“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to ac- tion?… This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in prac- tical experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self- interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of the kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life…”

Schopenhauer’s response, one Campbell delighted in making his own, was that the immediate reaction and response represented the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization best rendered as “thou art that.”2 This pre- supposes, as the German philosopher wrote, his identification with someone not himself, a penetration of the barrier between persons so that the other was no longer perceived as an indifferent stranger but as a person “in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves.”3

This fundamental insight, as Schopenhauer continued, reveals that “my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature… [and] is the ground of that compassion (Mitleid) upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.

“There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.”

-Albert Einstein¹

It is on this very point that Eastern mysticism and Western science meet. Tat tvam asi, “thou art that,” is the bottom line of Joseph Campbell’s philosophy. There is no matter; everything is the field. The sepa- rations and limitations are in our own minds.

To separate oneself or one’s group-to say, “Oh, no, we are different”-is to set oneself against whole- ness. To separate ourselves from the whole is to cut our options and erect the walls of our own prison. When we create duality in our thoughts and lives, we have created opposition.