Symphony of Life

Parsing through old book notes, I found this wonderful passage from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell:

Schopenhauer in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual”, points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have the consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself which your consciousness is unaware, so too your life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become the leading agents in the structuring of your life, so too will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.

The book is based on a series of 6 one-hour conversations between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell in 1988.