The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [37]
MOYERS: Is reincarnation also a metaphor?
CAMPBELL: Certainly it is. When people ask, “Do you believe in reincarnation,” I just have to say, “Reincarnation, like heaven, is a metaphor.”
The metaphor in Christianity that corresponds to reincarnation is purgatory. If one dies with such a fixation on the things of this world that one’s spirit is not ready to behold the beatific vision, then one has to undergo a purgation, one has to be purged clean of one’s limitations. The limitations are what are called sins. Sin is simply a limiting factor that limits your consciousness and fixes it in an inappropriate condition.
In the Oriental metaphor, if you die in that condition, you come back again to have more experiences that will clarify, clarify, clarify, until you are released from these fixations. The reincarnating monad is the principal hero of Oriental myth. The monad puts on various personalities, life after life. Now the reincarnation idea is not that you and I as the personalities that we are will be reincarnated. The personality is what the monad throws off. Then the monad puts on another body, male or female, depending on what experiences are necessary for it to clear itself of this attachment to the field of time.
MOYERS: And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest?
CAMPBELL: It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth. And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that all the religions are talking of that.
MOYERS: Is this a chief motif of mythological stories through time?
CAMPBELL: No, the idea of life as an ordeal through which you become released from the bondage of life belongs to the higher religions. I don’t think I see anything like that in aboriginal mythology.
MOYERS: What is the source of it?
CAMPBELL: I don’t know. It would probably come from people of spiritual power and depth who experienced their lives as being inadequate to the spiritual aspect or dimension of their being.
MOYERS: You say that elites create myths, that shamans and artists and others who take the journey into the unknown come back to create these myths. But what about ordinary folks? Don’t they create the stories of Paul Bunyan, for example?
CAMPBELL: Yes, but that is not a myth. That doesn’t hit the level of myth. The prophets and what in India are called the “rishis” are said to have heard the scriptures. Now anybody might open his ears, but not everyone has the capacity actually to hear the scriptures.
MOYERS: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious.
Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.” This is no fancy, it is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds, “Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say