The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [96]
“That is a holy man,” the driver replies, “one who has abandoned the goods of this world and lives without desire or fear.” Whereupon the young prince, on returning to his palace, resolved to leave his father’s house and to seek a way of release from life’s sorrows.
MOYERS: Do most myths say that suffering is an intrinsic part of life, and that there’s no way around it?
CAMPBELL: I can’t think of any that say that if you’re going to live, you won’t suffer. Myths tell us how to confront and bear and interpret suffering, but they do not say that in life there can or should be no suffering.
When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from desire and fear.
MOYERS: And your life becomes—
CAMPBELL: —harmonious, centered, and affirmative.
MOYERS: Even with suffering?
CAMPBELL: Exactly. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva—the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And this means not only experiencing sorrows oneself but participating with compassion in the sorrows of others. Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with.”
MOYERS: But you don’t mean compassion condones suffering, do you?
CAMPBELL: Of course compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes, yes, suffering is life.
MOYERS: That life is lived with sufferings—
CAMPBELL: —with the suffering—but you’re not going to get rid of it. Who, when or where, has ever been quit of the suffering of life in this world?
I had an illuminating experience from a woman who had been in severe physical pain for years, from an affliction that had stricken her in her youth. She had been raised a believing Christian and so thought this had been God’s punishment of her for something she had done or not done at that time. She was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her that if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life, and that through it she had become the noble creature that she now was. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, “Who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain, when I’ve never had anything more than a toothache?” But in this conversation, in affirming her suffering as the shaper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion—right there. I have kept in touch with her since—that was years and years ago—and she is indeed a transformed woman.
MOYERS: There was a moment of illumination?
CAMPBELL: Right there—I saw it happen.
MOYERS: Was it something you said mythologically?
CAMPBELL: Yes, although it’s a little hard to explain. I gave her the belief that she was herself the cause of her suffering, that she had somehow brought it about. There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the “love of your fate,” which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
My friend had thought, “God did this to me.” I told her, “No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”
MOYERS: The only alternative would be not to live.
CAMPBELL: “All life is suffering,” said the Buddha, and Joyce has a line—“Is life worth leaving?”
MOYERS: But what about the young person who says, “I didn’t choose to be born—my mother and father made the choice for me.”
CAMPBELL: Freud tells