The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [124]
Then he asked—and I think it interesting that he phrased the question in this way—“Do you believe in a personal god?”
“No, Father,” I said.
And he replied, “Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the existence of a personal god.”
“If there were, Father,” said I, “what then would be the value of faith?”
“Well, Mr. Campbell,” said the priest quickly, “it’s nice to have met you.” And he was off. I felt I had executed a jujitsu throw.
But that was an illuminating conversation to me. The fact that a Catholic father had asked, “Do you believe in a personal god?” meant to me that he also recognized the possibility of an impersonal god, namely, a transcendent ground or energy in itself. The idea of Buddha consciousness is of an immanent, luminous consciousness that informs all things and all lives. We unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments of that energy. But the religious way of life is to live not in terms of the self-interested intentions of this particular body at this particular time but in terms of the insight of that larger consciousness.
There is an important passage in the recently discovered Gnostic Gospel According to St. Thomas: “ ‘When will the kingdom come?’ Christ’s disciples ask.” In Mark 13, I think it is, we read that the end of the world is about to come. That is to say, a mythological image—that of the end of the world—is there taken as predicting an actual, physical, historical fact to be. But in Thomas’ version, Jesus replies: “The kingdom of the Father will not come by expectation. The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it”—so I look at you now in that sense, and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me through you.
MOYERS: Through me?
CAMPBELL: You, sure. When Jesus says, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am and I shall be he,” he’s talking from the point of view of that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. Anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. Anyone who brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus, that’s the sense of that.
MOYERS: So that’s what you mean when you say, “I am radiating God to you.”
CAMPBELL: You are, yes.
MOYERS: And you to me?
CAMPBELL: And I am speaking this seriously.
MOYERS: I take it seriously. I do sense that there is divinity in the other.
CAMPBELL: Not only that, but what you represent in this conversation and what you’re trying to bring out is a realization of these spiritual principles. So you are the vehicle. You are radiant of the spirit.
MOYERS: Is this true for everyone?
CAMPBELL: It is true for everyone who has reached in his life the level of the heart.
MOYERS: You really believe there is a geography of the psyche?
CAMPBELL: This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex organs, and that’s all they’re living for. That’s the meaning of life. This is Freud’s philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that’s a perfectly good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the animal level. Then there comes another kind of life, which involves giving oneself to others one way or another. This is the one that’s symbolized in the opening of the heart.
MOYERS: What is the source of that life?
CAMPBELL: It must be a recognition of your life in the other, of the one life in the two of us. God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from, and people who think everything has to have been made by somebody will think, “Well, God made it.” So God’s the source of all this.
MOYERS: Well then, what is religion?
CAMPBELL: The word “religion” means religio, linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent