“This, am I.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Whenever one moves out of
The Transcendent,
one comes into
A Field of Opposites.
These Two,
Pairs of Opposites
come forth as
Male and Female
from the two sides.
What has eaten of
The Tree of The Knowledge,
not only of good and evil,
but of male and female,
of right and wrong,
of this and that,
and light and dark.
Everything in The Field of Time is Dual,
past and future,
dead and alive.
All This,
being and nonbeing,
is, isn’t.
BILL MOYERS:
And what’s the significance
of them being beside
The Mask of God,
The Mask of Eternity?
What is this sculpture
saying to us?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The Mask
represents
The Middle,
and
The Two
represent
The Two Opposites,
and
They ALWAYS
Come in Pairs.
And —
Put Your Mind
in The Middle.
Most of us put
Our Minds on
The Side of The Good
against
What We Think of as ‘Evil’.
It was Heraclitus,
I think, who said,
“For God, all things are
Good and Right and Just,
but for Man, some things are
Right and others are not.”
You’re in The Field of Time
when you’re Man,
and one of
The Problems of Life
is to
Live in the realisation of
both terms.
That is to say,
“I know
The Centre
and I know that
Good and Evil
are simply
temporal apparitions.”
BILL MOYERS:
Well, are some myths
More or Less
True than others?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
They’re True in
different senses, do you see?
Here’s a whole mythology
based on
The Insight That
Transcends Duality.
Ours is a mythology that’s based on The Insight of Duality.
And so,
Our Religion tends to be
ethical in its accent,
Sin and Atonement,
Right and Wrong.
It started with a sin, you see.
In other words, moving out of the mythological zone, the garden of paradise where there is no time, and where men and women don’t even know that they’re different from each other, there the two are just creatures. And God and man are practically the same: “He walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where we are.” And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the pairs of opposites, and man and woman then cover their shame, that they’re different; God and man, they’re different; man and nature, as against man.
“You get a totally different civilization, a totally different way of living according to your myth
as to whether Nature is fallen
or whether Nature is itself a manifestation of Divinity,
and The Spirit being the revelation of The Divinity That’s Inherent in Nature.”
— Joseph Campbell
I once heard a wonderful lecture by Daisetz Suzuki,
you remember, this wonderful old
Zen philosopher, who was over here.
He was in his 90s.
He started to lecture in Switzerland that I heard in Ascona.
He stood up with his hands on his side, and he said,
“God against Man —
Man against God —
Man against Nature —
Nature against Man —
Nature against God —
God against Nature —
Very funny religion.....”
Now, in the other mythologies,
One puts Oneself
in accord with The World.
If The World is a mixture
of Good and Evil,
you do not put yourself
in accord with it.
You Identify with The Good
and
You Fight against The Evil,
and this is a religious system
which belongs to
The Near East, following Zarathustra’s time.
It’s in the Biblical Tradition,
all the way, in Christianity
and in Islam as well.
This business of
not being with Nature,
and we speak with sort of derogation of
“The Nature Religions.”
You see, with that
Fall in The Garden,
Nature was regarded as corrupt.
There’s a Myth for you that
Corrupts The Whole World for Us.
And every Spontaneous Act is Sinful,
Because Nature is Corrupt
and
Has to be Corrected,
Must not be yielded-to.
You get
A Totally Different Civilisation,
a totally different way of living
according to your myth as to whether
Nature is Fallen or whether Nature is itself
A manifestation of divinity,
and The spirit being the revelation of the divinity that’s inherent in nature.
