The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [39]
MOYERS: The person who has the experience has to project it in the best way he can with images. It seems to me that we have lost the art in our society of thinking in images.
CAMPBELL: Oh, we definitely have. Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear. There is more reality in an image than in a word.
MOYERS: Do you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely. That is the way in.
MOYERS: The way in?
CAMPBELL: To an experience.
MOYERS: And religion can’t do that for you, or art can’t do it?
CAMPBELL: It could, but it is not doing it now. Religions are addressing; social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.
MOYERS: So you think religion’s great calling is the experience?
CAMPBELL: One of the wonderful things in the Catholic ritual is going to communion. There you are taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior. And you take it to you, and you turn inward, and there Christ is working within you. This is a way of inspiring a meditation on experiencing the spirit in you. You see people coming back from communion, and they are inward-turned, they really are.
In India, I have seen a red ring put around a stone, and then the stone becomes regarded as an incarnation of the mystery. Usually you think of things in practical terms, but you could think of anything in terms of its mystery. For example, this is a watch, but it is also a thing in being. You could put it down, draw a ring around it, and regard it in that dimension. That is the point of what is called consecration.
MOYERS: What do you mean? What can you make of the watch you’re wearing? What kind of mystery does it reveal?
CAMPBELL: It is a thing, isn’t it?
MOYERS: Yes.
CAMPBELL: Do you really know what a thing is? What supports it? It is something in time and space. Think how mysterious it is that anything should be. The watch becomes the center for a meditation, the center of the intelligible mystery of being, which is everywhere. This watch is now the center of the universe. It is the still point in the turning world.
MOYERS: Where does the meditation take you?
CAMPBELL: Oh, it depends on how talented you are.
MOYERS: You talk about the “transcendent.” What is the transcendent? What happens to someone in the transcendent?
CAMPBELL: “Transcendent” is a technical, philosophical term, translated in two different ways. In Christian theology, it refers to God as being beyond or outside the field of nature. That is a materialistic way of talking about the transcendent, because God is thought of as a kind of spiritual fact existing somewhere out there. It was Hegel who spoke of our anthropomorphic god as the gaseous vertebrate—such an idea of God as many Christians hold. Or he is thought of as a bearded old man with a not very pleasant temperament. But “transcendent” properly means that which is beyond all concepts. Kant tells us that all of our experiences are bounded by time and space. They take place within space, and they take place in the course of time.
Time and space form the sensibilities that bound our experiences. Our senses are enclosed in the field of time and space, and our minds are enclosed in a frame of the categories of thought. But the ultimate thing (which is no thing) that we are trying to get in touch with is not so enclosed. We enclose it as we try to think of it.
The transcendent transcends all of these categories of thinking. Being and nonbeing—those are categories. The word “God” properly refers to what transcends all thinking, but the word “God” itself is something thought about.
Now you can personify