Moyers:  Can you imagine that somewhere else other creatures can be
         sitting, investing their transient journey with the kind of
         significance that our myths and great stories do?

Campbell:  No.  When you realize that if the temperature goes up fifty
         degrees and stays there, life will not exist on this earth, and
         that if it drops, let's say, another hundred degrees and stays
         there, life will not be on this earth; when you realize how
         very delicate this balance is, how the quantity of water is so
         important - well, when you think of all the accidents of the
         environment that have fostered life, how can you think that the
         life we know would exist on any other particle of the universe,
         no matter how many of these satellites around stars there may
         be. [p. 17]

                        ---------------------

Moyers:  And what does the idea of reincanation suggest?

Campbell:  It suggests that you are more than you think you are.  There
         are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization
         and consciousness that are not included in your concept of
         yourself.  Your life is much deeper and broader than you
         conceive it to be here.  What you are living is but a
         fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you
         life, breadth, and depth.  But you can live in terms of that
         depth.  And when you can experience it, you suddenly see that
         all the religions are talking of that. [p. 58]

                        ---------------------

Moyers:  In classic Christian doctrine the material world is to be
         despised, and life is to be redeemed in the hereafter, in
         heaven, where our rewards come.  But you say that if you affirm
         that which you deplore, you are affirming the very world which
         is our eternity at the moment.

Campbell:  Yes, that is what I'm saying.  Eternity isn't some later
         time.  Eternity isn't even a long time.  Eternity has nothing
         to do with time.  Eternity is that dimension of here and now
         that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.  And if you don't
         get it here, you won't get it anywhere.  The problem with
         heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you
         won't even think of eternity.  You'll just have this unending
         delight in the beautific vision of God.  But the experience of
         eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of
         as good or as evil, is the function of life.

Moyers:  This is it.

Campbell:  This is it. [p. 67]

                        ---------------------

Moyers:  Which stories from mythology help us understand death?

Campbell:  You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce to death.
         I would say that the story of Christ assuming the form of a
         human servant, even to death on the cross, is the principal
         lesson for us of the acceptance of death.  The story of Oedipus
         and the Sphinx has something to say of this, too.  The Sphinx
         in the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but a female
         form with the wings of a bird, the body of an animal, and the
         breast, neck, and face of a woman.  What she represents is the
         destiny of all life.  She has sent a plague over the land, and
         to lift the plague the hero has to answer the riddle that she
         presents:  "What is it that walks on four legs, then on two
         legs, and then on three?"  The answer is "Man."  The child
         creeps about on four legs, the adult walks on two, and the aged
         walk with a cane.

           The riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through
         time - childhood, maturity, age, and death.  When without fear
         you have faced and accepted the riddle of the Sphinx, death has
         no further hold on you, and the curse of the Sphinx disappears.
         The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's
         joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life
         only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but
         as an aspect of life.  Life in its becoming is always shedding
         death, and on the point of death.  The conquest of fear yeilds
         the courage of life.  That is the cardinal initiation of every
         heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement.

           I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian
         braves riding into battle against the rain of bullets of
         Custer's men. "What a wonderful way to die!"  There was no
         hanging on there to life.  This is one of the great messages of
         mythology.  I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of
         my being.  We must constantly die one way or another to the
         selfhood already achieved. [p. 151]

[_The Power of Myth_ by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers.  1988,
Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-24773-7 or 0-385-24774-5.]