From documentary series “The Power of Myth” with Bill Moyers – a Winstar Fire Video
The Message of Myth
-Campbell says don’t be interested in things merely because they are said to be important but get a proper introduction to them and you may find indeed that they are very important.
-myths can help give you the guide signs along the way so you don’t have to figure out everything for yourself.
-the life has to do with meaning. We can find that meaning out. What is the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. Your own meaning also is that you are just there. There is a rapture associated with being alive.
-God is a reference to a thing that transcends all other things.
-everything in the field of time is dual: is and isn’t, dead and alive, male and female, good and evil, light and darkness. Things always come in pairs. Put your mind in the middle. Most of us put our minds on the good side, we must realize all realities.
-myths are true in different senses. Our religion is ethical, between right and wrong, for that is the world we live in, a world of opposites. God and man are different. God is eternal man is not. In the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve didn’t even know they were different from each other, mere creatures, then they learn there is more to it.
-in some religions in the near east as in the bible Christianity and Islam, is that there is nature, and you are corrupt if you are acting in spontaneity, for nature is corrupt, and you must fight such, this brings us to an entirely different society. The bible shows God is not nature, he is something separate, something higher. Hinduism is a different place without the narrative of the Garden of Eden. They think natural impulses aren’t to be corrected but beautified.
-when you enter an Indian home, you are a visiting deity and you feel that by the way they treat you.
-there is a standard motif of the one forbidden thing like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. God knows man will eat that fruit, and with the eating of that fruit, man becomes the initiator of his own life, the person in charge of his venture.
-the African legend of the Unumbate is similar to the Genesis creation narrative
-the snake can represent the power of life to throw off death, like how the God can extend life, the snake cuts it short by getting the man to take the forbidden fruit etc.
-it’s a childish idea to think that life should not have been because of its pain, it’s essence and character. Some say that is the case.
-this is our little eternity here and now: this is our current eternity. If you don’t get it here and now, you’ll never get it. This is it. Our participation here in this life, in this world, is how we will participate in eternity.
-all life is sorrowful is the first reality of life is the first Buddhist saying
-one must embrace life the way it is; history is a nightmare from which one must awake; don’t be frightened by it but embrace how it is. Pain is part of therapy. But these things don’t entail that we do nothing for good; we must participate in the game, the wonderful opera (except for that it hurts). This is not a private fight, anyone can get into it. The hero is the one who can participate in it decently without rancor. We can get in the army, or whatever we see how to do good, we join in and do our part to make things better.
-mythology helps you see your life as a poem, and that you are participating in that poem.
-Campbell claims that Christ’s ascension is symbolic not real, that all seeming miracles are mere ideas not realities. He teaches heaven hell and all the gods are within us, as well as all the worlds. This is the Indian way of thinking, that they are magnified dreams, images and body being in conflict with each other. That myth is symbolic manifestation of the dreams of the body, and the desires of the several organs of the body including the brain. (*I believe in the assertion of Christ into a celestial astronomical sphere heaven)
-in the Thomas gospel Christ says who drinks from my mouth becomes as me; this has similarities to the Buddha consciousness.
-when a society loses its myths, it succumbs to disease and destruction; when there is no fixed star, no known horizon, things decay. That is why preachers are begging for old time religion.
-if a person has no myth in his life, all he must do is read the newspaper. Its own idea.
-Campbell says it’s ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion seeing as there are other human values in our world today (*I see this true on some levels, but absolutely false on others).
-is the machine, society, going to crush or help the humanity which is from the heart? Luke’s father Vader had been playing the role of the executive, the system. And under the mask of Vader is an undeveloped man, something of a worm.
-each kind of religion is like a computer software
-the infrastructure of a computer is like a hierarchy of angels working together to do something
-one Chinese legend has a god who sleeps and a lotus flower grows from out of his stomach, that his dream is the universe (*Like the Egyptian depiction of the lotus flower from growing out from under the throne of Osiris, or the analogy of it coming from the throne of Abraham as Joseph Smith teaches, and how Abraham, as a prophet of Jehovah, shows how that is what God is like, Abraham is a type of Jehovah, teaching the world what Jehovah is like.)
-each galaxy in outer space may be like a lotus growing from out of a “Brahma”.
-speaks of a myth wherein the man is going to be a meditator for life but finds out that it is better to go and have a family, and live, thus, in the present, the time that really matters.
-the myths are like messages in a bottle from one who has visited those shores before you, and now you are visiting those same shores.
-when you go from one stage of life to another, like retirement etc., you need to create a new life for yourself. Focus on doing life in this life rather than on focusing on what you’ll do in the next life.
-death is where myth originates from: there was something in a person, then that thing leaves them. Where did it go?
-oft killing an animal wasn’t slaughter, but a ritual act honoring how the animal was giving its life voluntarily to you; that the animal was meant for your well-being, that the animal’s spirit would go on existing dispute being killed. This myth serves to wipe out the guilt of the killing, saying you are acting out nature.
-early hunting people oft saw the animal as superior to them, and they oft take home the personality of the animal as we see with the American Indians. The animals played roles in the myths, and people with those traits.
-a shaman was one with magical powers
-Indians called animals, trees, stones, as “thou” rather than “it”. Do that, and you’ll feel a change in psychology entirely. In the newspaper, people defame each other by making them it rather than thou.
-the song of the bird is the expression of its soul; the web of the spider the expression of its beauty; the life of a human it’s expression.
-Indians painted in caves, call them temple caves; a world of spiritual images.
-Cathedrals are oft seen as the mother womb of your spiritual life, where all the images are spiritual
-the Indian caves have animals depicted in them, but the picture is secondary in importance to the meanings of the images; it’s the place that’s like a womb, the place from which life comes; the world with the sun shining is secondary to the world compared to the whom of the earth where the life begins and originates. It was said that inside the earth was the womb land from which the animals, or the deities, came. There in the caves the boys would learn to be not boys but men. It’s was where the boys would be through the rites of initiation where they became no longer the mother’s son, but the father’s son. These Indian rites continue today in places like Australia.
-a ritual is the enactment of a myth, participating in a ritual is participating in the enactment of a myth
-the Indians would take the teeth out of a boy, etc., to try and make the boy go through a psychological change of becoming a new person, going from a boy to a man. Now the Catholic priest slaps the incite and that’s it. As for the girl, she goes from a girl to a woman with her first menstruation. It happens by nature. Her initiation ceremony is usually to sit there and consider what has happened to her. When a girl becomes a woman, she becomes a vehicle of life, identical with the gods. The boy doesn’t get this by nature but must become a servant of something greater than himself, to society, while a woman is to herself.
-if you want a society without any rituals, read the New York Times. It has young men who don’t know how to behave. They behave like barbarians, belonging to nothing. Even in the catholic church, they have translated the language from the Latin, which takes you from your place, and into English where it’s homely and cozy. They’ve forgotten the function of a ritual: to pitch you out! Not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time!
-James Joyce “The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” shows what it’s like to grow up and become a man. the artists are the myth makers of our day.
-the Shamans were the equivalent to our modern-day poets; they had an immense psychological experience and hence live in the spiritual realm. They experience dying and coming back to life, and deep dreams, or mystical encounters in the woods. They are persons who go from the normal world into that of the gifted. A priest is a functionary of a social sort, to carry on the ritual about a deity who preexisted him. A shaman rather teaches of his experience not a social ordination and appoints himself rather than being appointed.
-the woman is life, and the man the servant of life. With the indigenous tribes, the woman orchestrate the dance, and the men act out the dance.
-the tribes also do meditations of out of body experiences to reach ‘the other mind’ (*Jehovah doesn’t ask such of us but outlaws such. The experience he offers is more intelligible and logical and understandable and tangible.)
-Book “Black Alp Speaks”
-the shaman would be psychoanalysts to help the people going through hard things to retain connection with deity and give spiritual advisement.
-they say the central peak is everywhere, or the center of the universe, axis mundi, around which all revolve on the earth, where stillness is, where perhaps time is not. Jerusalem, Mexico City, Rome, etc., were symbolic of a center.
-Campbell speaks of how each human is a manifestation of the mystery of God
Love & The Goddess
-love is perfect kindness
-love is seeing your soul’s counterpart in the other person
-traditional marriages are arranged by the family, there is much family love. Today there is still this often. In the middle ages this is what the Catholic church sanctioned. So, person to person love was considered adultery by them.
-any idea of life bliss should be chosen with the idea that no one can frighten me away from this thing.
-love sick is the kind the doctor cannot heal
-the heart, opening to another person, is what distinguishes mankind from animals.
-much insight into life comes from experiencing it for yourself, trusting your feelings, having your own experience rather than word of mouth.
-Paul speaks of love enduring all things; love knows no pain.
-*Campbell has many ideas I don’t agree with, not in accord with the Restored Gospel.
-the main message of Christianity is legitimate love for all people.
-he learned religion from monks who felt no evil toward people who had committed mass murder on their people.
-the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified was for Atonement, at-one-ment, to make us one with God; the injured one becomes the Savior, it’s the suffering that evokes the compassion of the human heart. By contemplating this mystery you’re contemplating the true meaning of life.
-life is the burning point of love, since life is sorrowful, the more love the more pain that it will bring.
-there used to be an idea of the golden age of the goddess, where women were looked upon with great esteem, but ideas of men being more important choked that out, but it’s coming back perhaps.
-*Campbell claims that all religions don’t claim a physical location of an extra-terrestrial heaven on some planet somewhere, but not so with the LDS.
-in Egypt and other places, often it’s the goddess who is the dominant one
-the Hebrews calls the Canaanite Goddess an abomination whereas with the Greeks Zeus marries a lady (*some things are too sacred perhaps to speak of. But we do have some information about Heavenly Mother, the Goddess in the restored gospel, we believe this perhaps more literally and fervently than any other people. We merely don’t like mockeries of Her, she is so sacred we speak of her seldomly)
-*Campbell demeans the virgin birth of Christ. I appreciate some of what he has to say, not all.
-points out that oft we think too much of Jesus dying, but we could spend more time thinking about how we should be going through something similar; something of being born again yourself.
-Paul speaks of the former mythologies of death and rising now being incarnate by our Savior; that which was only talked about is now reality.
-the celebration of the rising of Christ happens in the solstice, when the days begin to be longer.
-in the ying-yang sign there is a light spot on the dark one and a dark spot on the light one, that is how they relate to each other.
-just because you die doesn’t mean your character changes
-*the inner reaches of outer space by Joseph Campbell another book he published, another run of the mill big bang theory book it looks like, though it may have some good insight about humans going on to become organizers of the heavens
-Wrote the book hero with 2000 faces, and there is a film on this in the BYU media library
-the hero must go through a death and a resurrection, he must be born again and start a new life, the young man a rite of initiation where he leaves childhood and goes to manhood etc.
-like joining the military, you put on a uniform, your old self is dead, you are a new creature
-the hero sacrifices themselves for a reality, for a better cause.
-as people learn to write, they put their society in pictures, they develop heroes
-Moses is hero in his book, he ascends to a mountain and returns
-the Chinese characters have analogies to Christ, you could match them with the Apostles
-Christ has 3 major temptations, economical being offered bread, then political Satan saying you can rule all if you obey me, then the spiritual one where he is tempted to throw himself down showing he is divine but says don’t tempt thy God. The Chinese go through similar 3 trials, lust, fear, and doing what they are told. They are in the wilderness for a time as well.
-all the myths have to do with transformation of consciousness.
-In Star Wars, George Lucas uses classical mythological roles. When Luke must pull his eyes closed and use his consciousness to defend himself, that’s real Japanese stuff.
-Star Wars in the garbage disposal is them being like Jonah in the belly of the whale, which represents the personification of all that is in the unconscious. Water is the unconscious, the person in the water is the dynism in the unconsciousness, which is powerful and dangerous.
-the hero moves from his comfortable life into danger, and he at that point is attacked, where he succeeds or is defeated.
-the brain is to be subject to the heart, or else you go over to the intellectual side, the dark side, like Darth Vader. The brain is a secondary organ that is to be used for HUMAN purposes, rather than serving a system. Resist like Luke Skywalker, the impersonal claims of the intellectual side. If a person not listen to his own heart, he gets off center and becomes schizophrenic, it’s not the life the body is interested in at all. There are many people who have stopped listening to themselves. We commit ourselves to a system and its requirements of our own, our lives are to be like a Maverick, not being willing to submit to things contrary to his personal creed.
-being in the water is like being in the subconscious, where we give ourselves to the dark power or the powers of above. This is common Indian lore.
-it’s psychology, when they find out what’s ticking in them, they get straightened out. This is a similar role of mythology and helps them see what the cores are of their life, and the negative aspects of what’s positive, all these things in their place.
-dragons represent caves where there are heaps of gold and virgins. Psychologically you’re captured in your own dragon cage. The psychologist wakes that dragon, so you can have a larger field of relations.
-the Chinese dragon represents nature
-the real dragon is the one that is in you- your ego- what you love, what you think you can do, what you think you can’t, your aims in life; it may be too small. We deal with it by falling in our place in life. Your work is it if you enjoy your work, or if you are afraid to do what you love, that’s your dragon locking you in when you say things like ‘oh I could never do that’.
-any world is a living world if it’s alive; you can bring to life what you will
-others can help you, but ultimately the ultimate trick must be done by you.
-Chinese speak of nirvana, Jesus speaks of peace. It’s a place in yourself of rest. The athlete has in himself a quiet place, and from there comes his action- same in dance, there is a center that must be held and known. Unless you find this center, you’re torn apart, tension comes. Nirvana isn’t a place like heaven, it’s a psychological state of mind in our present location which comes when you’re not compelled by desire or fear or social commitments, but you hold your center and act from there. It’s the way, but it’s your way too. The Buddha can’t tell you how to do it. The teacher can merely give you a clue of the direction, and the student must find what works for himself.
-the palm tree has a consciousness, it follows the sun in the day sky. Hence there is a plant consciousness. This is consciousness. The vegetable world etc., the whole world in conscious. Scientists are openly speaking of the Gaia principal, the whole planet as a living organism. We are the consciousness of the earth, our eyes its eyes, our voice its voice.
-how discover the consciousness? Meditation where we choose where to direct our efforts. Thinking of money is a level of meditation, which is important, but it can’t communicate spiritual consciousness to our loved ones which we must do.
-when you walk into a cathedral or temple, you leave the economic world and enter the spiritual one. Your consciousness is brought to another level. You leave the temple, and can you keep what you felt in there? You memorize prayers etc. which help you live in the spiritual realm while in the economic one; you learn that the economic realm is the lower manifestation of the real spiritual one.
-in one era, it’s the gothic cathedral tallest, then in later times the princely political centers are the tallest, now in our day, the business buildings are the tallest. You see this in SLC UT, the temple was first built there as tallest, then the city building larger, now the business buildings largest. That is how our society has developed.
-myths and dreams come from the same place, you can’t tell what they are going to be
-Campbell teaches people that if you really want to help people in this world, what you must teach them is how to live in it.
-Indians teach that the rivers are our brothers, that the air is precious to them and shares its spirit with the rest. The earth doesn’t belong to man but vice versa, what man does to the web he lives in, he does to himself. The love the earth as a mother it’s newborn.
-to have a sacred place is absolutely necessary for everyone where we have a room or an hour where we don’t think of news friends or debts but consider bringing forth what you are or might me. A place of creation. Use this place and something will happen. For the Indians the whole earth was such a place.
-as you get older, the claims of the environment are so great that you hardly know where you are. You’re always doing this and that, so you stop knowing where you are. Put on music you like or read the book you want to read.
-to one in the forest, being on a mountaintop seeing a horizon is frightening, and the animals looks small as ants since you have no sense of depth.
-the aborigines become a part of their world. Today we are stripping the world of the revelation the earth can give us.
-one myth tells of man killing a bird and hence killing himself by killing his environment
-Jesus uses a similar analogy, saying I am the vine and you are the branches, this connection with each other.
-seeing similar tales across cultures may be because humanity has a similar organ, has similar brains (*Also, God reveals truth from heaven) the hero dying for life to appear again (*this is passed along though time.)
-some aborigines have people killed then them eaten. Also, the Catholics have the sacrament they eat believing it’ the flesh and blood of the deity. (*LDS believe this only symbolic, not that we are eating gods flesh literally at all)
-Jesus on a cross is the fruit on the second tree, the first tree bringing death, he bringing life. The first tree is the tree of exit, where separation occurs, the tree of Jesus is the tree of life, of bringing things back together.
-see also the Buddha sitting under the Wisdom Tree.
-the person’s body is the carrier of the vehicle of life
-death and life are 2 aspects of the same thing: Being and Becoming. The life is being, the death is how we do becoming, or transformation. This is in every myth, they all acknowledge death.
-Jesuits had a boy to be sacrificed, they would sing on the way to the sacrifice, including the sacrificial victim, and the killers were the priests.
-Jesus sang a hymn before the crucifixion we see recorded in the bible.
-you need death to have life and birth
-in some tribes the young man must kill someone to qualify for marriage. When the new child is born in the family, your whole duty is to be caregiver for that new life, that new generation.
-Schopenhauer’s philosophy speaks of how can one love another so much to sacrifice himself for another? It’s extraordinary. The theory of self-preservation vanishes in it. It’s that you and the other person are one. Unity in all life. A metaphysical truth that becomes spontaneously realized for it’s the fount of all truth.
-a guy in the office every day doesn’t get real life experience, but when he rescues someone, or feels some pain, he finds out he is alive, and it hurts, but it’s good to know you are alive.
-marriage is primarily about becoming one spiritually rather than physically though such is a part of it. The physical is the elementary stage, but there is a deeper stage of unity than even that.
-at times people divorce after their child is raised, not understanding that marriage isn’t just about children, it’s about each other, becoming one together, a transcendent unit creating together continuously.
-your heart tells you who to marry, that’s the mystery. Something within you knows this is the one.
-Woody Allen said, “I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
-the body dies as it gets to where there is more mass than energy.
-you as you know yourself aren’t the final term of your being. You must die to that one way or another, you must become yourself.
-it doesn’t matter if you have accomplishments in life; if you’ve never done anything you want to do in life, it’s all for nothing.
-the wheel of fortune has a person either on the top or the bottom, but the person at the hub of the wheel is who never moves. That’s how marriage is to be, you love them in sickness or in health, you love them because of them, they are your joy no matter what stage they are in in the wheel of fortune.
-a poet is one who has made a lifestyle of being in touch with these type of things; most people get involved with other things economic or political in life;
-as a teacher he interviewed each student for 30 minutes every other day about the things they should be reading and the several topics.
-the joy we find, grab that. You must learn to recognize your own depths. You can be helped by hidden times as you find this track that has been waiting for you and you begin to live it. You begin to see people who are in the field of your bliss as helpful to you.
-he says the waters of eternal bless are where you are following your heart (*I see this is so, but that it grows as we move from one life to the next also).
-the reference to God is to something that transcends all
-*the secular world, as we see from Campbell, see God as neither being nor existing, and that none can understand God. That apostate doctrine that has been around ever since the people killed Jesus and his Apostles.
-we emphasize how each individual must be their own reincarnation
-you are god in your deepest identity, one with the transcendent
-he calls the different ways people view masks as different masks they wear
-he calls divinity the realization of wonder and tremendous power, like as we see with nature, something much bigger than humans.
-in the west we consider God as the source of energy, in the east and perhaps antiquity they see God as the vehicle of energy, the manifestation of energy. The source of the energy he says is a total mystery.
-in the east the Gods are less human and more like the powers of nature, representing an energy system, being the vehicle of the energy, not its source as in the west.
-the word religion is from the word religio, the linking back to a familiar source
-the center is an image is all religion, it’s the center from which you come, and the center to which you will return.
-Natalie Curtis about the Indian Circle, her conversation with an Indian chief, speaks of eagle’s nest as a circle.
-Plato speaks of the soul being a circle
-the temporal aspect of the circle is that you start in a place and go back to that place, it’s like God being the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
-the circle is seen often, like going out for a hunt then returning to camp; or the watch or calendar, we celebrate holidays time and again.
-a Mandela is a Chinese picture with a god in the middle, the power source, and manifestations of that around it. (*Same seen in The Pearl of Great Price LDS Scripture, and Egyptian text etc.)
-*Campbell doesn’t believe in a personal god, lest that god reveal himself to you; this isn’t LDS theology, but it expresses the idea that this life is a test, and it takes effort to reach God.
-there are motif’s you find in all of religion and mythology all around the world, such as a spiritual power source, a Savior, a virgin birth, a creation narrative, etc.
-god is the archetype of man, we are created in his image.
-clowns in religion show that the form is just a trick, that the image does not matter. It’s to say, I’m not the ultimate image, I’m transparent to something. Thorough my funny form I’m mocking that, and (*trying to be an idea rather than a face)
-humor is one way of expressing how we people don’t have everything correct, *and how humanity is silly at how much we mess it up sometimes
-a whole new stage of human life opens when one opens the heart. It’s like becoming a human rather than an animal, not merely living for the occasional pleasure.
-you can experience this ultimate mystery either with or without form
-wanting to own object is pornography
-the god who wants your mind open, if your mind is shut can appear terrifying, but if your mind is open you can see this god as benevolent.
-poetry doesn’t shut you off, it opens you. Then you get an epiphany which is a showing through of the essence of god or eternity.
-Schopenhauer says when you look back on your life it seems to have had an order, to have had been orchestrated, that the things that you thought were random occurrences, those turn out to be the main elements of a plot. He considers god orchestrating such, about all influencing the structure of everything else, like a big symphony; it’s like life is a dream of a man dreaming, and all characters in his dream are dreaming. In India it’s shown as a net of gems which all reflect each other. They get into the excuse of saying you can’t blame anyone for anything (*I don’t believe the part about no one having responsibility).
-Campbell says there is no purpose to life (*I don’t believe that)
-Campbell says follow your dream, that if you just focus on earning money, you’ve lost your life.
-when you’re journeying, and you see your journey is getting longer and longer, you learn that your journey is the destination; this is one way to look at it.
-why cut the grass over and over? It’s for the coming into being.
-The word was made flesh is about how the eternity has a mortal experience (*the text refers to Jesus Christ).
-A-U-M chant of the monks is a cycle of your mouth representing birth being and completion at the closing of the mouth with the M.
