ॐ.rocks: Inward

Joseph Campbell @ age 81, 1986 - The Power of Myth, published in 1988 - page ???

BILL MOYERS: Like Roethke's poem, "In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See." You're saying that myths have brought this consciousness to you.

JOSEPH  CAMPBELL: I live with these myths, and they tell me this all the time. This is the problem that can be metaphorically understood as identifying with the Christ in you. The Christ in you doesn't die. The Christ in you survives death and resurrects. Or you can identify that with Shiva. I am Shiva -- this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas.

BILL MOYERS: And heaven, that desired goal of most people, is within us.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.

BILL MOYERS: So when we dream, we are fishing in some vast ocean of mythology that --

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: -- that goes down and down and down. You can get all mixed up with complexes, you know, things like that, but really, as the Polynesian saying goes, you are then "standing on a whale fishing for minnows." We are standing on a whale. The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.

Malignant Normality page (click here)