The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [131]
I’ve lost a lot of friends, as well as my parents. A realization has come to me very, very keenly, however, that I haven’t lost them. That moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there’s a kind of intimation of immortality in that.
There is a story of the Buddha, who encountered a woman who had just lost her son, and she was in great grief. The Buddha said, “I suggest that you just ask around to meet somebody who has not lost a treasured child or husband or relative or friend.” Understanding the relationship of mortality to something in you that is transcendent of mortality is a difficult task.
MOYERS: Myths are full of the desire for immortality, are they not?
CAMPBELL: Yes. But when immortality is misunderstood as being an everlasting body, it turns into a clown act, really. On the other hand, when immortality is understood to be identification with that which is of eternity in your own life now, it’s something else again.
MOYERS: You’ve said that the whole question of life revolves around being versus becoming.
CAMPBELL: Yes. Becoming is always fractional. And being is total.
MOYERS: What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: Well, let’s say you are going to become fully human. In the first few years you are a child, and that is only a fraction of the human being. In a few more years you are in adolescence, and that is certainly a fraction of the human being. In maturity you are still fractional—you are not a child, but you are not old yet. There is an image in the Upanishads of the original, concentrated energy which was the big bang of creation that set forth the world, consigning all things to the fragmentation of time. But to see through the fragments of time to the full power of original being—that is a function of art.
MOYERS: Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.
CAMPBELL: Every moment should be such an experience.
MOYERS: And what we are going to become tomorrow is not important as compared to this experience.
CAMPBELL: This is the great moment, Bill. What we are trying to do in a certain way is to get the being of our subject rendered through the partial way we have of expressing it.
MOYERS: But if we can’t describe God, if our language is not adequate, how is it that we build these buildings that are sublime? How do we create these works of art that reflect what artists think of God? How do we do this?
CAMPBELL: Well, that’s what art reflects—what artists think of God, what people experience of God. But the ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond human experience.
MOYERS: So whatever it is we experience we have to express in language that is just not up to the occasion.
CAMPBELL: That’s it. That’s what poetry is for. Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated. Poetry involves a precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the words themselves. Then you experience the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence.
MOYERS: So the experience of God is beyond description, but we feel compelled to try to describe it?
CAMPBELL: That’s right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life