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Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person. This is what the Grail is about. And this is what comes out in the romance.
And then it takes him five years of ordeals and embarrassments and all kinds of things to get back to that castle and ask the question that heals the king and heals society. The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being. That’s the Grail. MOYERS: And it is a kind of love that— CAMPBELL: Well, it is spontaneous compassion, a suffering with. MOYERS: What was it Jung said—that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the other is always a you? Is that what the romantic—
It says that we’re in two worlds. We’re in our own world, and we’re in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field
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And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history. MOYERS: Destroyed by the organized Church? CAMPBELL: By the organized Church. And why couldn’t Christians live with another religion? What was the matter with them? MOYERS: What do you think?
CAMPBELL: It’s power, it’s power. I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history. And it got into our religious traditions.
But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.
I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side, or, if you’re a woman, your masculine side, you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know. CAMPBELL: That’s the information that one gets from being married. That’s the way you get in touch with your feminine side. MOYERS: But what happens to this self-discovery in love when you meet someone else, and you suddenly feel, “I know that person,” or “I want to know that person”?
But loyalty doesn’t forbid you to have an affectionate, even a loving relationship to another person of the opposite sex. The way in which the knightly romances describe the tenderness of the relationships to other women, of one who is being loyal to his own love, is very graceful and sensitive.
So joy and pain are in love. CAMPBELL: Yes. Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. MOYERS: But love bears all things. CAMPBELL: Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive.
There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: “When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.” Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension. Man’s tendency, however, is to personify such experiences, to anthropomorphize natural forces.
Yes, as it is in life itself. Even in our minds—when it comes to making a decision, there will be a war. In acting in relationship to other people, for example, there may be four or five possibilities. The influence of the dominant divinity in my mind will be what determines my decision. If my guiding divinity is brutal, my decision will be brutal, as well.
It’s our fashion to think of God in masculine form, but many traditions think of divine power principally in female form.
Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian? CAMPBELL: Not the kind of Christian we know. Perhaps some of the monks and nuns who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be of the sort that Jesus was. MOYERS: So Jesus might not have belonged to the Church militant? CAMPBELL: There’s nothing militant about Jesus. I don’t read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear, and Jesus said, “Put back thy sword, Peter.” But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.
I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
is true for everyone who has reached in his life the level of the heart. MOYERS: You really believe there is a geography of the psyche? CAMPBELL: This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex organs, and that’s all they’re living for. That’s the meaning of life. This is Freud’s philosophy, is it not? Then you come to the Adlerian philosophy of the will to power, that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure, that’s a perfectly good life, and those are forms of divinity also. But they are on the
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That depends on how you understand marriage. The word “sym-bol” itself means two things put together. One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is of two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are in one circle together.
“Mandala” is the Sanskrit word for “circle,” but a circle that is coordinated or symbolically designed so that it has the meaning of a cosmic order. When composing mandalas, you are trying to coordinate your personal circle with the universal circle. In a very elaborate Buddhist mandala, for example, you have the deity in the center as the power source, the illumination source. The peripheral images would be manifestations or aspects of the deity’s radiance.
In working out a mandala for yourself, you draw a circle and then think of the different impulse systems and value systems in your life. Then you compose them and try to find out where your center is. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordinate your circle with the universal circle.
To be at the center? CAMPBELL: At the center, yes. For instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing ceremonies are conducted through sand paintings, which are mostly mandalas on the ground. The person who is to be treated moves into the mandala as a way of moving into a mythological context that he will be identifying with—he identifies himself with the symbolized power. This idea of sand painting with mandalas, and their use for meditation purposes, appears also in Tibet. Tibetan ...
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