The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [26]
MOYERS: They just wear different costumes when they appear at different times?
CAMPBELL: Yes. It’s as though the same play were taken from one place to another, and at each place the local players put on local costumes and enact the same old play.
MOYERS: And these mythic images are carried forward from generation to generation, almost unconsciously.
CAMPBELL: That’s utterly fascinating, because they are speaking about the deep mystery of yourself and everything else. It is a mysterium, a mystery, tremendum et fascinans—tremendous, horrific, because it smashes all of your fixed notions of things, and at the same time utterly fascinating, because it’s of your own nature and being. When you start thinking about these things, about the inner mystery, inner life, the eternal life, there aren’t too many images for you to use. You begin, on your own, to have the images that are already present in some other system of thought.
MOYERS: There was a sense during medieval times of reading the world as if the world had messages for you.
CAMPBELL: Oh, it certainly does. The myths help you read the messages. They tell you the typical probabilities.
MOYERS: Give me an example.
CAMPBELL: One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
MOYERS: Like Roethke’s poem, “In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See.” You’re saying that myths have brought this consciousness to you.
CAMPBELL: I live with these myths, and they tell me this all the time. This is the problem that can be metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. The Christ in you doesn’t die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects. Or you can identify that with Shiva. I am Shiva—this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas.
MOYERS: And heaven, that desired goal of most people, is within us.
CAMPBELL: Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.
MOYERS: So when we dream, we are fishing in some vast ocean of mythology that—
CAMPBELL: —that goes down and down and down. You can get all mixed up with complexes, you know, things like that, but really, as the Polynesian saying goes, you are then “standing on a whale fishing for minnows.” We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.
MOYERS: You talk about mythology existing here and now in dreamtime. What is dreamtime?
CAMPBELL: This is the time you get into when you go to sleep and have a dream that talks about permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now.
MOYERS: Explain that.
CAMPBELL: For example, you may be worried about whether you are going to pass an exam. Then you have a dream of some kind of failure, and you find that failure will be associated with many other failures in your life. They are all piled up together there. Freud says even the most fully expounded dream is not really fully expounded. The dream is an inexhaustible source of spiritual information about yourself.
Now the level of dream of “Will I pass the exam?” or “Should I marry this girl?”—that is purely personal.