[Bill] MOYERS: Perfection would be a bore, wouldn't it?
[Joseph] CAMPBELL: It would have to be. It would be inhuman. The umbilical point, the humanity, the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal—that's what's lovable. That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there's no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It's Christ on the cross that becomes lovable.
MOYERS: What do you mean?
CAMPBELL: Suffering. Suffering is imperfection, is it not?
MOYERS: The story of human suffering, striving, living—
CAMPBELL: —and youth coming to knowledge of itself, what it has to go through.
MOYERS: I came to understand from reading your books—The Masks of God or The Hero with a Thousand Faces, for example—that what human beings have in common is revealed in myths. Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need to help in our passages from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
CAMPBELL: People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's finally about, and that's what these clues help us to find within ourselves.
MOYERS: Myths are clues?
CAMPBELL: Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
MOYERS: What we're capable of knowing and experiencing within?
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning.
CAMPBELL: Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What's the meaning of a flower? There's a Zen story about a sermon of the Buddha in which he simply lifted a flower. There was only one man who game him a sign with his eyes that he understood what was said. Now, the Buddha himself is called "the one thus come." There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. That's it. And your own meaning is that you're there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about.