The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [123]
CAMPBELL: That can happen, of course. That’s a kind of short-circuiting of the current. But the whole aim is to go past oneself, past one’s concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an imperfect manifestation. When you come out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end by yielding all the benefits, whatever they may be, to the world, to all living beings, not holding them to yourself.
You see, there are two ways of thinking “I am God.” If you think, “I here, in my physical presence and in my temporal character, am God,” then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience. You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual transcendent.
MOYERS: Somewhere you say that we can become savior figures to those in our circle—our children, our wives, our loved ones, our neighbors—but never the Savior. You say we can be mother and father but never the Mother and the Father. That’s a recognition of limitation, isn’t it?
CAMPBELL: Yes, it is.
MOYERS: What do you think about the Savior Jesus?
CAMPBELL: We just don’t know very much about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did.
MOYERS: Written many years after he lived.
CAMPBELL: Yes, but in spite of this, I think we may know approximately what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close to the originals. The main teaching of Christ, for example, is, Love your enemies.
MOYERS: How do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does, without accepting his aggression?
CAMPBELL: I’ll tell you how to do that: do not pluck the mote from your enemy’s eyes, but pluck the beam from your own. No one is in a position to disqualify his enemy’s way of life.
MOYERS: Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian?
CAMPBELL: Not the kind of Christian we know. Perhaps some of the monks and nuns who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be of the sort that Jesus was.
MOYERS: So Jesus might not have belonged to the Church militant?
CAMPBELL: 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.
I’ve lived through the twentieth century, and I know what I was told as a boy about a people who weren’t yet and never had been our enemies. In order to represent them as potential enemies, and to justify our attack upon them, a campaign of hatred, misrepresentation, and denigration was launched, of which the echoes ring to this day.
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?
CAMPBELL: I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
MOYERS: I’ll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian New Testament is for me: “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” I believe in this ultimate reality, that I can and do experience it. But I don’t have answers to my questions. I believe in the question, Is there a God?
CAMPBELL: A couple of years ago, I had a very amusing experience. I was in the New York Athletic Club swimming pool, where I was introduced to a priest who was a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I had had my swim, I came and sat in a lounging chair in what we call the “horizontal athlete” position, and the priest, who was beside me, asked, “Now, Mr. Campbell, are you a priest?”
I answered, “No, Father.”
He asked, “Are you a Catholic?”
I answered,