trust your senses, then.

i've read Harris and Dawkins. due to the dark place i was in two years ago, i enjoyed their work at the time. now? poor buggers.

and i agree that religion and 'God' are way too intertwined. i don't particularly care for the word myself; it's been rendered nearly useless by prejudices and misconceptions.

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Campbell, from pages 56-57:

Campbell: It's a matter of planes of consciousness. There is the planes of consciousness where you can identify yourself with that which transcends pairs of opposites.

Moyers: Which is?

Campbell: Unnameable. Unnameable. it is transcendent of all names.

Moyers: God?

Campbell: "God" is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name "God." God is beyond names and forms. Meister Eckhart said that the ultimate and highest leave-taking is leaving God for God, leaving your notions of God for an experience of that which transcends all notions. The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of pairs of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.

Moyers: Why do we think in terms of opposites?

Campbell: Because we can't think otherwise.

Moyers: That's the nature of reality in our time.

Campbell: That's the nature of our experience of reality.

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more, from pages 73-74:

Campbell: Poetry is a metaphorical language.

Moyers: A metaphor suggests potential.

Campbell: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

Moyers: You speak of the poets and artists. What about the clergy?

Campbell: I think our clergy is really not doing its proper work. It does not speak about the connotations of the metaphors but is stuck with the ethics of good and evil.

Moyers: What haven't the priests become the shamans of American society?

Campbell: The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had an experience. In our tradition it is the monk who seeks the experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community. I had a friend who attended an international meeting of the Roman Catholic meditative orders, which was held in Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but that it was the clergy of the two religions who were unable to understand each other. The person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don't render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven't had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue - otherwise you're not hearing what is being said.

Moyers: The person who has the experience has to project it the best way he can with images. It seems to me that we have lost the art in our society of thinking in images.

Campbell: Oh, we definitely have. Our thinking is largely discursive, verbal, linear. There is more reality in an image than in a word.

Moyers: Do you ever think that it is this absence of of the religious experience of ecstasy, joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?

Campbell: Absolutely. That is the way in.

Moyers: The way in?

Campbell: To an experience.

Moyers: And religion can't do that for you, or art can't do it?

Campbell: It could, but it's not doing it now. Religions are addressing social problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.