The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [130]
MOYERS: The experience of the eternal.
CAMPBELL: The experience of what you are.
MOYERS: Yes, but whatever eternity is, it is here right now.
CAMPBELL: And nowhere else. Or everywhere else. If you don’t experience it 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 world. 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.
MOYERS: There’s some image of Shiva, the god Shiva, surrounded by circles of flame, rings of fire.
CAMPBELL: That’s the radiance of the god’s dance. Shiva’s dance is the universe. In his hair is a skull and a new moon, death and rebirth at the same moment, the moment of becoming. In one hand he has a little drum that goes tick-tick-tick. That is the drum of time, the tick of time which shuts out the knowledge of eternity. We are enclosed in time. But in Shiva’s opposite hand there is a flame which burns away the veil of time and opens our minds to eternity.
Shiva is a very ancient deity, perhaps the most ancient worshiped in the world today. There are images from 2000 or 2500 B.C., little stamp seals showing figures that clearly suggest Shiva.
In some of his manifestations he is a really horrendous god, representing the terrific aspects of the nature of being. He is the archetypal yogi, canceling the illusion of life, but he is also the creator of life, its generator, as well as illuminator.
MOYERS: Myths deal with metaphysics. But religion also deals with ethics, good and evil, and how I am to relate to you, and how I should behave toward you and toward my wife and toward my fellow man under God. What is the place and role of ethics in mythology?
CAMPBELL: We spoke of the metaphysical experience in which you realize that you and the other are one. Ethics is a way of teaching you how to live as though you were one with the other. You don’t have to have the experience because the doctrine of the religion gives you molds of actions that imply a compassionate relationship with the other. It offers an incentive for doing this by teaching you that simply acting in your own self-interest is sin. That is identification with your body.
MOYERS: Love they neighbor as thyself because thy neighbor is thyself.
CAMPBELL: That is what you have learned when you have done so.
MOYERS: Why do you think so many people have a deep yearning to live forever?
CAMPBELL: That’s something I don’t understand.
MOYERS: Does it come out of the fear of hell and the desirable alternative?
CAMPBELL: That’s good standard Christian doctrine—that at the end of the world there will be a general judgment and those who have acted virtuously will be sent to heaven, and those who have acted in an evil way, to hell.
This is a theme that goes back to Egypt. Osiris is the god who died and was resurrected and in his eternal aspect will sit as judge of the dead. Mummification was to prepare the person to face the god. But an interesting thing in Egypt is that the person going to the god is to recognize his identity with the god. In the Christian tradition, that’s not allowed. So if you’re saying that the alternative