so this is it.
MOYERS: Of course the heart of the Christian faith is that God was in Christ, that these elemental forces you’re talking about embodied themselves in a human being who reconciled mankind to God.
CAMPBELL: Yes, and the basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true of you and me as well. Jesus was a historical person who realized in himself that he and what he called the Father were one, and he lived out of that knowledge of the Christhood of his nature.
I remember, I was once giving a lecture in which I spoke about living out of the sense of the Christ in you, and a priest in the audience (as I was later told) turned to the woman beside him and whispered, “That’s blasphemy.”
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.
MOYERS: In discussing the god within, the Christ within, the illumination or the awakening