“Perhaps Hope exists only in The Journey.... In The Beginning, everything is still possible, every expectation.... Every Dream.
None of us know for sure what's out there.
That's why we keep looking.
Keep your faith. Travel hopefully.
The Universe'll surprise you... constantly.
Paradise and Hell both can be earthly — We carry them with us, wherever we go.”
BILL MOYERS: How do we raise our consciousness?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s a matter of what you are disposed to think about, and that’s what meditations are for. And all of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. A lot of people spend most of it in meditating on where their money’s coming from and where it’s going to go, but that’s a level of meditation. Or, if you have a family to bring up, you’re concerned for the family. These are all perfectly, very important concerns, but they have to do with physical conditions, mostly, and spiritual conditions of the children, of course. But how are you going to communicate spiritual consciousness to the children if you don’t have it yourself? So how do you get that? Then you think about the myths. What the myths are for is to bring us into a level of consciousness that is spiritual.
Just for example, I walk off 52nd Street and Fifth Avenue into Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I have left a very busy city and one of the most fiercely economically inspired cities on the planet. I walk into that cathedral, and everything around me speaks of spiritual mystery. The mystery of the cross; what’s that all about there? The stained glass windows which bring another atmosphere in. My consciousness has been brought up onto another level altogether, and I am on a different platform. And then I walk out and I’m back in this one again. Now, can I hold something from that? Well, certain prayers or meditations that are associated with the whole context there; these are what are called mantras in India, little meditation themes that hold your consciousness on that level instead of letting it drop down here all the way. And then what you can finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that.
BILL MOYERS: The cathedral at Chartres, which you love so much…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, well.
BILL MOYERS: It also expresses a relationship of the human to the cosmos, doesn’t it?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think everyone who has spent any time at Chartres has felt something very special about this cathedral. I’ve been there about eight times. When I was a student in Paris, I went down there about five times and spent one whole weekend, and I identified and looked at every single figure in that cathedral. I was there so much that the concierge, this little old fellow who took care of the cathedral, he came to me one noontime and he said, “Would you like to go up with me and ring the bells?” I said, “I sure would.” So we climbed the fleche, the tower up to where the great bell was, the great enormous bronze bell, and there was a little, like a seesaw. And he stood on one end of the seesaw, and I stood on the other end of the seesaw, and there was a little bar there for us to hold onto. And he gave the thing a push and then he was on it and I was on it, and we started going up and down, and the wind blowing through our hair up there in the cathedral, and then it began underneath. Bong, you know, bong, bong… I tell you, it was one of the most thrilling adventures in my life.
And when it was all over, he brought me down, he said, “I want to show you where my room is.” Well, in a cathedral you have the nave and then the transept, and then the apse. And around the apse is the choir screen. Now the choir screen in Chartres is about that wide, and he took me in a little door into the middle of the choir screen, and there was his little bed and a little table with a lamp on it, and when I looked out, there was the Black Madonna, the vitrine, the window of the Black Madonna and that was where he lived. Now, there was a man living in a meditation, him? A constant meditation, I mean, that was a very moving, beautiful thing. Oh, I’ve been there time and time again, since.
BILL MOYERS: What do you find when you go there? What does it say about all that we’ve been discussing?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, first thing it says is, it takes me back to a time when these principles informed the society. I mean, you can tell what’s informed the society by the size of the what the building is that’s the tallest building in the place. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral’s the tallest thing in the place. When you approach a 17th century city, it’s the political palace that’s the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, it’s office buildings and dwellings that are the tallest things in the place.
And if you go to Salt Lake City, you’ll see the whole thing illustrated right in front of your face. First, the temple was built. The temple was built right in the center of the city. I mean, this was the proper organization, that’s the spiritual center from which all flows in all directions. And then the capitol was built right beside the temple, and it’s bigger than the temple. And now the biggest thing is the office building that takes care of the affairs of both the temple and the political building. That’s the history of Western civilization, from the Gothic through the princely periods of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, to this economic world that we’re in now.
BILL MOYERS: In New York now the debate is over who can build the tallest building, not to praise but to build the tallest building.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, and they are magnificent. I mean, some of the things that are going up in New York now really are, and this is a kind of architectural triumph. And what it is, is the statement of the city; we are a financial power center and look what we can do. It’s a kind of virtuosic acrobatics done.
BILL MOYERS: Will new myths come from there?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, something might. You can’t predict what a myth is going to be, any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place; they come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the myth, the only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that’s talking about the planet not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it. That’s my main thought for what the future myth is going to be. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with: the maturation of the individual, the gradual the pedagogical way to follow, from dependency through adulthood to maturity, and then to the exit and how to do it. And then how to relate to this society, and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about; that’s what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s going to talk about is the society of the planet, and until that gets going, you don’t have anything.
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