This story got me thinking about life after death

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Couldn't have said it any better. And Campbell, he was a really great mind, really.

Oh, agreed, ten times over. Discovering Campbell changed everything for me. I was always reading mythology growing up, always fascinated and moved by it in ways I couldn't quite understand. But it seemed like there was more to it than just old stories in a book from the library. When I first saw "The Power Of Myth" - then I understood.

"Denn dieses vermögen wir Menschen gerade im Angesicht des Todes: uns auszuspannen bis zum Horizont, weit zu werden bis an die Enden der Welt, und also den Tod zu besiegen indem wir begreifen wer wir selber eigentlich sind." - "Because this we humans are able to achieve right in the face of death: to expand ourselves up to the horizon, to become wide until the edge of the world, and so to defeat death by realising who we really are." - E. Drewermann: "Mut zu Leben. in: Seelsorge im 20 Jahrhundert"

the other is from one of my absolute most favourite movise of all times, Terence Malick's "A thin red line". There, the narration voice from the off says this:

"One man looks at a dying bird, and thinks there is nothing but unanswered pain. But death's got the final word. It's laughing at him. Another man sees the same bird, feels the glory. Feels something smiling through him."

One of my very favorite Campbell quotes:

But the goal of your quest for knowledge of yourself is to be found at that burning point in yourself, that becoming thing in yourself, which is innocent of the goods and evils of the world as already become, and therefore desireless and fearless. That is the condition of a warrior going into battle with perfect courage. That is life in movement. That is the essence of the mysticism of war as well as of a plant growing. I think of grass — you know, every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawnmower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, “Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use if you keep getting cut down this way?” Instead, it keeps on growing. That’s the sense of the energy of the center. That’s the meaning of the image of the Grail, of the inexhaustible fountain, of the source. The source doesn’t care what happens once it gives into being. It’s the giving and coming into being that counts, and that’s the becoming life point in you.

And in the same movie, the final scene at the end of the film ends like this, after all the horror and all the beauty that just had been seen:

"Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes! Look out at all the things you made! All things shining!"

A fantastic, brutal, fragile, horryfying, beautiful, humane, spiritual movie. If you don't know it, go watching it. Stuff like this you see in the movies only every ten or twenty years or so.

I have not seen this one, I'll add it to the queue. Thanks for reminding me of it!