classes ::: author, professor, Mythology, Psychology, Mysticism,
children :::
branches ::: Joseph Campbell

bookmarks: Instances - Definitions - Quotes - Chapters - Wordnet - Webgen


object:Joseph Campbell
object:JC2
class:author
class:professor
subject class:Mythology
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Mysticism

Influences:James_Frazer, Carl_Jung, Sigmund_Freud, Leo Frobenius, Krishnamurti, Heinrich Zimmer, Stanislav Grof, Johann Bachofen, Otto Rank, Thomas Mann, Schopenhauer, James_Joyce, Abraham_Maslow, Adolf Bastian


--- PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
The_Power_of_Myth

A_skeleton_key_to_Finnegans_wake-New_World_Library_(2005)
Knowledge_and_skepticism-A_Bradford_Book_MIT_Press_(2010)
Man_and_Time__Papers_from_the_Eranos_Yearbooks_(Bollingen_Series)-Princeton_Univ_Pr_(1983)
Meaning_and_truth__investigations_in_philosophical_semantics-Seven_Bridges_Press_(2002)
Mythos__The_Shaping_of_Our_Mythic_Tradition-Element_Books_(2000)
Occidental_mythology-Penguin_Books__(1964)
The_heros_journey_(1991)
The_Masks_of_God,_Vol._1__Primitive_Mythology-Martin_Secker_&_Warburg_(1960)
The_Masks_of_God,_Vol._4__Creative_Mythology_(1991)
The_Way_of_the_Animal_Powers-Harper_&_Row_(1983)
Time_and_identity-MIT_Press_(2010)


--- WIKI
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 October 30, 1987) was an American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's most well-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth. Since the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theories have been applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss." He gained recognition in Hollywood when George Lucas credited Campbell's work as influencing his Star Wars saga. Campbell's approach to folklore topics such as myth and his influence on popular culture has been the subject of criticism, including from folklorists, academics in folklore studies.


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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO


AUTH

BOOKS
Infinite_Library
The_Heros_Journey
The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
The_Power_of_Myth

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME
1.01_-_the_Call_to_Adventure
1.02_-_The_Refusal_of_the_Call
1.03_-_Supernatural_Aid
1.04_-_The_Crossing_of_the_First_Threshold
1.05_-_The_Belly_of_the_Whale
2.01_-_The_Road_of_Trials
2.02_-_Meeting_With_the_Goddess
2.05_-_Apotheosis
3.04_-_The_Crossing_of_the_Return_Threshold

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
0.00_-_THE_GOSPEL_PREFACE
1.01_-_the_Call_to_Adventure
1.02_-_The_Refusal_of_the_Call
1.03_-_Supernatural_Aid
1.04_-_THE_APPEARANCE_OF_ANOMALY_-_CHALLENGE_TO_THE_SHARED_MAP
1.04_-_The_Crossing_of_the_First_Threshold
1.05_-_The_Belly_of_the_Whale
1.05_-_THE_HOSTILE_BROTHERS_-_ARCHETYPES_OF_RESPONSE_TO_THE_UNKNOWN
2.01_-_The_Road_of_Trials
2.02_-_Meeting_With_the_Goddess
2.05_-_Apotheosis
3.04_-_The_Crossing_of_the_Return_Threshold
3-5_Full_Circle

PRIMARY CLASS

author
professor
SIMILAR TITLES
Joseph Campbell

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE



QUOTES [73 / 73 - 1172 / 1172]


KEYS (10k)

   63 Joseph Campbell
   1 where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons
   1 Tom Butler-Bowdon
   1 Phil Hine
   1 my heavens
   1 losing yourself
   1 Ken Wilber
   1 Jason Bowman
   1 I take you in health or sickness
   1 including that of our contemporary biological view
   1 heaven

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

1088 Joseph Campbell
   5 Timothy Ferriss
   5 Sean Patrick
   4 Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers
   3 Bren Brown
   2 Joseph Campbell (Mythos)
   2 Elizabeth Lesser
   2 Christopher Ryan
   2 Caitlin Doughty

1:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
2:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell,
3:The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure ~ Joseph Campbell,
4:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
5:What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey,
6:Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
7:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
8:Make your God transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is. ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
9:Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces,
10:The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
11:The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
12:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
13:Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. ~ Joseph Campbell,
14:You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey,
15:One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that. ~ Joseph Campbell,
16:The realms of the gods and demons ~ heaven, purgatory, hell ~ are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light,
17:When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness." ~ Joseph Campbell, (1904-1987), Wikipedia. See,
18:Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. ~ Joseph Campbell,
19:Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
20:Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
21:As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
22:One thing that comes out of myth is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
23:Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
24:One of our problems is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We're interested in the news of the day ...When you get to be older and you turn to the inner life -- well, if you don't know where it is or what it is, you'll be sorry. ~ Joseph Campbell,
25:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
   ~ Joseph Campbell,
26:Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living,
27:They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey,
28:10. Apotheosis:Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lies in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. ~ Joseph Campbell,
29:The remainder of the long story of Kamar al-Zaman is a history of the slow yet wonderful operation of a destiny that has been summoned into life. Not everyone has a destiny: only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again-with a ring. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Crossing of the Return Threshold,
30:Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Works,
31:Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
32:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces,
33:for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not. When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, "I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God's view, there is no difference." ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
34:The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
35:The research for physical immortality proceeds from a misunderstanding of the traditional teaching. On the contrary, the basic problem is: to enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact: "It is here! It is here!" [165]
[165] A Tantric aphorism. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
36:When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Works,
37:Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity~my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm. ~ Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler for the Yoga Journal (1987),
38:The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes~including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye. ~ Joseph Campbell,
39:Further Reading:
Nightside of Eden - Kenneth Grant
Shamanic Voices - Joan Halifax
The Great Mother - Neumann
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Cities of the Red Night - William S. Burroughs
The Book of Pleasure - Austin Osman Spare
Thundersqueak - Angerford & Lea
The Masks of God - Joseph Campbell
An Introduction to Psychology - Hilgard, Atkinson & Atkinson
Liber Null - Pete Carroll ~ Phil Hine, Aspects of Evocation,
40:If you realize what the real problem is~losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another~you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way. ~ Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth,
41:[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ Joseph Campbell,
42:I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living,
43:17. Freedom to Live:The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. "Before Abraham was, I AM." He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change. 'Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure that nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass. ~ Joseph Campbell,
44:The Japanese have a proverb: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
45:Creative artists … are mankind's wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology,
46:13. The Magic Flight:If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
47:In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There's the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow~I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you. That is following your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers,
48:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form-all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
49:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
50:The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in-and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Crossing of the Return Threshold,
51:14. Rescue from Without:The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. 'Who having cast off the world,' we read, 'would desire to return again? He would be only there.' And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door. If the hero... is unwilling, the disturber suffers an ugly shock; but on the other hand, if the summoned one is only delayed-sealed in by the beatitude of the state of perfect being (which resembles death)-an apparent rescue is effected, and the adventurer returns. ~ Joseph Campbell,
52:11. The Ultimate Boon:The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven. ~ Joseph Campbell,
53:So it is that when Dante had taken the last step in his spiritual adventure, and came before the ultimate symbolic vision of the Triune God in the Celestial Rose, he had still one more illumination to experience, even beyond the forms of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. "Bernard," he writes, "made a sign to me, and smiled, that I should look upward; but I was already, of myself, such as he wished; for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more, through the radiance of the lofty Light which in Itself is true. Thenceforward my vision was greater than our speech, which yields to such a sight, and the memory yields to such excess. [167]
[167] "Paradiso," XXXIII, 49-57 (translation by Norton, op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 253-254, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers). ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
54:2. Refusal of the Call:Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless-even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
55:The thunderbolt (vajra) is one of the major symbols in Buddhist iconography, signifying the spiritual power of Buddhahood (indestructible enlightenment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. The Absolute, or Adi Buddha, is represented in the images of Tibet as Vajra-Dhara (Tibetan: Dorje-Chang) "Holder of the Adamantine Bolt.
...
We know also that among primitive peoples warriors may speak of their weapons as thunderbolts. Sicut in coelo et in terra: the initiated warrior is an agent of the divine will; his training is not only in manual but also in spiritual skills. Magic (the supernatural power of the thunderbolt), as well as physical force and chemical poison, gives the lethal energy to his blows. A consummate master would require no physical weapon at all; the power of his magic word would suffice. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
56:And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world~where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again~each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, 'Know thyself,' is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every 'thou' on earth is the center of this world, in the sense of that formula quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as 'an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.' ~ Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology,
57:Part 3 - Return
12. Refusal of the Return:When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds. But the responsibility has been frequently refused. Even Gautama Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated, and saints are reported to have died while in the supernal ecstasy. Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
58:4. Crossing the First Threshold:With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in four directions-also up and down-standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the members of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. ~ Joseph Campbell,
59:Part 2 - Initiation
6. The Road of Trials:Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed-again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unsustainable ecstasies and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land. ~ Joseph Campbell,
60:7. The Meeting with the Goddess:The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart. The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed-whether she will or not. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace. ~ Joseph Campbell,
61:8. The Woman As Temptress:The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else. But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond (the woman), surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond. ~ Joseph Campbell,
62:16. Master of Two Worlds:Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back-not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other-is the talent of the master. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
63:15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold:The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world. Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided" The hero returns to the world of common day and must accept it as real. ~ Joseph Campbell,
64:3. Meeting the Mentor:For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance-promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just behind the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. ~ Joseph Campbell,
65:Because I have called, and ye refused . . . I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you." "For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them."

Time Jesum transeuntem et non revertentem: "Dread the passage of Jesus, for he does not return."

The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. King Minos retained the divine bull, when the sacrifice would have signified submission to the will of the god of his society; for he preferred what he conceived to be his economic advantage. Thus he failed to advance into the liferole that he had assumed-and we have seen with what calamitous effect. The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously, if one is oneself one's god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one's egocentric system, becomes a monster. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
66:Part 1 - Departure
1. The Call to Adventure ::: This first stage of the mythological journey-which we have designated the "call to adventure"-signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of grav­ ity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infinitum, from every corner of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
67:Recommended Reading
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
DH Lawrence - The Rainbow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle
Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse
Ben Lerner - The Topeka School
Sally Rooney - Conversations With Friends
Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper
Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment
Jack Kerouac - Dharma Bums
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Michael Murphy - Golf in the Kingdom
Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
Albertine Sarrazin - Astragal
Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby
Michael Paterniti - Love and Other Ways of Dying
Rainer Maria Rilke - Book of Hours
James Baldwin - Another Country
Roberto Calasso - Ka
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - Principle Upanisads
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Translation by Georg Feuerstein - Yoga Sutra
Richard Freeman - The Mirror of Yoga
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - The Bhagavad Gita
Shrunyu Suzuki - Zen Mind Beginner's Mind
Heinrich Zimmer - Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
Sogyal Rinpoche - The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Joseph Campbell - Myths of Light
Joseph Campbell - The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Sri Aurobindo - Savitri
Thomas Meyers - Anatomy Trains
Wendy Doniger - The Hindus ~ Jason Bowman, http://www.jasonbowmanyoga.com/recommended-reading,
68:5. Belly of the Whale:The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshipper into a temple-where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. The devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero-dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act. ~ Joseph Campbell,
69:9. Atonement with the Father/Abyss:Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis-only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same. The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands-and the two are atoned. ~ Joseph Campbell,
70:The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again-if the powers have remained unfriendly to him-his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir). ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Keys,
71:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,
72:reading :::
   Self-Help Reading List:
   James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
   Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2nd Century)
   The Bhagavad-Gita
   The Bible
   Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
   Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
   Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
   William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1980)
   David Brooks The Road to Character (2015)
   Brené Brown Daring Greatly (2012)
   David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
   Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
   Richard Carlson Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
   Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
   Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
   Clayton Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012)
   Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
   Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
   Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
   The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
   The Dhammapada (Buddha's teachings)
   Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit (2011)
   Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
   Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
   Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
   Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning (1959)
   Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
   Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
   Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
   John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
   Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
   James Hillman The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
   Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
   Richard Koch The 80/20 Principle (1998)
   Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014)
   Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
   Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
   Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
   Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
   Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
   Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
   Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
   M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
   Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
   Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
   Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
   Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
   Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
   Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
   Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
   ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help,
73:Apotheosis ::: One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.

Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings are without self."

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them-and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.

The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." - Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Apotheosis,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:All babies are Buddha babies. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
2:Don't do anything that isn't play. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
3:Love is a friendship set to music. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
4:Love is exactly as strong as life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
5:Art is the clothing of a revelation. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
6:Religion is misunderstood mythology. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
7:The place to find is within yourself. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
8:Every story you tell is your own story. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
9:A myth doesn't have to be real to be true. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
10:Seek to know the power that is within you. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
11:Myth is what we call other people's religion. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
12:You have to learn to recognise your own depth. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
13:I don't have to have faith, I have experience.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
14:The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
15:Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
16:You can’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
17:Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
18:Whatever the hell happens, say, "This is what I need.” ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
19:The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
20:The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
21:The god you worship is the one you're capable of becoming. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
22:Mythology is the womb of man's initiation to life and death. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
23:The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
24:All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
25:God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, "Ah!”  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
26:The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
27:Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
28:The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
29:The cave you most fear to enter contains the greatest treasure. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
30:Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
31:Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
32:The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.         ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
33:&
34:If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
35:The warrior's approach is to say "yes" to life: "yes" to it all.” ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
36:Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
37:It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
38:Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
39:The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
40:The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
41:If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
42:Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
43:You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
44:The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
45:Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
46:If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
47:Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
48:The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
49:Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
50:He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
51:Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
52:Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
53:It's a shame to waste the uniqueness that is you, by doing what someone else has done. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
54:Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
55:Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
56:The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
57:A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
58:If you follow your bliss... the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
59:Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
60:The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
61:The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
62:It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
63:Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
64:I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
65:Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
66:When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
67:Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
68:Eternity is not the hereafter... this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
69:When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
70:I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
71:Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
72:The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
73:No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
74:It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
75:Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
76:We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
77:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
78:If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
79:I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
80:The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
81:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
82:When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
83:Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
84:The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.    ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
85:Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
86:Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
87:Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
88:In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
89:What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
90:Questing is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
91:It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
92:The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
93:In the words of Joseph Campbell, life is ‘one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream character is dream too’. ~ tim-freke, @wisdomtrove
94:How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
95:Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
96:The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
97:There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
98:I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
99:I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
100:I always tell my students follow your bliss. When you have that feeling then stay with it and don't let anyone throw you off. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
101:Myths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
102:Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
103:Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
104:The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come.  At the darkest moment comes the light.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
105:What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
106:God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
107:Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
108:Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
109:The perfect human being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
110:Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
111:One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
112:Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
113:A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
114:Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
115:Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
116:The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
117:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
118:For myself, well, Alan Watts once asked me what spiritual practice I followed. I told him, ‘I underline books.’ It’s all in how you approach it.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
119:You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
120:One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
121:Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
122:We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
123:The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
124:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
125:Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
126:The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
127:At such moments, you realise that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
128:If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
129:What did I do? I read. I followed the path from one book to another, from one thinker to another. I followed my bliss, though I didn’t know that was what I was doing. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
130:..enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact... ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
131:If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
132:When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
133:A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: ‘As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It’s not as wide as you think.’  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
134: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. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
135:Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
136:Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? &
137:It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
138:If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
139:Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
140:Joseph Campbell wrote, If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path. ~ brene-brown, @wisdomtrove
141:I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
142:Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
143:We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
144:The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
145:Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
146:Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.    ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
147:Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
148:When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
149:God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
150:The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
151:What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
152:When you see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
153:There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
154:With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
155:The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
156:We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
157:You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
158:The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
159:How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
160:The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere&
161:The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
162:How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means &
163:If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
164:Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
165:Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
166:The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.  Joseph Campbell ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
167:Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is writing in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
168:I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
169:Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
170:The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it's really a manifestation of his character. It's amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
171:There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
172:Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
173:What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
174:The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
175:If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
176:All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
177:People say that what we are all seeking is meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innnermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
178:You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
179:The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, &
180:Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
181:Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love&
182:The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
183:Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done.  ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
184:Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
185:Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
186:Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
187:Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
188:When you look at that nature world it becomes an icon, it becomes a holy picture that speaks of the origins of the world. Almost every mythology sees the origins of life coming out of water. And, curiously, that's true. It's amusing that the origin of life out of water is in myths and then again, finally, in science, we find the same thing. It's exactly so. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
189:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
190:Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth&
191:There's a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there's no such thing as work, and there's no such thing as getting tired. That's been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they've all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
192:Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
193:Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing. ~ ursula-k-le-guin, @wisdomtrove
194:We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
195:The good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure. You are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then, if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.    ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
196:Myths are stories for 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 help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
197:There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
198:What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
199:Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
200:The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
201: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 yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
202:The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
203:Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
204:This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God ... Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
205:The interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
206:In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say &
207:Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man... . Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
208:This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers this morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
209:Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
210:Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realisation of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension. ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove
211:Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment-not discouragement-you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.   ~ joseph-campbell, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:counterpart, in ~ Joseph Campbell,
2:Follow your bliss ~ Joseph Campbell,
3:Follow your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
4:Hell is life drying up. ~ Joseph Campbell,
5:Do what gives you bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
6:Love is perfect kindness. ~ Joseph Campbell,
7:If you are falling....dive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
8:All babies are Buddha babies. ~ Joseph Campbell,
9:Awe is what moves us forward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
10:When you are falling --- Dive! ~ Joseph Campbell,
11:Everything starts with a story. ~ Joseph Campbell,
12:Tragedy is an unfinished comedy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
13:Don't do anything that isn't play ~ Joseph Campbell,
14:All we really want to do is dance. ~ Joseph Campbell,
15:Love is exactly as strong as life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
16:Religon is misunderstood mythology ~ Joseph Campbell,
17:Art is the clothing of a revelation ~ Joseph Campbell,
18:If we fix on the old, we get stuck. ~ Joseph Campbell,
19:The insecure way is the secure way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
20:You are the Hero of your own Story. ~ Joseph Campbell,
21:An old Apache storyteller reminds us ~ Joseph Campbell,
22:A ritual is the enactment of a myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
23:A temple is a landscape of the soul. ~ Joseph Campbell,
24:The spirit is the bouquet of nature. ~ Joseph Campbell,
25:The place to find is within yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
26:The process of nature cannot be evil. ~ Joseph Campbell,
27:At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
28:I don't have faith, I have experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
29:I don't need faith. I have experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
30:Every story you tell is your own story. ~ Joseph Campbell,
31:It is within you that the divine lives. ~ Joseph Campbell,
32:The concept of time shuts off eternity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
33:Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous ~ Joseph Campbell,
34:Regrets are illuminations come too late. ~ Joseph Campbell,
35:What does the soul truly want is a story ~ Joseph Campbell,
36:You've got to find the force inside you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
37:The influence of a vital being vitalizes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
38:The perfect human being is uninteresting. ~ Joseph Campbell,
39:A myth doesn't have to be real to be true. ~ Joseph Campbell,
40:Seek to know the power that is within you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
41:I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.' ~ Joseph Campbell,
42:Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life ~ Joseph Campbell,
43:The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
44:We save the world by being alive ourselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
45:All religions are true but none are literal. ~ Joseph Campbell,
46:Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
47:Myth is what we call other people's religion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
48:The best we can do is lean towards the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
49:To find your own way is to follow your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
50:hen threatened by fear and desire, let ego go. ~ Joseph Campbell,
51:I don't have to have faith, I have experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
52:If there's a way or path, it's someone else's. ~ Joseph Campbell,
53:One looks, looks long, and the world comes in. ~ Joseph Campbell,
54:We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows ~ Joseph Campbell,
55:You have to learn to recognize your own depth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
56:If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go. ~ Joseph Campbell,
57:People forget facts, but they remember stories. ~ Joseph Campbell,
58:The dance is the highest symbol of life itself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
59:We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows. ~ Joseph Campbell,
60:We're all seeking...the rapture of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
61:You have to learn to recognize your own depths. ~ Joseph Campbell,
62:Hay más realidad en una imagen que en una palabra ~ Joseph Campbell,
63:The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. ~ Joseph Campbell,
64:Love your enemies, for they determine who you are. ~ Joseph Campbell,
65:Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. ~ Joseph Campbell,
66:Of all the forms of māyā that of woman is supreme. ~ Joseph Campbell,
67:Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names. ~ Joseph Campbell,
68:Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare. ~ Joseph Campbell,
69:When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
70:Everything, all the time, is causing everything else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
71:Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
72:MOYERS: But that’s not the Christian idea of creation ~ Joseph Campbell,
73:The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag. ~ Joseph Campbell,
74:The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag. ~ Joseph Campbell,
75:Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold. ~ Joseph Campbell,
76:All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional. ~ Joseph Campbell,
77:Whatever the hell happens, say, 'This is what I need.' ~ Joseph Campbell,
78:The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. ~ Joseph Campbell,
79:The fundamental human experience is that of compassion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
80:What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss ~ Joseph Campbell,
81:The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
82:The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won't! ~ Joseph Campbell,
83:The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. ~ Joseph Campbell,
84:There is no security in following the call to adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
85:Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
86:Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else's way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
87:Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. ~ Joseph Campbell,
88:Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps. ~ Joseph Campbell,
89:The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive ~ Joseph Campbell,
90:Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming. ~ Joseph Campbell,
91:All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
92:If you travel far enough, you'll eventually meet yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
93:Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92) ~ Joseph Campbell,
94:The god you worship is the one you're capable of becoming. ~ Joseph Campbell,
95:There is no greater privilege in life than being yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
96:You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body. ~ Joseph Campbell,
97:Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle ~ Joseph Campbell,
98:God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah! ~ Joseph Campbell,
99:Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
100:Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
101:The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides ~ Joseph Campbell,
102:You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave. ~ Joseph Campbell,
103:Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
104:The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets. ~ Joseph Campbell,
105:The ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond Human experience ~ Joseph Campbell,
106:You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death. ~ Joseph Campbell,
107:All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
108:All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
109:Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death. ~ Joseph Campbell,
110:Her every step seemed an advertisement of her entire anatomy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
111:The girl was absorbed in him, without consciousness or shame. ~ Joseph Campbell,
112:The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
113:Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream. ~ Joseph Campbell,
114:The function of artists is "the mythologization of the world." ~ Joseph Campbell,
115:The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime. ~ Joseph Campbell,
116:The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL ~ Phil Jackson,
117:Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. ~ Joseph Campbell,
118:Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
119:The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul. ~ Joseph Campbell,
120:The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
121:The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. ~ Joseph Campbell,
122:Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death. ~ Joseph Campbell,
123:Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
124:The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: ‘yes’ to it all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
125:If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor. ~ Joseph Campbell,
126:La imagen interior del hombre no debe confundirse con su atuendo. ~ Joseph Campbell,
127:old Roman: “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag. ~ Joseph Campbell,
128:You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
129:Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. ~ Joseph Campbell,
130:Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army ~ Joseph Campbell,
131:Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement. ~ Joseph Campbell,
132:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
133:If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
134:It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
135:Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
136:Respect your curses, for they are the instruments of your destiny. ~ Joseph Campbell,
137:What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play. ~ Joseph Campbell,
138:If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's. ~ Joseph Campbell,
139:The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention. ~ Joseph Campbell,
140:The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
141:The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. ~ Joseph Campbell,
142:The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. - Joseph Campbell ~ Rossi Fox,
143:If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. ~ Joseph Campbell,
144:Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny. ~ Joseph Campbell,
145:Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life ~ Joseph Campbell,
146:Poets have the courage to follow the echoes of the eloquence within. ~ Joseph Campbell,
147:The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down. ~ Joseph Campbell,
148:Sentiment is an echo of violence. It's not really a vital expression. ~ Joseph Campbell,
149:Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. ~ Joseph Campbell,
150:The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
151:The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
152:Todos los dioses, todos los cielos, todos los infiernos, están en ti. ~ Joseph Campbell,
153:Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again. ~ Joseph Campbell,
154:Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
155:Full circle, from to tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come ~ Joseph Campbell,
156:Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
157:When you are on the right path, invisible hands will come to your aid. ~ Joseph Campbell,
158:You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
159:A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render... ~ Joseph Campbell,
160:Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before. ~ Joseph Campbell,
161:I started studying mythology, just on my own. Joseph Campbell, mysticism. ~ Antoine Fuqua,
162:The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
163:The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. ~ Joseph Campbell,
164:You must kill your god. If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go. ~ Joseph Campbell,
165:When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands. ~ Joseph Campbell,
166:You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
167:As a white candle / In a holy place, / So is the beauty / Of an aged face ~ Joseph Campbell,
168:Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans. ~ Joseph Campbell,
169:The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves ~ Joseph Campbell,
170:The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in. ~ Joseph Campbell,
171:A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working. ~ Joseph Campbell,
172:Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain. ~ Joseph Campbell,
173:Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities. ~ Joseph Campbell,
174:A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
175:Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. ~ Joseph Campbell,
176:Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
177:Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. ~ Joseph Campbell,
178:First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
179:If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping. ~ Joseph Campbell,
180:People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things. ~ Joseph Campbell,
181:Religion is poetry misunderstood. ~ Joseph Campbell, “Mythology and the Individual,” Lecture 4,
182:The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
183:Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to Man; Man belongs to the Earth.”6 ~ Joseph Campbell,
184:Joseph Campbell’s wisdom: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. ~ Bren Brown,
185:Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification. ~ Joseph Campbell,
186:Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
187:If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential. ~ Joseph Campbell,
188:You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done. ~ Joseph Campbell,
189:Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls. ~ Joseph Campbell,
190:He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. ~ Joseph Campbell,
191:If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it's probably someone else's. ~ Joseph Campbell,
192:The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. ~ Joseph Campbell,
193:A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself ~ Joseph Campbell,
194:Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on. ~ Joseph Campbell,
195:The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
196:Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
197:A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
198:Heroism is a matter of integrity--beco ming more and more at each step ourselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
199:The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
200:The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
201:There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
202:We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
203:What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
204:Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
205:When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out. ~ Joseph Campbell,
206:If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen. ~ Joseph Campbell,
207:What can’t be known or named except in our feeble attempt to clothe it in language. ~ Joseph Campbell,
208:When an idea is important to a person or culture it will find its way into imagery. ~ Joseph Campbell,
209:Lo que el creativo saca a la luz es algo que estaba esperando ser extraído en todos. ~ Joseph Campbell,
210:Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. ~ Joseph Campbell,
211:Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. ~ Joseph Campbell,
212:Chodte za svojim stastim a vesmir vam otvori dvere aj tam, kde dovtedy boli iba mury. ~ Joseph Campbell,
213:The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence. ~ Joseph Campbell,
214:Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
215:Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. ~ Joseph Campbell,
216:There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
217:Deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
218:Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. ~ Joseph Campbell,
219:Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's. Each of us has to find his own way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
220:You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules ~ Joseph Campbell,
221:If you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
222:If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
223:It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done. ~ Joseph Campbell,
224:The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self. ~ Joseph Campbell,
225:The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today. ~ Joseph Campbell,
226:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell,
227:there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, ~ Joseph Campbell,
228:What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
229:You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
230:I've never read Joseph Campbell, and I don't know all that much about story archetypes. ~ Christopher Nolan,
231:Joseph Campbell once said that the “essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating. ~ Tovar Cerulli,
232:‎"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is." ~ Joseph Campbell,
233:Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk) ~ Joseph Campbell,
234:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell,
235:A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
236:If you follow your bliss...the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. ~ Joseph Campbell,
237:It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. ~ Joseph Campbell,
238:I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts. ~ Joseph Campbell,
239:Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures. ~ Joseph Campbell,
240:The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure ~ Joseph Campbell,
241:What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination? ~ Joseph Campbell,
242:You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances. ~ Joseph Campbell,
243:Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new . ~ Joseph Campbell,
244:Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. ~ Joseph Campbell,
245:The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure ~ Joseph Campbell,
246:The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
247:The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside. ~ Joseph Campbell,
248:We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
249:Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
250:A sound precipitates air, then fire, then water and earth- and that's how the world becomes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
251:I must admit to being greatly influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. ~ Norman Spinrad,
252:Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
253:Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall. ~ Joseph Campbell,
254:Mythology is the song. Its the flight of the imagination inspired by the energy of the body. ~ Joseph Campbell,
255:Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make. ~ Joseph Campbell,
256:The distance of your love is the distance of your life.   Love is exactly as strong as life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
257:The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
258:Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life ~ Joseph Campbell,
259:I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery. ~ Joseph Campbell,
260:The leader might be analyzed as the one who perceived what could be achieved and did it. p159 ~ Joseph Campbell,
261:The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
262:We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. ~ Joseph Campbell,
263:Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline. ~ Joseph Campbell,
264:The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb. ~ Joseph Campbell,
265:The great problem is bringing life back into the wasteland, where people live inauthentically. ~ Joseph Campbell,
266:We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
267:When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. ~ Joseph Campbell,
268:Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally. ~ Joseph Campbell,
269:Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt: “The Fates lead him who will; him who won’t, they drag. ~ Joseph Campbell,
270:Eternity is not the hereafter...this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere. ~ Joseph Campbell,
271:For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich. ~ Joseph Campbell,
272:If you really want to help this world, what you really will have to teach is how to live in it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
273:Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem. ~ Joseph Campbell,
274:She was clearly competent to face, satisfy, and treat with asexual ease the brotherhood of men. ~ Joseph Campbell,
275:The deeper you go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance. ~ Joseph Campbell,
276:For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
277:I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize ~ Joseph Campbell,
278:I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious. ~ Will Smith,
279:The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution. ~ Joseph Campbell,
280:When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
281:You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work. ~ Joseph Campbell,
282:Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it.” And ~ Joseph Campbell,
283:Hell is the place where love isn't big enough to encompass the total depth and mystery of it all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
284:If you do not have a mystic dimension you do not have a mythology, you have an ideology. ~ Joseph Campbell (Mythos),
285:Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. ~ Joseph Campbell,
286:For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us... ~ Joseph Campbell,
287:It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60). ~ Joseph Campbell,
288:It's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
289:Joseph Campbell, who when asked what spiritual practice he followed said, "I underline books." Me too. ~ Eric Weiner,
290:So what is keeping you out of the Garden? Your fear and desire: that which the Buddha transcended. ~ Joseph Campbell,
291:The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact ~ Joseph Campbell,
292:The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist. ~ Joseph Campbell,
293:Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. ~ Joseph Campbell,
294:We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
295:What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle? ~ Joseph Campbell,
296:Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world ~ Joseph Campbell,
297:Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free. ~ Joseph Campbell,
298:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
299:You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules. ~ Joseph Campbell,
300:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
301:It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
302:«Los mitos y los sueños proceden del mismo lugar... Un mito es el sueño de una sociedad.» Joseph Campbell ~ Seth Godin,
303:No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. ~ Joseph Campbell,
304:The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
305:There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
306:If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times. ~ Joseph Campbell,
307:Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
308:Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
309:There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God. ~ Joseph Campbell,
310:Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
311:Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and door will open where you didn't know they were going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
312:Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
313:God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that. ~ Joseph Campbell,
314:Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
315:We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. JOSEPH CAMPBELL ~ Roma Downey,
316:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
317:If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to. ~ Joseph Campbell,
318:The loss of a love and the pain of a broken relationship is an overload of projection. That's all it is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
319:Description of the Six Bodily Centers of the Unfolding Serpent Power (Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpana), which has been ~ Joseph Campbell,
320:Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
321:He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. ~ Joseph Campbell,
322:Myths derive from the visions of people who have searched their own most inward world. ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
323:The dreamer and his dream are the same...the powers personified in a dream are these that move the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
324:Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another. ~ Joseph Campbell,
325:If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
326:I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing. ~ Joseph Campbell,
327:Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. ~ Sean Patrick,
328:Life is without meaning. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell,
329:So that's what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system. ~ Joseph Campbell,
330:The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
331:The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. ~ Joseph Campbell,
332:Arnold suffered her stare for a moment, then turned, without rudeness, and cast his eyes about the shelves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
333:If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. ~ Joseph Campbell,
334:Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery. ~ Joseph Campbell,
335:The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. ~ Joseph Campbell,
336:You must have amor fati, the love of fate. And it takes an awful lot of guts to really say yes all the way. ~ Joseph Campbell,
337:Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.” — Joseph Campbell ~ Cara Alwill Leyba,
338:It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope. ~ Joseph Campbell,
339:One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment. ~ Joseph Campbell,
340:The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. ~ Joseph Campbell,
341:To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art. ~ Joseph Campbell,
342:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. ~ Joseph Campbell,
343:When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. ~ Joseph Campbell,
344:Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
345:With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage. ~ Joseph Campbell,
346:For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state, ~ Joseph Campbell,
347:For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. ~ Joseph Campbell,
348:I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
349:Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
350:“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ~ Joseph Campbell,
351:Anyone who is unable to understand a god sees it as a devil. "Devil" is a word we use for another peoples' god. ~ Joseph Campbell,
352:“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ~ Joseph Campbell,
353:We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us ~ Joseph Campbell,
354:Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
355:Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
356:They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
357:Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
358:Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology. ~ Joseph Campbell,
359:The hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave. ~ Joseph Campbell,
360:The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated Soul. ~ Joseph Campbell,
361:There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall. ~ Joseph Campbell,
362:When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
363:Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. ~ Joseph Campbell,
364:Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid. Doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” —Joseph Campbell ~ Sasha Martin,
365:Joseph Campbell said the privilege of a lifetime is being yourself. That's his feeling. And I guess it's mine too. ~ Viggo Mortensen,
366:Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of mythic dimension. ~ Joseph Campbell,
367:Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
368:We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
369:In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. ~ Joseph Campbell,
370:Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
371:Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. ~ Joseph Campbell,
372:Some things die after they born, others born after they die.
myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths... ~ Joseph Campbell,
373:We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ― Joseph Campbell ~ Amy Lane,
374:What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
375:CAMPBELL: Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most ~ Joseph Campbell,
376:Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe. ~ Joseph Campbell,
377:There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder
and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall. ~ Joseph Campbell,
378:You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
379:Each of us has capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel. ~ Joseph Campbell,
380:Myths are the metaphors of the human beings’ spiritual potential. They relate us to nature and with the natural world ~ Joseph Campbell,
381:It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
382:I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. ~ Joseph Campbell,
383:It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
384:The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
385:Trebuie să fim dispuși să renunțăm la viața pe care ne-am planificat-o, pentru a o putea trăi pe cea care ne așteaptă. ~ Joseph Campbell,
386:Ni siquiera tenemos que arriesgarnos solos a la aventura, porque los héroes de todos los tiempos se nos han adelantado. ~ Joseph Campbell,
387:Oriental idea: you don’t teach until you are asked. You don’t force your mission down people’s throats.) And so the boy ~ Joseph Campbell,
388:Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
389:How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. ~ Joseph Campbell,
390:How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick. ~ Joseph Campbell,
391:Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
392:The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society. ~ Joseph Campbell,
393:The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations. ~ Joseph Campbell,
394:When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
395:I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
396:If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to. ~ Joseph Campbell,
397:Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, re-engage. ~ Joseph Campbell,
398:When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
399:It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.” Joseph Campbell “Shit don’t mean shit.” Jimmy Gold ~ Stephen King,
400:No return to the office! No return, anymore, to anything! Her life had cracked and smashed, at last; let it go, let it go. ~ Joseph Campbell,
401:The dead are buried to be born again, and the cycles of the plant world become models for the myths and rituals of mankind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
402:The function of initiations is to commit one's whole psychological pitch to the requirements of a particular stage in life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
403:Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. ~ Joseph Campbell,
404:For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. ~ Joseph Campbell,
405:Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood. ~ Joseph Campbell,
406:I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child. ~ Joseph Campbell,
407:The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others. ~ Joseph Campbell,
408:As in the novels of James Joyce, so in those of Thomas Mann, the key to the progression lies in the stress on what is inward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
409:Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors. ~ Joseph Campbell,
410:the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit. ~ Joseph Campbell,
411:Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. ~ Joseph Campbell,
412:You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing. ~ Joseph Campbell,
413:The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
414:The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating. ~ Joseph Campbell,
415:Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
416:The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
417:Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable. ~ Joseph Campbell,
418:The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
419:The heroic life is living the individual adventure (but) there's no security there. Nothing is exciting if you know the outcome. ~ Joseph Campbell,
420:If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion... The hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
421:[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from. ~ Joseph Campbell,
422:IT IS BY GOING DOWN INTO THE ABYSS THAT WE RECOVER THE TREASURES OF LIFE. WHERE YOU STUMBLE, THERE LIES YOUR TREASURE. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL ~ Steve Kamb,
423:God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. ~ Joseph Campbell,
424:What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe. ~ Joseph Campbell,
425:It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
426:Jung is saying in his "Answer to Job": historically, the God-image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a given time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
427:The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness. ~ Joseph Campbell,
428:Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. ~ Joseph Campbell,
429:The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. ~ Joseph Campbell,
430:When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. ~ Joseph Campbell,
431:A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. ~ Joseph Campbell,
432:If a being from another world were to ask you, "How can I learn what it's like to be human?" a good answer would be, "Study mythology. ~ Joseph Campbell,
433:Joseph Campbell calls the “hero’s path.” Some of us need a cataclysmic event to find our way toward “the center of our own existence. ~ Elizabeth Lesser,
434:The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
435:The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. ~ Joseph Campbell,
436:The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. ~ Joseph Campbell,
437:Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you. ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion),
438:Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell,
439:The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces. ~ Joseph Campbell,
440:If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings. ~ Joseph Campbell,
441:When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. ~ Joseph Campbell,
442:[W]hereas the truths of science are communicable, … mythology and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
443:A society that does not have a myth to give it support and coherence falls into dissolution. And that is what is happening to us. ~ Joseph Campbell (Mythos),
444:I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. ~ Joseph Campbell,
445:One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
446:The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure-- fearlessness and achievement. ~ Joseph Campbell,
447:Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away. ~ Joseph Campbell,
448:The domain of mythic images lives in us; it's good to be acquainted with it. When a mythology does not operate on us, we lose this contact. ~ Joseph Campbell,
449:Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
450:A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo. ~ Joseph Campbell,
451:Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. ~ Joseph Campbell,
452:Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one. ~ Joseph Campbell,
453:One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives for self while the other acts to redeem society. ~ Joseph Campbell,
454:Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
455:The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
456:You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
457:Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
458:In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they think they ought to do or have to do is the wasteland. What is the wasteland to you? ~ Joseph Campbell,
459:The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, and River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
460:People can go very badly awry in this individual quest. But when the quest is fortunate, there comes a lifetime of creative innovative action. ~ Joseph Campbell,
461:The schizophrenic is drowning in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. Edgar Cayce made the same observation in his readings ~ Joseph Campbell,
462:Well, as the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. ~ Sean Patrick,
463:I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell's notion that a culture or society without mythology would die, and we're close to that. ~ Robert Redford,
464:"Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer." ~ Joseph Campbell#meaning,
465:Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ Joseph Campbell,
466:In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams. ~ Joseph Campbell,
467:Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. ~ Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth,
468:Joseph Campbell said that love is the burning point—the stronger the love, the greater the pain. If he’s right, maybe we’re better off without it. ~ Mary Jo Putney,
469:Jung found out in 1909 that myth and dream were linked, but it has been well known in India forever. It is implicit in the syllable OM, or A-U-M. ~ Joseph Campbell,
470:When you distinguish between good and evil, you've lost the art. Art goes beyond morality. The reach of your compassion is the reach of your art. ~ Joseph Campbell,
471:I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave. ~ Joseph Campbell,
472:One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. ~ Joseph Campbell,
473:Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular. ~ Joseph Campbell,
474:We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
475:You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
476:I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off. ~ Joseph Campbell,
477:The word "compassion" means literally "suffering with."

Of course compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes yes, suffering is life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
478:You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that's waiting to be yours. Move, move, move. ~ Joseph Campbell,
479:manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
480:Marshall McLuhan was right when he said that television has made a global village of the world—but he didn’t know the global village would be Beirut. ~ Joseph Campbell,
481:And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that’s the sense of the Grail. ~ Joseph Campbell,
482:Have you ever looked inside one of those things [computers]? It's a whole hierarchy of angels- all on slats. And those little tubes-those are miracles. ~ Joseph Campbell,
483:That is a greeting which says that the god that is in you recognizes the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things. ~ Joseph Campbell,
484:The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not. ~ Joseph Campbell,
485:The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
486:When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
487:Don’t think of what’s being said, but of what’s talking. Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?   The goal of the hero’s journey is yourself, finding yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
488:He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know. ~ Joseph Campbell,
489:My faith, inasmuch as I have any, is more like a kind of Joseph Campbell thing, and even that frequently finds itself tested to oblivion in siren waters. ~ David Knopfler,
490:The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth. ~ Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By,
491:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
492:lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few. ~ Joseph Campbell,
493:I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive ~ Joseph Campbell,
494:The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. ~ Joseph Campbell,
495:You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
496:In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.   The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
497:It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, ~ Joseph Campbell,
498:We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. ~ Joseph Campbell,
499:When you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
500:The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won. ~ Joseph Campbell,
501:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. ~ Joseph Campbell,
502:Every step they took, she told him something he'd never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she'd said it, as if he had known it all his life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
503:Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? ~ Joseph Campbell,
504:the famous conflict of science and religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of 4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000. ~ Joseph Campbell,
505:The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God. ~ Joseph Campbell,
506:This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
507:We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. ~ Joseph Campbell,
508:Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
509:Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where you're stuck, the wasteland. In hell, you are so bound to yourself that grace cannot enter. ~ Joseph Campbell,
510:Star Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watching the money shot. ~ John Scalzi,
511:Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object. ~ Joseph Campbell,
512:Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8) ~ Joseph Campbell,
513:The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
514:The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. ~ Joseph Campbell,
515:The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them. ~ Joseph Campbell,
516:Enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact. ~ Joseph Campbell,
517:Follow your bliss, and doors will open for you that you never knew existed. Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls ~ Joseph Campbell,
518:We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. - ~ Joseph Campbell,
519:CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
520:Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest. ~ Joseph Campbell,
521:At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one. ~ Joseph Campbell,
522:It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported. ~ Joseph Campbell,
523:Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that’s what the nature of genius is ultimately about. ~ Sean Patrick,
524:Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a ~ Joseph Campbell,
525:The Bhagavad Gita says: Recognize sorrow as of the essence. When there is time, there is sorrow. We can't rid the world of sorrow, but we can choose to live in joy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
526:If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living. ~ Joseph Campbell,
527:Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role. ~ Joseph Campbell,
528:One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. ~ Joseph Campbell,
529:The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart. ~ Joseph Campbell,
530:And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, 'I am that.' I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting. ~ Joseph Campbell,
531:At most, he was introducing me to a body of knowledge I could draw from, like the writings of Joseph Campbell or the teaching of the Buddha or the lyrics of Jay-Z. After ~ Neil Strauss,
532:..enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact... ~ Joseph Campbell,
533:Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
534:The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence. ~ Joseph Campbell,
535:If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it’s true. Myth is the penultimate truth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
536:I know when my life is not in the center. I get desirously involved with my relation to some achievement or system that is tangential to the real centering of my life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
537:One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit.' 'We're interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. ~ Joseph Campbell,
538:To become "in Jung's term" individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one's various life roles. ~ Joseph Campbell,
539:If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. ~ Joseph Campbell,
540:Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?' ~ Joseph Campbell,
541:The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50) ~ Joseph Campbell,
542:A hero ventures forth from the world
of common day into a region of
supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces
are there encountered and a decisive
victory is won. ~ Joseph Campbell,
543:As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell said, follow your bliss and the universe miraculously supports your choices for a happier and healthier way of life. Therefore, ~ John A McDougall,
544:When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
545:...and though it is perhaps too facile to say that he was already in love with her, it is certainly true that from that moment on she was a permanent element in his mind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
546:It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back. ~ Joseph Campbell,
547:[Marriage] is the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
548:From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
549:When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living. ~ Joseph Campbell,
550:A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think. ~ Joseph Campbell,
551:anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
552:Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
553:Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss. You throw off yesterday as the snake sheds its skin. ~ Joseph Campbell,
554:I think if you do what's in your heart - Joseph Campbell always says you have to follow your bliss, and if you do, doors open where you didn't even realize there were doors. ~ Linda Ronstadt,
555:When I was in India I met and conversed briefly with Shri Atmananda Guru of Trivandrum, and the question he gave me to ponder was this: 'Where are you between two thoughts? ~ Joseph Campbell,
556:We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about. ~ Joseph Campbell,
557:And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined? ~ Joseph Campbell,
558:for it is this modern Occidental civilization which, since about the middle of the thirteenth century, has been—quite literally—the only innovating civilization in the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
559:The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
560:The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. ~ Joseph Campbell,
561:Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now. ~ Joseph Campbell,
562:The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange. ~ Joseph Campbell,
563:The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
564:Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Love is a friendship set to music. ~ Joseph Campbell,
565:It's not an advantage to be without a PhD. But it's an advantage not to have taken a PhD because of the things that they do to you to get you into the slot that they want you in. ~ Joseph Campbell,
566:Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
567:The key to the Grail is compassion, 'suffering with,' feeling another's sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who's found the Grail. ~ Joseph Campbell,
568:When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life—well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry. ~ Joseph Campbell,
569:When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111) ~ Joseph Campbell,
570:It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. ~ Joseph Campbell,
571:There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before. ~ Joseph Campbell,
572:It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong. ~ Joseph Campbell,
573:Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
574:When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? ~ Joseph Campbell,
575:Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. ~ Joseph Campbell,
576:Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. ~ Joseph Campbell,
577:Pluralism makes a unifying myth impossible. But if we cannot reinstate such a mythology we can, at least, return to the source from which mythology springs - the creative imagination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
578:Schopenhauer sagely remarks in his paper on The Will in Nature, “we are sunk in the sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us nor ourselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
579:Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble. ~ Joseph Campbell,
580:He has yet to confront society with this ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend. ~ Joseph Campbell,
581:If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one that you ARE living. ~ Joseph Campbell,
582:Moyers: {TS] Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together. ~ Joseph Campbell,
583:[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16) ~ Joseph Campbell,
584:The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
585:A bit of advice
Given to a young Native American
At the time of his initiation:
As you go the way of life,
You will see a great chasm. Jump.
It is not as wide as you think. ~ Joseph Campbell,
586:And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal —carries the cross of the redeemer— not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. ~ Joseph Campbell,
587:In the Buddhist view... what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy or wrath of any god, but our own instinctive attachment to what we take to be our lives. ~ Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By,
588:I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
589:Joseph Campbell wrote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path. ~ Bren Brown,
590:Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. ~ Joseph Campbell,
591:Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
592:People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE ~ Rolf Potts,
593:Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
594:Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development—in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
595:The fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality...was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil...This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands. ~ Joseph Campbell,
596:“The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.” ~ Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth,
597:We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
598:You don't have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don't make sense. ~ Joseph Campbell,
599:He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh ~ Joseph Campbell,
600:Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. ~ Joseph Campbell,
601:Preachers err, [Joseph Campbell] told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.” ~ Bill Moyers in [Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth],
602:Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
603:The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
604:you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs? ~ Joseph Campbell,
605:At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again. ~ Joseph Campbell,
606:The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. ~ Joseph Campbell,
607:There is a time to go into the woods and a time to come back, and you know which it is. Do you have the courage? It takes a hell of a lot of courage to return after you've been in the woods. ~ Joseph Campbell,
608:Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
609:Myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the mystery of the universe. It gives us a map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature. ~ Joseph Campbell,
610: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.” –Joseph Campbell ~ Timothy Ferriss,
611:We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important. ~ Joseph Campbell,
612:Full circle from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb we come, an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream. ~ Joseph Campbell,
613:the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.’  ~ Joseph Campbell,
614:The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too. ~ Joseph Campbell,
615:CAMPBELL: I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
616:What each brings forth is what never before was on land or sea: the fulfillment of his unique potentialities, which are different from anybody else's. All you get on your life way are little clues. ~ Joseph Campbell,
617:And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey. ~ Joseph Campbell,
618:As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. ~ Joseph Campbell,
619:Ego consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, subject and object are the same. ~ Joseph Campbell,
620:Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. ~ Joseph Campbell,
621:The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. ~ Joseph Campbell,
622:The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
623:To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is -- not the quick little excitement , but the real deep, life-filling bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
624:We need mythology as the marsupial needs the pouch to develop beyond the stage of the incompetent infant to a stage where it ca ~ n step out of the pouch and say, “Me, voilà: I’m it.”Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
625:Well, as the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that’s what the nature of genius is ultimately about. ~ Sean Patrick,
626:Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. ~ Joseph Campbell,
627:Yahweh—a jealous god, who would hold men to himself and who turned mankind away from the Tree of Immortality, instead of leading us to it. Such a god in the Orient would be regarded as a deluding idol. ~ Joseph Campbell,
628:Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
629:... all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain... a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
630:People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth ~ Timothy Ferriss,
631:A handsome girl with a round, dark face set like a flower on a stalk-like neck smiled prettily at John as she shut the door, then glanced at his companion and became lost in the contemplation of his eyes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
632:Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. ~ Joseph Campbell,
633:You participate with joy in the sorrows of the world. You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that's it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
634:The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso. ~ Joseph Campbell,
635:You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
636:How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. ~ Joseph Campbell,
637:Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. ~ Joseph Campbell,
638:When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
639:is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again? That is a prime question, I would say, of this hour in the bringing up of children. ~ Joseph Campbell,
640:Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. ~ Joseph Campbell,
641:Mythologist Joseph Campbell, however, thought that the temple and cathedral are attractive because they spatially and acoustically recreate the cave, where early humans first expressed their spiritual yearnings. ~ David Byrne,
642:The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
643:God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
644:Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
645:What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
646:Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now. ~ Joseph Campbell,
647:The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of "Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it's myself." This is what it's all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
648:God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
649:How might we as individuals get in touch with the child that lives within us? By killing the dragon 'Thou shalt'. By choosing not to live by other people's rules? Right. Respecting them, but not living by them. ~ Joseph Campbell,
650:in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos. ~ Joseph Campbell,
651:MOYERS: So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama? CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony. ~ Joseph Campbell,
652:Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. Thevery cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in thecave, that was so dreaded, has become the center. ~ Joseph Campbell,
653:Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world. ~ Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth,
654:Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
655:Your ego is your embodiment and your self is your potentiality and that's what you listen to when you listen for the voice of inspiration and the voice of 'What am I here for? What can I possibly make of myself?' ~ Joseph Campbell,
656:... the All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart. ~ Joseph Campbell,
657:The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. To refuse the call means stagnation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
658:All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view. ~ Joseph Campbell,
659:No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold. ~ Joseph Campbell,
660:The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one’s own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not “Do thus and be good,” but “Know this and be God. ~ Joseph Campbell,
661:Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. ~ Joseph Campbell,
662:MOYERS: A poem? CAMPBELL: I mean a vocabulary in the form not of words but of acts and adventures, which connotes something transcendent of the action here, so that you always feel in accord with the universal being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
663:In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal. ~ Joseph Campbell,
664:facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,' as my friend the late Maya Deren once phrased the mystery. ~ Joseph Campbell,
665:In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful; Too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world! ~ Joseph Campbell,
666:The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
667:What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects. ~ Joseph Campbell,
668:When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. ~ Joseph Campbell,
669:Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
670:As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
671:As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
672:If you “follow your bliss…you will begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you,” said Joseph Campbell, explaining his theory of the “invisible hands” that help you through life. ~ Danielle LaPorte,
673:Joseph Campbell was so conversant with the world of wonders that he awakened the potential for wonder in everyone he touched. He unbuttoned the secret earth for us and let the inexhaustible inspiration of Being stream through. ~ Tom Robbins,
674:Well, there's a standard folktale motif called--The One Forbidden Thing. "Remember, in Bluebeard, don't open that closet. But it's by doing that that man becomes the initiator of his own life. Life really begins with that. ~ Joseph Campbell,
675:A human being in action cannot represent perfection. The moment you take action, you are imperfect: you have decided to act that way instead of that other way. That's why people who think they are perfect are so ridiculous. ~ Joseph Campbell,
676:in this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die. ~ Joseph Campbell,
677:The position of the palms together- this we use when we pray, do we not? That is a greeting that says that the god that is in you recognises the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things. ~ Joseph Campbell,
678:It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one's own people. ~ Joseph Campbell,
679:The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within. ~ Joseph Campbell,
680:One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light ~ Joseph Campbell,
681:The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word. ~ Joseph Campbell,
682:The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are essentially everywhere the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. ~ Joseph Campbell,
683:One thing that comes out of myth is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
684:The community of today is the planet, not the bounded nation…patterns of coordinated agression can only break it into factions”. We are in a time of “rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding.” Joseph Campbell, 1949 ~ Joseph Campbell,
685:There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
686:I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
687:I had to climb a mountain. There were all kinds of obstacles in the way. I had now to jump over a ditch, now to get over a hedge, and finally to stand still because I had lost my breath.

This was the dream of a stutterer. ~ Joseph Campbell,
688:Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities ... Money experienced as life energy is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the life of others. ~ Joseph Campbell,
689:Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form. ~ Joseph Campbell,
690:Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. “Lead us not into temptation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
691:The boy answers, "Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt."
Indra says, "I ask. Teach." (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.) ~ Joseph Campbell,
692:The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. ~ Joseph Campbell,
693:Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now...that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now. ~ Joseph Campbell,
694:Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relative late stage. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You only have one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
695:The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero...is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. ~ Joseph Campbell,
696:The material of myth is the material of our life, the material of our body, and the material of our environment, and a living, vital mythology deals with these in terms that are appropriate to the nature of knowledge of the time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
697:New myths have arisen from the idea that man came from the earth and was not thrown here from somewhere . . . man is the earth, is the conscience, the eyes and the voice of the earth . . . All of the planet is one single organism. ~ Joseph Campbell,
698:We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
699:Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, metaphorical images, of the energies within us, moved by the organs of the body, in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, this organ wants this: the brain is one of the organs. ~ Joseph Campbell,
700:...suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to, you can see the eyes open and the complexion change. The life possibility has opened there. All you can say to yourself is, "I hope this child hangs on to that." ~ Joseph Campbell,
701:The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. ~ Joseph Campbell,
702:We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recongnize your own depth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
703:With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105) ~ Joseph Campbell,
704:In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I’ve done as I was told.” You know? ~ Joseph Campbell,
705:There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness. ~ Joseph Campbell,
706:The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge. ~ Joseph Campbell,
707:You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential. ~ Joseph Campbell,
708:You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising. ~ Joseph Campbell,
709:When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90) ~ Joseph Campbell,
710:The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. ~ Joseph Campbell,
711:Der gewöhnliche Sterbliche ist nicht nur zufrieden, sondern geradezu stolz, daß er innerhalb der etablierten Grenzen bleibt, und die geläufigen Ansichten tun das ihre, sein Zagen schon vor dem ersten Schritt ins Unerforschte zu bestätigen. ~ Joseph Campbell,
712:Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery—this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been. ~ Joseph Campbell,
713:The Hindus, for example, don’t believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that’s a fundamental deist idea. ~ Joseph Campbell,
714:There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
715:This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere. ~ Joseph Campbell,
716:The Navajo have that wonderful image of what they call the pollen path. The Navajo say, 'Oh, beauty before me, beauty behind me, beauty to the right of me, beauty to the left of me, beauty above me, beauty below me, I'm on the pollen path.' ~ Joseph Campbell,
717:As Joseph Campbell once said, watching birds speeding through webs of branches and never even grazing a wing tip, animals may dwell in a realm beyond mistakes, totally present to life in ways our concept-crowded thinking cannot fully understand. ~ Will Tuttle,
718:Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days. ~ Joseph Campbell,
719:Losing yourself, giving yourself to another, that’s a trial in itself, is it not? There’s a big transformation of consciousness that’s concerned. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
720:The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears. ~ Joseph Campbell,
721:When Dante passed out of Purgatory, he drank at the river where all of his sins were wiped out of his memory. The first river from which he drunk forgave all of his sins, but that wasn't good enough, because then he still had to forget them. ~ Joseph Campbell,
722:Hero's call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that's impossible to find when you're socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it's time to go. ~ Joseph Campbell,
723:The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89) ~ Joseph Campbell,
724:Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is ... The world is a match for us, and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater power in ourselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
725:The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to to support society. ~ Joseph Campbell,
726:But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found. ~ Joseph Campbell,
727:Now you can see today why the world is in trouble. What is the social field today? The social field is the planet, and there isn't a single system of action that has to do with the planet. They all have to do with one interest group or another. ~ Joseph Campbell,
728:How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92) ~ Joseph Campbell,
729:If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
730: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 we actually feel the rapture of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL ~ Elizabeth Lesser,
731:There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail. ~ Joseph Campbell,
732:There's nothing militant about Jesus. I don't read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant's ear, and Jesus said, "Put back thy sword, Peter." But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since. ~ Joseph Campbell,
733:Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned. ~ Joseph Campbell,
734:The society is the enemy when it imposes its structures on the individual.
On the dragon there are many scales. Every one of them says "Thou Shalt."
Kill the dragon "Thou Shalt."
When one has killed that dragon, one has become The Child. ~ Joseph Campbell,
735:A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
736:...an ameliorative mythology [that through] prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life... This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her—it is not a marriage. ~ Joseph Campbell,
737:Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
738:And there is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unful-fillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail. ~ Joseph Campbell,
739:The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do. ~ Joseph Campbell,
740:They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
741:All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
742:How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means 'filled with a god,' so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That's where your life is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
743:In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
744:Now each one has to work it out in his own way. But if a person just refuses to think that he has an inside problem, he’s not going to work the thing out. Nobody can do it for him. You have to learn how to recognize your own depths. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey,
745:Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight. ~ Joseph Campbell,
746:The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
747:There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path. ~ Joseph Campbell,
748:The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. ~ Joseph Campbell,
749:Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same. ~ Joseph Campbell,
750:If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
751:The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
752:The privilege of a lifetime is beingwho you are.The goal of the hero tripdown to the jewel pointis to find those levels in the psychethat open, open, openand finally open to the mystery of your Selfbeing Buddha consciousnessor the Christ.That's the journey. ~ Joseph Campbell,
753:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. ~ Joseph Campbell,
754:I speak of the present as a moment of free fall into the future with no guidance. All you’ve got to know is how to fall; and you can learn that, too. That is the situation with regard to myth right now. We’re all without dependable guides. ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
755:The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
756:This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's. ~ Joseph Campbell,
757:CAMPBELL: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language. MOYERS: A metaphor suggests potential. CAMPBELL: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced. ~ Joseph Campbell,
758:The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance. ~ Joseph Campbell,
759:Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know. ~ Joseph Campbell,
760:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
   ~ Joseph Campbell,
761:But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
762:Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person. ~ Joseph Campbell,
763:In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved. ~ Joseph Campbell,
764:"[A]ll the gods &devils have been rationalized out of existence....nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and religions that have been preserved to us, or collected from the ends of the earth, we might yet see delineated something of our still human course. ~ Joseph Campbell,
765:I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for. ~ Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth,
766:The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible
call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without ~ Joseph Campbell,
767:Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine. ~ Joseph Campbell,
768:And I don’t know what being is. And I don’t know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already. ~ Joseph Campbell,
769:I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims. ~ Joseph Campbell,
770:Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved. ~ Caitlin Doughty,
771:Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out ~ Joseph Campbell,
772:These are, as far as I know, the three main mythological points of view in the high cultures: one is altogether affirming, another altogether rejecting, and a third says, “I will affirm the world when it gets to be the way I think it should be.” ~ Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss,
773:Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out. ~ Joseph Campbell,
774:Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out. ~ Joseph Campbell,
775:Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. ~ Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living,
776:If you have the guts to follow the risk...if one follows what I call one's "bliss" - the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life - doors will open up...if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. ~ Joseph Campbell,
777:There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
778:Mythologies & religions are great poems and point infallibly through all things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity' that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries and all mystic traditions are in accord ~ Joseph Campbell,
779:Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
780:Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come. ~ Joseph Campbell,
781:Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. ~ Joseph Campbell,
782:You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential. ~ Joseph Campbell,
783:They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey,
784:I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will. ~ Joseph Campbell,
785:The whale represents the personification of all that's in the unconscious. Reading this psychologically, water is the unconscious. Creature in the water would be the dynamism of the unconscious, which is dangerous & powerful & has to be controlled by consciousness ~ Joseph Campbell,
786:Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
787:The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization. ~ Joseph Campbell,
788:In Joseph Campbell's popular book of essays Myths to Live By, he described something pertinent to our theme of sacred journeys: “The ultimate aim of the quest, if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others. ~ Phil Cousineau,
789:There's no meaning. What's the meaning of the universe? What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there. We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about. ~ Joseph Campbell,
790:When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help. ~ Joseph Campbell,
791:The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it's really a manifestation of his character. It's amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets. ~ Joseph Campbell,
792:A constant image [in myths] is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight – isn't that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings. ~ Joseph Campbell,
793:If you just read Joseph Campbell, who has written amazing books on mythology and religion, they all do come together at some point. There are some of the greatest stories that there have ever been in the Bible. All you have to do is read the book of Maccabi, it's like a film script. ~ Mel Gibson,
794:It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal --carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair. ~ Joseph Campbell,
795:The only action we have to take is to decide whether we are going to stay closed or open up, accept experience as it is or rationalize it to death. This is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that what we seek is not the meaning of life but the "experience of being alive. ~ Richard E Cytowic,
796:An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth. ~ Christopher Ryan,
797:Because rage and violence are human emotions and drives and capacities that inhabit us all. SEE CARL JUNG. Or that hipster Joseph Campbell. Because we all take archetypal journeys in a million ways - literal, symbolic, you name it - that figure, disfigure, and refigure violence. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,
798:I have traveled down this path before - 'List of Seven' and 'Twin Peaks' both have thematic similarities - but 'Paladin' took me much deeper into the intuitive underground. Always bearing in mind Joseph Campbell's Rule No. 1: When entering a labyrinth, don't forget your ball of twine. ~ Mark Frost,
799:There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message? ~ Joseph Campbell,
800:Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
801:Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. ~ Joseph Campbell,
802:If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
803:Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules. ~ Joseph Campbell,
804:And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
805:If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
806:I have a strong feeling that the U.S.A. has lost the world, will be used by everybody as a ‘fall guy’, and is the Dragon to be tricked and plundered: old Fafnir with his gold-horde and grandfatherly willingness to be of help to his own destroyer. My sympathy, this time, is with the Dragon. ~ Joseph Campbell,
807:Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. ~ Joseph Campbell,
808:10. Apotheosis:Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lies in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. ~ Joseph Campbell,
809:The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
810:As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. ~ Joseph Campbell,
811:Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell,
812:Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive. [...] But love bears all things. [...] Love itself is pain, you might say - the pain of being truly alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
813:It is remarkable how completely forgotten episodes, when touched with a word, open to the memory—at first vaguely, like the recollection of a dream, but then with increasing clarity and certitude, until at last all is again present, and one wonders how such scenes could have ever been forgotten. ~ Joseph Campbell,
814:Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving. ~ Joseph Campbell,
815:Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. ~ Joseph Campbell,
816:There was a wonderful old man [...] who had a piece of property [...] he would rent out for twenty dollards a year or so to any young person he thought might have a future in the arts. [...]
He declared he wouldn't install running water because he didn't like the class of people it attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell,
817:I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health. ~ Joseph Campbell,
818:Yes. What you have here is what might be translated into raw individualism, you see, if you didn’t realize that the center was also right there facing you in the other person. This is the mythological way of being an individual. You are the central mountain, and the central mountain is everywhere. ~ Joseph Campbell,
819:If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly. ~ Joseph Campbell,
820:Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out." ~ Joseph Campbell Joseph Campbell ~ Joseph Campbell,
821:The big problem of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, 'Man is the sick animal.' Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves? ~ Joseph Campbell,
822:[T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It. ~ Joseph Campbell,
823:Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals. ~ Joseph Campbell,
824:Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going. ~ Joseph Campbell,
825:The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
826:Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
827:The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
828:Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
829:Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
830:To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That’s the basic motif of the universal hero’s journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition. ~ Joseph Campbell,
831:All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
832:of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us. You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the ~ Joseph Campbell,
833:The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts. ~ Joseph Campbell,
834:Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind ~ Joseph Campbell,
835:For it is a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe. A youngster identified with a mustang goes galloping down the street with a new vitality and personality. A daughter imitates her mother; a son, his father. —Joseph Campbell, MYTHS TO LIVE BY ~ Stephen Larsen,
836:People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
837:The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths. ~ Joseph Campbell,
838:If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
839:In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.
Awe is what moves us forward. ~ Joseph Campbell,
840:You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off. ~ Joseph Campbell,
841:Find your myth. As Joseph Campbell observed, "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.' A myth we requicken in our minds and our lives brings creative juice, for every living myth "bears within it, undamaged, the seed power of its source. ~ Robert Moss,
842:And what it [a future myth] will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to he exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. ~ Joseph Campbell,
843:In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other. ~ Joseph Campbell,
844:Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
845:Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
846:We must be willing to get rid of
the life we’ve planned, so as to have
the life that is waiting for us.

The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come.

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.
When we hang onto any form,
we are in danger of putrefaction.

Hell is life drying up. ~ Joseph Campbell,
847:I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to 'Primitive Mythology' that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals. ~ Barry Lopez,
848: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.... the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
849:The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
850:Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
851:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. ~ Joseph Campbell,
852:The remainder of the long story of Kamar al-Zaman is a history of the slow yet wonderful operation of a destiny that has been summoned into life. Not everyone has a destiny: only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again-with a ring. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Crossing of the Return Threshold,
853:We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns-one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity-where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one. ~ Joseph Campbell,
854:Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps. ~ Joseph Campbell,
855:You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be. ~ Joseph Campbell,
856:What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure; 3-fear of loss; 4-desire for gain; 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise; 7-fear of disgrace; [and] 8-desire for fame. ~ Joseph Campbell,
857:Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known… (She) is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. ~ Joseph Campbell,
858:The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses. ~ Joseph Campbell,
859:I've been reading a bunch of stuff lately - like Joseph Campbell - that has made me realize that people in our cultural, especially in the liberal community, often go in search of a foe. It's like we always need a hill to climb up or something to push against, or we feel as if we're not working constructively in the world. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman,
860:The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell,
861:There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. ~ Joseph Campbell,
862:I don't think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman, or child. ~ Joseph Campbell,
863:I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child. ~ Joseph Campbell,
864:traditions. In the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world, with the mixture of good and evil. But in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions. ~ Joseph Campbell,
865:The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light. ~ Joseph Campbell,
866:Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
867:What is unknown is the fulfillment of your own unique life, the likes of which has never existed on earth. And you are the only one who can do it. People can give you clues how to fall and when to stand, and when you are falling and when you are standing, this only you can know. And in the way of your own talents is the only way to do it. ~ Joseph Campbell,
868:This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God. ~ Joseph Campbell,
869:For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. ~ Joseph Campbell,
870:The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
871:...among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people's souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another. ~ Joseph Campbell,
872:Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
873: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 what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
874:The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. ~ Joseph Campbell,
875:The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
876:Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself... The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises... If you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing... The demon that you swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply. ~ Joseph Campbell,
877:Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship. ~ Joseph Campbell,
878:Only when that mortal “you” will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will “you” have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world: ~ Joseph Campbell,
879: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 with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. ~ Joseph Campbell,
880:The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss." ~ Joseph Campbell,
881:Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
882:Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved. ~ Joseph Campbell,
883:Via Joseph Campbell: My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, "The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts."The third best are what we talk about. ~ Heinrich Robert Zimmer,
884:When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he’d address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you’re addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you’re in, then you’re in your place in the world. It’s a different way to live. ~ Joseph Campbell,
885:Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. ~ Joseph Campbell,
886:How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. ~ Joseph Campbell,
887:Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Works,
888:Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another. ~ Joseph Campbell,
889:The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself. ~ Joseph Campbell,
890:She was ... the arch personification of the power of Space, Time, and Matter, within whose bound all beings arise and die: the substance of their bodies, configurator of their lives and thoughts, and receiver of their dead. And everything having form or name-including God personified as good or evil, merciful or wrathful-was her child, within her womb. ~ Joseph Campbell,
891:Such an image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith. ~ Joseph Campbell,
892:The poet Yeats felt we were living in the last of a great Christian cycle. His poem “The Second Coming” says, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned. ~ Joseph Campbell,
893:Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
894:When you look at that nature world it becomes an icon, it becomes a holy picture that speaks of the origins of the world. Almost every mythology sees the origins of life coming out of water. And, curiously, that's true. It's amusing that the origin of life out of water is in myths and then again, finally, in science, we find the same thing. It's exactly so. ~ Joseph Campbell,
895:in this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die. Fig. 2.2 — Neanderthal Burial This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology. ~ Joseph Campbell,
896:Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. ~ Joseph Campbell,
897: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. ~ Joseph Campbell,
898:It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
899:One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.' ~ Joseph Campbell,
900:One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces. ~ Joseph Campbell,
901:I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition . . . Such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Robert Bly (Iron John), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), and Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly). I also re-read Viktor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning (which my daughter Lizz and my wife Sue also read while Lizz was away). ~ Peter Enns,
902:That's the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want tot go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off. p147 ~ Joseph Campbell,
903:The world, as we know it, is coming to an end. The world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which love is reserved for members of the in-group: that is the world that is passing away. Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and complacency are coming to an end. ~ Joseph Campbell,
904:When you go through life ... it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme ... Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, 'Who wrote this novel? You did.' ~ Joseph Campbell,
905:It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
906:Time explodes, so again, eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships. I've lost a lot of friends,...that moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there's a kind of intimation of immortality in that. ~ Joseph Campbell,
907:But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that. MOYERS: So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the generations, isn’t functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one? ~ Joseph Campbell,
908:A schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of a return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. ~ Joseph Campbell,
909:Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. ~ Joseph Campbell,
910:This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art. ~ Joseph Campbell,
911:Jungians such as Joseph Campbell have generalised such journeys into a set of archetypal events and images. Though they can be useful in criticism, I mistrust them as fatally reductive. “Ah, the Night Sea Voyage!” we cry, feeling that we have understood something important — but we’ve merely recognised it. Until we are actually on that voyage, we have understood nothing. ~ Ursula K Le Guin,
912:Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: "Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them." Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth ~ Barbara Moore,
913:The idea of Truth with capital "T"-that there is something called Truth that's beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think-is what I call "the error of the found truth." The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you've got a faker. ~ Joseph Campbell,
914:This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art... ~ Joseph Campbell,
915:Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind. ~ Joseph Campbell,
916:Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. “What’s the meaning of the universe?” asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. “What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there, that’s it, and your own meaning is that you’re there.”3 ~ David Christian,
917:The importance of the End of time is as ... a psychological event ... When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time ... and it is the function of art to make that visible to you ... then you have really have ended life in the world as it is lived by those who only think only in the historical, concretizing terms. This is the function of mythology. ~ Joseph Campbell,
918:Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historica l, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former-the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers-prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. ~ Joseph Campbell,
919:We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
920:The two greatest works of war mythology in the west ... are the Iliad and the Old Testament... When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament we find a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled... pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a "Thou" but an "It." ~ Joseph Campbell,
921:We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomonation,
we shall find a God.
And where we had thought to slay another,
we shall slay ourselves.
And where we had thought to travel outward,
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone,
we shall be with all the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
922:Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
923:Because I have called and you refused, 24 I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded, Because you disdained all my counsel, 25 And would have none of my rebuke, I also will laugh at your calamity; 26 I will mock when your terror comes, When your terror comes like a storm, 27 And your destruction comes like a whirlwind, When distress and anguish come upon you. Proverbs 1:23-27 ~ Joseph Campbell,
924:Behind all the dark humor, Bill was talking about the same things I’d read in Joseph Campbell. If you look at things, really look, if you lift the veil, you start to recognize that light is love, is infinite, is unconditional. Bill was saying that once you understand the nature of nature, you can let go of difficulties and sign on for the ride—knowing that it’s just a ride. And ~ Maynard James Keenan,
925:I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD. ~ Joseph Campbell,
926:Schopenhauer’s answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
927:The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. [ The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world.] Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence-for he has the perfected eye to see. ~ Joseph Campbell,
928:The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, "The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."
Joseph Campbell, 1991, The Power of Myth, pp.68-69 ~ Joseph Campbell,
929:When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. ~ Joseph Campbell,
930:Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It." (18) ~ Joseph Campbell,
931:Myths are stories for 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 help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. ~ Joseph Campbell,
932:Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric. ~ Philip Kitcher,
933:If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. If you are following your bliss you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid; the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. ~ Joseph Campbell,
934:The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Un-create- Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear (93). ~ Joseph Campbell,
935:The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, “Don’t open that closet”? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
936:Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact ~ Joseph Campbell,
937:The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning. ~ Joseph Campbell,
938:There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call a terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come. ~ Joseph Campbell,
939:What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
940:for God all things are good and right and just, but for man some things are right and others are not. When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, "I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God's view, there is no difference." ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
941:We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
942:What is the cause, though, of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else ~ Joseph Campbell,
943:I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
944:Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm. ~ Joseph Campbell,
945:One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact. And when he said, “I am God,” a voice was heard to say, “You are mistaken, Samael.” “Samael” means “blind god”: blind to the infinite Light of which he is a local historical manifestation. This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah—that he thought he was God. ~ Joseph Campbell,
946:And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one’s heirs one’s own paranoia. More ~ Joseph Campbell,
947:Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
948:I'd be damn p-p-p-proud," he said, "of a f-father like Martin Hopper."

The girl tossed her head with disdain. "That's just your trouble, Douglas Hyde."

"What do you mean?" he bristled angrily.

"You know he's a phony," she answered coldly. "You've told me so yourself. And yet, in a pinch, you defend him."

The two stared at each other—blonde against dark—in absolute opposition. ~ Joseph Campbell,
949:I am Shiva-this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Hea ven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. ~ Joseph Campbell,
950:While the boy is talking, an army of ants parades across the floor. The boy laughs when he sees them, and Indra's hair stands on end, and he says to the boy, "Why do you laugh?"
The boy answers. "Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt."
Indra says, "I ask. Teach." (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.) ~ Joseph Campbell,
951:One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
952:The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City? ~ Joseph Campbell,
953:The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
954:The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
955:What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of. ~ Joseph Campbell,
956:A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
957:Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know...And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation... The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
958: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 yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement. ~ Joseph Campbell,
959:When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment. ~ Joseph Campbell,
960:As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can’t be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can’t be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent. ~ Joseph Campbell,
961:For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work-or, if working, produce deviant effects-there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning'. ~ Joseph Campbell,
962:The research for physical immortality proceeds from a misunderstanding of the traditional teaching. On the contrary, the basic problem is: to enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact: "It is here! It is here!" [165]
[165] A Tantric aphorism. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
963:As you think about your own path to daring leadership, remember Joseph Campbell’s wisdom: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Own the fear, find the cave, and write a new ending for yourself, for the people you’re meant to serve and support, and for your culture. Choose courage over comfort. Choose whole hearts over armor. And choose the great adventure of being brave and afraid. At the exact same time. ~ Bren Brown,
964:Moyers: Then what does love have to do with morality?
Campbell: Violates it....Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage....Love was a divine visitation, and that's why it was superior to marriage. ~ Joseph Campbell,
965:We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves. As author and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested, "'What will they think of me?' must be put aside for bliss." We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain. ~ Marshall B Rosenberg,
966:The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through. ~ Joseph Campbell,
967:To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way? When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is ~ Joseph Campbell,
968:The encounter and separation, for all its wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love. For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. ~ Joseph Campbell,
969:My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders every day—the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights in distant towns—is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden and dream stars! ~ Joseph Campbell,
970:A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
971:Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick. ~ Joseph Campbell,
972:Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a "free fall," so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly, those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls have burst. It is not left to us to chooseto hazard the adventure of an unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave. ~ Joseph Campbell,
973:person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don’t render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven’t had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue—otherwise you’re not hearing what is being said. MOYERS: ~ Joseph Campbell,
974:The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspecting self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. one by one the resistences are broken. he must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh. ~ Joseph Campbell,
975:We’re all members of one tribe or another—bonded by culture, family, religion, class, education, employment, team affiliation, or any number of other criteria. An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth. ~ Christopher Ryan,
976:What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth. ~ Joseph Campbell,
977:Whether Jewish or Christian, our religions have stressed too strongly the strictly historical aspect, so that we are, so to say, in worship of the historical event, instead of being able to read through that event to the spiritual message for ourselves. People turn to Oriental religion because therein they find the real message which has been closed by excessive literalism and historicism in their own religion and which is now open to them ~ Joseph Campbell,
978:The ultimate divine mystery is there found immanent within each. It is not “out there” somewhere. It is within you. And no one has ever been cut off. The only difficulty is, however, that some folk simply don’t know how to look within. The fault is no one’s, if not one’s own. Nor is the problem one of an original Fall of the “first man,” many thousand years ago, and of exile and atonement. The problem is psychological. And it can be solved. ~ Joseph Campbell,
979:When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Works,
980:The real important function of the church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it. What the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to each other might be, in technical terms, is not half important as you, the celebrant, feeling the Virgin Birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
981:[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. ...Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms... ~ Joseph Campbell,
982:In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses. ~ Joseph Campbell,
983:A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important. ~ Joseph Campbell,
984:I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations. ~ Joseph Campbell,
985:But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources -- the unconscious wells of fantasy-- and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom. ~ Joseph Campbell,
986:......the interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict. ~ Joseph Campbell,
987:Joseph Campbell reflects in The Power of Myth that in mythic terms, the first part of any journey of initiation must deal with the death of the old self and the resurrection of the new. Campbell says that the hero, or heroic figure, 'moves not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. ~ Syd Field,
988:The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye. ~ Joseph Campbell,
989:In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
990:Further Reading:
Nightside of Eden - Kenneth Grant
Shamanic Voices - Joan Halifax
The Great Mother - Neumann
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
Cities of the Red Night - William S. Burroughs
The Book of Pleasure - Austin Osman Spare
Thundersqueak - Angerford & Lea
The Masks of God - Joseph Campbell
An Introduction to Psychology - Hilgard, Atkinson & Atkinson
Liber Null - Pete Carroll ~ Phil Hine, Aspects of Evocation, #reading list,
991:The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale-as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. ~ Joseph Campbell,
992:CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.” This ~ Joseph Campbell,
993:What do you need the mythology? … Rituals evoke it. Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death. ~ Joseph Campbell,
994:Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
995:Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end… The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us. ~ Joseph Campbell,
996:All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do. ~ Joseph Campbell,
997:Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
998:Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination. That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass: not the "you" of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the "you" that was already there before you were born. You are not now to lose your nerve! Go on through with it and play your own game all the way! ~ Joseph Campbell,
999:There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati, the "love of your fate," which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unravelled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1000:there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy sentimentalism that with increasing force is taking over. Its beginnings date back to the eighteenth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its artificial back-to-nature movements and conceptions of the Noble Savage. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1001:I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don’t know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1002:Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas -- joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1003:You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1004:In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is-from the point of view of Indian thought-a style of religion for children. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1005:The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world – no matter how his affairs may prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself. The giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1006:Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1007:The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1008:Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1009:the most evident distinguishing sign is man’s organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws. Food and drink, reproduction and nest-building, it is true, play formidable roles in the lives no less of men than of chimpanzees. But what of the economics of the Pyramids, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, Hindus starving to death with edible cattle strolling all around them, or the history of Israel, from the time of Saul to right now? ~ Joseph Campbell,
1010:Art and the triumph of the human spirit - the two combined thrill me. It's the "Braveheart" moment, the stuff Joseph Campbell talks about, "the heroes journey," a beautiful documentary on a poignant topic, the fireman saving a kitten from a burning building. It's the combo of heroism and kindness against the odds or even good reason. It implies immortality because it is the domain of the soul. That evidence of the spirit of life is what makes me get out of bed in the morning. ~ Kristin Bauer van Straten,
1011:MOYERS: Is this a chief motif of mythological stories through time? CAMPBELL: No, the idea of life as an ordeal through which you become released from the bondage of life belongs to the higher religions. I don’t think I see anything like that in aboriginal mythology. MOYERS: What is the source of it? CAMPBELL: I don’t know. It would probably come from people of spiritual power and depth who experienced their lives as being inadequate to the spiritual aspect or dimension of their being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1012:If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1013:When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering.

The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1014:But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, its off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1015:You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1016:love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1017:And then he says, "The writer must be true to truth." And that's a killer, because the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections. The perfect human being is uninteresting - the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Mann called "erotic irony," the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1018:Theseus and Ariande. Theseus says to Ariande, “I’ll love you forever if you can show me a way to come out of the labyrinth.” So she gives him a ball of string, which he unwinds as he goes into the labyrinth, and then follows to find the way out. You say, “All he had was the string. That’s all you need.” CAMPBELL: That’s all you need—an Ariande thread. MOYERS: Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us, a great power to save us, or great ideas to save us, when all we need is that piece of string. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1019:Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.   You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1020:[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1021:[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1022:And so, we have next to ask what the difference is between the predicament of the “essential schizophrenic” and that of the trance-prone shaman: to which the answer is simply that the primitive shaman does not reject the local social order and its forms; that, in fact, it is actually by virtue of those forms that he is brought back to rational consciousness. And when he has returned, furthermore, it is generally found that his inward personal experiences reconfirm, refresh, and reinforce the inherited local forms; ~ Joseph Campbell,
1023:A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you're now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. in my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things. p177 ~ Joseph Campbell,
1024:Just think, Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, and the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. On the lotus sits Brahma, the creator. Brahma opens his eyes, and a world comes into being, governed by an Indra. Brahma closes his eyes, and a world goes out of being. The life of a Brahma is 432,000 years. When he dies, the lotus goes back, and another lotus is formed, and another Brahma. Then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space, each a lotus, with a Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1025:NATURAL MUSIC   The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers, (Winter has given them gold for silver To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks) From different throats intone one language. So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without Divisions of desire and terror To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities, Those voices also would be found Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.3 ~ Joseph Campbell,
1026:The earliest god-kings were ritually slain every six years, eight years, or twelve, according to the various local orders; and with them the dignitaries of their courts, all casting off their bodies to be born again. It is a fantastic, noble, weirdly wonderful ideal, this of the individual who is nobody at all if not the incarnation, even unto death, of the one eternal, absolutely impersonal, cosmic law. And it is against this that the Occidental, or, more particularly, modern European, ideal of the individual must be measured. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1027:I think ‘Pretty Polly’ is an attempt to speak to these same nature spirits. It is a ritual of bloodletting, an appeal to invisible forces, a cry to the goddess to come embrace us with her thorny arms. Polly’s murder works as Joseph Campbell believed all myth worked—as a secret opening, a knife slashed in the veil of experience through which deep knowledge may seep. To those not gifted enough to hear the bean plants talk or to see the fairies dancing, myth may be our only access to places outside our conscious perception of reality. ~ Rennie Sparks,
1028:Now all the myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there-how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years agon, but how they are relevant now-unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1029:Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy ending. Children of the Disney princess era grew up with a whitewashed version of reality filled with animal sidekicks and unrealistic expectations. Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved. ~ Caitlin Doughty,
1030:I think a person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don't like what you're doing. There's a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there's no such thing as work, and there's no such thing as getting tired. That's been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they've all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1031:The Hero Path

We have not even to risk the adventure alone
for the heroes of all time have gone before us.
The labyrinth is thoroughly known ...
we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.
And where we had thought to find an abomination
we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another
we shall slay ourselves.
Where we had thought to travel outwards
we shall come to the center of our own existence.
And where we had thought to be alone
we shall be with all the world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1032:The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1033:We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that the divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1034:So I think the Guru can be a delusion. But everything can be deluding. The thing central about the Guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle of the spirit, namely, that you don't follow your own path; you follow a given path. And that's totaly contrary to the Western Spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization- authenticity in your life out of your own center. So you must take the message of the East, assimilate it to your own dimension and to your own thrust of life, and not get pulled off track. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1035:We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1036:Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you're doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can't play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don't lead anywhere. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1037:The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest-as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1038:They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1039:Follow your bliss.
If you do follow your bliss,
you put yourself on a kind of track
that has been there all the while waiting for you,
and the life you ought to be living
is the one you are living.
When you can see that,
you begin to meet people
who are in the field of your bliss,
and they open the doors to you.
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid,
and doors will open
where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you follow your bliss,
doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1040:17. Freedom to Live:The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. "Before Abraham was, I AM." He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the 'other thing'), as destroying the permanent with its change. 'Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure that nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.' Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1041:The more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.

My friend had thought, "God did this to me." I told her, "No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1042:The Indian relationship to animals is in contrast to our relationship to animals, where we see animals as a lower form of life. In the Bible we are told that we are the masters. For hunting people, as I said, the animal is in many ways superior. A Pawnee Indian said: “In the beginning of all things, wisdom and knowledge were with the animal. For Tirawa, the One Above, did not speak directly to man. He sent certain animals to tell mankind that he showed himself through the beast. And that from them, and from the stars and the sun and the moon, man should learn. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1043:And what does the idea of reincarnation 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. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1044:The big moment in the medieval myth is the awaking of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion.... St. Paul had written, "For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all." You cannot be so disobedient that God's mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. "Sin bravely," as Luther said, and see how much of God's mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. The idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1045:Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1046:Moyers: But if God is the god we have only imagined, how can we stand in awe of our own creation?
Campbell: How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: "Religion is a defense against the experience of God."
...
There is a Hindu saying, "None but a god can worship a god." You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him properly and live according to his word. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1047:Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1048:My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1049:From that point of view is there anything of your life that did not occur by chance? This is a matter of being able to accept chance...
Chance or what seems to be by chance is the means by which life is realized. The problem is not to blame for explain but to handle the life that arises. Another war has been declared somewhere and you are drafted into an army and there go five or six years of your life with a whole new set of chance events. The best advice is to take it all AS IF it had been with all of your intention--with that your evoke the participation of your will. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1050:In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1051:Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called "the love of your fate." Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, "This is what I need." It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment-not discouragement-you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1052:There is a favorite story, frequently told by the Zen masters, of the Buddha, preaching: of how he held up a single lotus, that simple gesture being his whole sermon. Only one member of his audience, however, caught the message, a monk named Mahākāśyapa, who is regarded now as the founder of the Zen sect. And the Buddha, noticing, gave him a knowing nod, then preached a verbal sermon for the rest: a sermon for those who required meaning, still entrapped in the net of ideas; yet pointing beyond, to escape from the net and to the way that some of them, one day or another, might find. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1053:CAMPBELL: You bet it is—and if he doesn’t recognize it, it may turn him into Darth Vader. If the person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1054:of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us. You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1055:The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1056:This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1057:Jung’s image of the stage of becoming a tree is well illustrated here. The little man is stuck. In the West he would be taken away, perhaps, to an institution and cured back (shock treatment, etc.) to society. Here, he is permitted to sit it out and perhaps go through to Buddhahood—perhaps, on the other hand, simply to remain stuck, as a living symbol of spiritual effort. There are no hospitals, there are no asylums. The lepers sit out on the streets and so do the madmen. But some of the madmen can break through, and these breakthroughs are giving India something that the West really lacks. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1058:The Japanese have a proverb: "The gods only laugh when men pray to them for wealth." The boon bestowed on the worshiper is always scaled to his stature and to the nature of his dominant desire: the boon is simply a symbol of life energy stepped down to the requirements of a certain specific case. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that, whereas the hero who has won the favor of the god may beg for the boon of perfect illumination, what he generally seeks are longer years to live, weapons with which to slay his neighbor, or the health of his child. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
1059:We're in our own world, and we're in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve3 a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I've got to live in terms of this society. It's ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I'm not living. But I mustn't allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one's own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn't accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1060:You see, religion is really a kind of second womb. It’s designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life. MOYERS: But that’s not the Christian idea of creation and the Fall. CAMPBELL: I once heard a lecture by a wonderful old Zen philosopher, Dr. D. T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, “God against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature—very funny religion! ~ Joseph Campbell,
1061:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1062:13. The Magic Flight:If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1063:The return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat, the hero himself may find the most difficult requirement of all. For if he has won through, like the Buddha, to the profound repose of complete enlightenment, there is danger that the bliss of this experience may annihilate all recollection of, interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world; or else the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1064:CAMPBELL: The individual has to find an aspect of myth that relates to his own life. Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function—that is the one I’ve been speaking about, realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery. Myth opens the world to the dimension of mystery, to the realization of the mystery that underlies all forms. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology. If mystery is manifest through all things, the universe becomes, as it were, a holy picture. You are always addressing the transcendent mystery through the conditions of your actual world ~ Joseph Campbell,
1065:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1066:The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1067:This one is from an ancient Zoroastrian legend of the first parents of the human race, where they are pictured as having sprung from the earth in the form of a single reed, so closely joined that they could not have been told apart. However, in time they separated; and again in time they united, and there were born to them two children, whom they loved so tenderly and irresistibly that they ate them up. The mother ate one; the father ate the other; and God, to protect the human race, then reduced the force of man’s capacity for love by some ninety-nine per cent. Those first parents thereafter had seven more pairs of children, every one of which, however—thank God!—survived. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1068:The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form-all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
1069:Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth,
1070:Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft , to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascension of Christ - all bodily - into heaven? ~ Joseph Campbell,
1071:In the Orient the ultimate divine mystery is sought beyond all human categories of thought and feeling, beyond names and forms, and absolutely beyond any such concept as of a merciful or wrathful personality, chooser of one people over another, comforter of folk who pray, and destroyer of those who do not. Such anthropomorphic attributions of human sentiments and thoughts to a mystery beyond thought is - from the point of view of Indian thought - a style of religion for children. Whereas the final sense of all adult teaching is to the point that the mystery transcendent of categories, names and forms, sentiments and thought, is to be realized as the ground of one’s own very being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1072:Moyers: ...modern Americans have rejected the ancient idea off nature as a divinity because it would have kept us from achieving dominance over nature...
Campbell: Yes, but that's not simple a characteristic of modern Americans, that is the biblical condemnation of nature which they inherited from their own religion and brought with them.... God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It's right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world.
But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown I here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth...the Gaia principle. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1073:But aren’t many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism? CAMPBELL: Yes, they are. MOYERS: How do you explain that? CAMPBELL: They’ve moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1074:The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1075:The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in-and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Crossing of the Return Threshold,
1076:The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain? ~ Joseph Campbell,
1077:The function of ritual and myth is to make possible, and then to facilitate, the jump—by analogy. Forms and conceptions that the mind and its senses can comprehend are presented and arranged in such a way as to suggest a truth or openness beyond. And then, the conditions for meditation having been provided, the individual is left alone. Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness—that void, or being, beyond the categories —into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved. Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient means—themselves of the nature of the world of names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to move and awaken the mind, and to call it past themselves. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1078:MOYERS: You write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a sacred place?
CAMPBELL: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1079:generally, we refuse to admit within ourselves, within our friends, the fullness of that self-protective, carnivorous fever which is the nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, reinterpret; meanwhile, imagining that all the flies in the ointment are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organ of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, becomes intolerable to the pure pure pure soul. The innocent delight of oedipus in his first possession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1080:Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around—they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that’s about all it is. And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is no arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1081:Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1082:Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1083:14. Rescue from Without:The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. 'Who having cast off the world,' we read, 'would desire to return again? He would be only there.' And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door. If the hero... is unwilling, the disturber suffers an ugly shock; but on the other hand, if the summoned one is only delayed-sealed in by the beatitude of the state of perfect being (which resembles death)-an apparent rescue is effected, and the adventurer returns. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1084:To call up modern versions of the old stories, one has to go forth and live life. As a result then, one will have the challenge of not only living the story, taking it all in, but also interpreting it in whatever ways are useful. So too, one will reap the reward of telling all about it afterward. One's interest in the world, and in having experiences, is really an interest in hearing, having, living one more story, and then one more, then one more story, till one cannot live them out loud any longer. Perhaps it should be said that the drive to live out stories is as deep in the psyche, when awakened, as it is compelling to the psyche to listen to stories and learn from them.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. in Introduction to the 2004 edition of The hero with a thousand faces (J.Campbell) ~ Joseph Campbell,
1085:O professor Joseph Campbell escreve: "O ser humano não pode se manter no universo sem acreditar em alguma arrumação da herança geral do mito. De fato, até mesmo a plenitude de sua vida parece estar em relação direta com a profundidade e o alcance, nào do seu pensamento racional, mas da sua mitologia local." Campbell declara que o mito tem 3 funções essenciais: "provocar um sentimento de temor respeitoso", "originar uma cosmologia" e "iniciar o indivíduo nas realidades da sua própria psique". Conformo muitas pessoas estão descobrindo, o uso adequado da astrologia preenche todas as três funções. Daí, se concordamos com a definição de mito dada por Campbell, creio que devemos concordar que a astrologia, conforme o fez durante eras do passado, oferece uma prática e vital mitologia para os nossos tempos. ~ Stephen Arroyo,
1086:Lilian was very soon well on her way into the mysterious retreat. The lure of the waters, the thought of the remote, unknown head of the valley, carried her forward. She was alone, excited, even happy in this craggy, tangled, gradually darkening, thoroughly wonderful, increasingly fascinating wild retreat. Here was her dear childhood again. Here was the original wholeness she had lost: fresh life, young knowledge of abundance, no inkling of loss or defeat. And here, at last (not in the lewd streets of the cities), her glorious beauty was clean, her life was clean, her sex. Like a growing, lovely flower, a supple shoot, a burgeoning tree, Lilian knew that this, this lovely mountain-womb, was her home; the world to which her radiant body belonged was this living world of the bursting flowers and the trees. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1087:Often, your lessons will not come easily. Suffering has always been a vehicle for deep spiritual growth. Those who have endured great suffering are generally the ones who evolve into great beings. Those who have been deeply hurt by life are generally the ones who can feel the pain of others in a heartbeat. Those who have endured adversity become humbled by life, and as a result, are more open, compassionate and real. We may not like suffering when it visits us, but it serves us so very well: it cracks the shell that covers our hearts and empties us of the lies we have clung to about who we are, why we are here and how this remarkable world of ours really functions. Once emptied, we can be refilled with all that is good, noble and true. Troubles can transform, if we choose to allow them to do so. As Joseph Campbell ~ Robin S Sharma,
1088:The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith. Therefore…invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His Most Glorious Virgin Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence…: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo…have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that ~ Joseph Campbell,
1089:One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus—which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right—cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe—from circa 1100 onward—Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead.... ~ Joseph Campbell,
1090:11. The Ultimate Boon:The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly proven. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1091:I’ve been happily married forty-eight years, and I ought to know something about it. The important thing in marriage is the relationship between two people, and when one becomes married—I mean really has become married—one has shifted the center of regard from oneself to the relationship of the two. And when you think of yourself as sacrificing or giving up things, it is not for the other person that you are doing it, it is for the relationship. And you are as much in the relationship as the other one is, do you see what I mean? This is what you are dealing with, the two together. And you have to think of yourself not as this one, but as these two as one. And I say if your marriage isn’t the highest priority in your whole life, you’re not married, that’s all. And the thing I frequently say is that marriage is not a long love affair. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1092:How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make ... ~ Joseph Campbell,
1093:So it is that when Dante had taken the last step in his spiritual adventure, and came before the ultimate symbolic vision of the Triune God in the Celestial Rose, he had still one more illumination to experience, even beyond the forms of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. "Bernard," he writes, "made a sign to me, and smiled, that I should look upward; but I was already, of myself, such as he wished; for my sight, becoming pure, was entering more and more, through the radiance of the lofty Light which in Itself is true. Thenceforward my vision was greater than our speech, which yields to such a sight, and the memory yields to such excess. [167]
[167] "Paradiso," XXXIII, 49-57 (translation by Norton, op. cit., Vol. Ill, pp. 253-254, by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers). ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Ultimate Boon,
1094:The problem is that people have tried to look away from space and from the meaning of the moon landing. I remember seeing a picture of an astronaut standing on the moon. It was up at Yale and someone has scrawled on it, 'So what?' That is the arrogance of the kind of academic narrowness one too often sees; it is trapped in its own predictable prejudices, its own stale categories. It is the mind dulled to the poetry of existence. It's fashionable now to demand some economic payoff from space, some reward to prove it was all worthwhile. Those who say this resemble the apelike creatures in 2001. They are fighting for food among themselves, while one separates himself from them and moves to the slab, motivated by awe. That is the point they are missing. He is the one who evolves into a human being; he is the one who understands the future. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1095:2. Refusal of the Call:Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or 'culture,' the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless-even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1096:The thunderbolt (vajra) is one of the major symbols in Buddhist iconography, signifying the spiritual power of Buddhahood (indestructible enlightenment) which shatters the illusory realities of the world. The Absolute, or Adi Buddha, is represented in the images of Tibet as Vajra-Dhara (Tibetan: Dorje-Chang) "Holder of the Adamantine Bolt.
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We know also that among primitive peoples warriors may speak of their weapons as thunderbolts. Sicut in coelo et in terra: the initiated warrior is an agent of the divine will; his training is not only in manual but also in spiritual skills. Magic (the supernatural power of the thunderbolt), as well as physical force and chemical poison, gives the lethal energy to his blows. A consummate master would require no physical weapon at all; the power of his magic word would suffice. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1097:Nor does it matter from the standpoint of a comparative study of symbolic forms whether Christ or the Buddha ever actually lived and performed the miracles associated with their teachings. The religious literatures of the world abound in counterparts of those two great lives. And what one may learn from them all, finally, is that the savior, the hero, the redeemed one, is the one who has learned to penetrate the protective wall of those fears within, which exclude the rest of us, generally, in our daylight and even our dreamnight thoughts, from all experience of our own and the world’s divine ground. The mythologized biographies of such saviors communicate the messages of their world-transcending wisdom in world-transcending symbols - which, ironically, are then generally translated back into such verbalized thoughts as built the interior walls in the first place. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1098:Now, eternity is beyond all categories of thought. This is an important point in all of the great Oriental religions. We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the think in itself is no things. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent....That's why it's absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecedent to sexual separation. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1099:The world-discrediting insight of the monk "all lif is sorrowful" is combined with the world-begetting affirmative of the father: "life must be!" In full awareness of the life anguish of the creatures of his hand, in full consciousness of the roaring wilderness of pains, the brain-splitting fires of the deluded, self-ravaging, lustful, angry universe of his creation, this divinity acquiesces in the deed of supplying life to life. To withhold the seminal waters would be to annhilate; yet to give them forth is to create this world we know. For the essence of time is flux, dissolution of the momentarily existent; and the essence of life is time. In his mercy, in his love for the forms of time, this demiurgic man of men yields countenance to the sea of pangs; but in his full awareness of what he is doing, seminal waters of the life that he gives are the tears of his eyes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1100:1. Mother Universe
The world generating spirit of the father passes into the manifold of earthly experience through a transforming medium - the mother of the world. She is a personification of the primal elements named in the second verse of Genesis - "the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." In the Hindu myth, she is the female figure whom the self begot all creatures through: more abstractly understood, she is the world-bounding frame: time, space, and causality. the shell of the cosmic egg. More abstractly still, she is the lure that moved the self-brooding absolute to the act of creation.
In mythologies emphasizing the maternal rather than the paternal aspect of creation, this original female fills the wolrd stages in the beginning, playing the roles that are elsewhere assigned to males. And she is a virgin, because her spouse is the Invisible Unknown. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1101:When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1102:The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when...you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out".'

There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are only the three positions. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1103:during the first and primitive stages of the history of our species there was a general centrifugal movement of peoples into distance, to all sides, with the various populations becoming increasingly separated, each developing its own applications and associated interpretations of the shared universal motifs; whereas, since we are all now being brought together again in this mighty present period of world transport and communication, those differences are fading. The old differences separating one system from another now are becoming less and less important, less and less easy to define. And what, on the contrary, is becoming more and more important is that we should learn to see through all the differences to the common themes that have been there all the while, that came into being with the first emergence of ancestral man from the animal levels of existence, and are with us still. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1104:The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world--not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1105:Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute. ...Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine. Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1106:The world is full, also, of great traditional books tracing the history of man (but focused narrowly on the local group) from the age of mythological beginnings, through periods of increasing plausibility, to a time almost within memory, when the chronicles begin to carry the record, with a show of rational factuality, to the present. Furthermore, just as all primitive mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups, so do these great traditional books. On the surface they may appear to have been composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been conceived as myths: poetic readings of the mysteries of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is — to say the least — to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt. ~ Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God (1964),
1107:Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. If he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by evil eyes of ignorance, she is reduced to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can taker her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1108:The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology, there is an umbilical point, an Schillies tendon, which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knolwege has been imparted. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annhilate the key knot of his limited existence.
The problem of the hero going to meet the father is open to his soul beyon terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and rutheless comsmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands - and the two are atoned. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1109:To become—in Jung’s terms—individuated, to live as a released individual, one has to know how and when to put on and to put off the masks of one’s various life roles. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do,’ and when at home, do not keep on the mask of the role you play in the Senate chamber. But this, finally, is not easy, since some of the masks cut deep. They include judgment and moral values. They include one’s pride, ambition, and achievement. They include one’s infatuations. It is a common thing to be overly impressed by and attached to masks, either some mask of one’s own or the mana-masks of others. The work of individuation, however, demands that one should not be compulsively affected in this way. The aim of individuation requires that one should find and then learn to live out of one’s own center, in control of one’s for and against. And this cannot be achieved by enacting and responding to any general masquerade of fixed roles. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1110:Part 3 - Return
12. Refusal of the Return:When the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet or the ten thousand worlds. But the responsibility has been frequently refused. Even Gautama Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated, and saints are reported to have died while in the supernal ecstasy. Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1111:What we know today, if we know anything at all, is that every individual is unique and that the laws of his life will not be those of any other on this earth. We also know that if divinity is to be found anywhere, it will not be “out there,” among or beyond the planets. Galileo showed that the same physical laws that govern the movements of bodies on earth apply aloft, to the celestial spheres; and our astronauts, as we have all now seen, have been transported by those earthly laws to the moon. They will soon be on Mars and beyond. Furthermore, we know that the mathematics of those outermost spaces will already have been computed here on earth by human minds. There are no laws out there that are not right here; no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds. So what happens now to those childhood images of the ascent of Elijah, Assumption of the Virgin, Ascension of Christ - all bodily - into heaven? ~ Joseph Campbell,
1112:4. Crossing the First Threshold:With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the 'threshold guardian' at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in four directions-also up and down-standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the members of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1113:Part 2 - Initiation
6. The Road of Trials:Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the myth-adventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiatory conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed-again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unsustainable ecstasies and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1114:Think of the hero's journey as perceived by Joseph Campbell. The mythical hero, usually an unlikely male, undertakes a physical journey to an unknown land. One the way, he is faced with a series of challenges that he can meet only through his superior physical strength and cunning. If he succeeds in getting through all the barriers, he wins the prize, which he can then take home for the benefit of his people.

Although this model has some application to the experience of women, it is not adequate to describe what a woman must do in order to live beyond the stultifying expectations of the culture in which she's raised. If she has small children, she can't take a trip or move to a new place, and very rarely is she called upon to beat down her opponent with force. Instead, her journey is an inner one where the demons are her demons of the self. Her task as the heroine is to return from her inner journey and share her knowledge, wisdom, and energy with the people around her. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt,
1115:The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1116:Recordé también esa descripción cuando una amiga le preguntó a uno de mis colegas por nuestra colaboración con Campbell: «¿Para qué necesitan la mitología?». Esta mujer sostenía la opinión, muy corriente y moderna, de que «todos esos dioses griegos y sus historias» nada tienen que ver con la actual condición humana. Lo que ella no sabía (e ignora la mayoría) es que las reliquias de esas «viejas historias» adornan las paredes de nuestro sistema interior de creencias, como restos de antiguos utensilios en un yacimiento arqueológico. Pero como somos seres orgánicos, hay energía en todos esos restos. Los rituales la evocan. Pensemos en la posición de los jueces en nuestra sociedad, que Campbell analizó en términos mitológicos, no sociológicos. Si esta posición fuera solamente un papel a desempeñar, el juez podría asistir con un traje gris al tribunal en lugar de vestir la toga negra. Para que la ley tenga autoridad más allá de la mera coacción, el poder del juez debe ser ritualizado, mitologizado. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1117:Chapter III: Transformation of the Hero
1. Primordial hero and the human
We have come two stages: 1) from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; 2) from these Created CReating Ones to the sphere of human history. The emanations have condensed, consciousness is constricted. Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who became invisible now, but through heros, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized. This is the line where creation myths begin to give place to legend-as in the book of Genesis, following expulsion from Eden. Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which s dim and vague at first, but becomes precise in detail slowly. The heros become less fabulous, legend opens into the common dayliight of recorded time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1118:The child's world is alert and alive, governed by rules of response and command, not by physical laws: a portentous continuum of consciousness, endowed with purpose and intent, either resistant or responsive to the child itself.

This infantile notion of a world governed by moral rather than physical laws, kept under control by a superordinated parental personality instead of impersonal physical forces, and oriented to the weal and woe of man, is an illusion that dominates men's thoughts all over the world.

The sense then, of this world as an undifferentiated continuum of simultaneously subjective and objective experience (Participation), which is all alive (Animism), and which was created by a superior being (Artificialism), may be said to constitute the frame of reference of all childhood experience no matter where in the world.

No small wonder then, that the above Three Principles are precisely those most represented in the mythologies and religious systems of the whole world. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1119:And so we have…this critical problem as human beings of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs—that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or—what is worst of all—some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1120:MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I'm more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –
CAMPBELL: -- you'll be in trouble. If you're forced to live in that system, you'll be a neurotic.
MOYERS: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they are.
MOYERS: How do you explain that?
CAMPBELL: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience -- that is the hero's deed. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1121:Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1122:7. The Meeting with the Goddess:The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart. The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed-whether she will or not. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1123:Let me recall at this point Nietzsche’s statements regarding classic and romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The point I would make - and which I believe was also Nietzsche’s - is that form is the medium, the vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1124:All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring female heroes in, I had to go to the fairy tales. These were told by women to children, you know, and you get a different perspective. It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories. [...]
In the Odyssey, you'll see three journeys. One is that of Telemachus, the son, going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle in the sense of male-female relationship, rather than the male mastery of the female that was at the center of the Iliad. And the third is of Penelope herself, whose journey is [...] endurance. Out in Nantucket, you see all those cottages with the widow's walk up on the roof: when my husband comes back from the sea. Two journeys through space and one through time. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1125:8. The Woman As Temptress:The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else. But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond (the woman), surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1126:16. Master of Two Worlds:Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back-not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other-is the talent of the master. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1127:We all face a fundamental choice in our lives. Do we take the path prescribed by our “now you’re supposed to” society, or do we take our own path to toward the life we feel we ought to be living? Do we choose our life’s work based on the U.S. Department of Labor’s list of highest-paying jobs, or do we follow our bliss? Do we heed the call to conformity, or the call to adventure? Every day we see how people have answered these questions, whether consciously or otherwise. We’re constantly confronted with the lazy, the apathetic, the immoral, the indifferent, the irresponsible, and the disconnected—the signs of a decaying culture. “What does it all mean?” many wonder while chasing purposes they’re told are worthwhile, but which feel empty. “What is the purpose of this life?” humans have wondered for millennia, contemplating how insignificant we are in the great cosmic symphony. Well, as the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that’s what the nature of genius is ultimately about. ~ Sean Patrick,
1128:CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, “God.” This is no fancy, it is a fact. Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears the seer’s story, one responds, “Aha! This is my story. This is something that I had always wanted to say but wasn’t able to say.” There has to be a dialogue, an interaction between the seer and the community. The seer who sees things that people in the community don’t want to hear is just ineffective. Sometimes they will wipe him out. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1129:The fundamental text of the Hindu tradition is, of course, the Bhagavad Gītā; and there four basic yogas are described. The word yoga itself, from a Sanskrit verbal root yuj, meaning “to yoke, to link one thing to another,” refers to the act of linking the mind to the source of mind, consciousness to the source of consciousness; the import of which definition is perhaps best illustrated in the discipline known as knowledge yoga, the yoga, that is to say, of discrimination between the knower and the known, between the subject and the object in every act of knowing, and the identification of oneself, then, with the subject. “I know my body. My body is the object. I am the witness, the knower of the object. I, therefore, am not my body.” Next: “I know my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.” And so on: “I know my feelings; I am not my feelings.” You can back yourself out of the room that way. And the Buddha then comes along and adds: “You are not the witness either. There is no witness.” So where are you now? Where are you between two thoughts? That is the way known as jñāna yoga, the way of sheer knowledge. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1130:Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1131:15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold:The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world. Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided" The hero returns to the world of common day and must accept it as real. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1132:Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost superhuman degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. This is a basic principle of the Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West.25 It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1133:Our respect for the individual as a unique phenomenon, not to be suppressed in his idiosyncrasies, but to be cultivated and brought to fulfillment as a gift to the world such as never before was seen on earth, nor will ever appear again, is contrary, toto caelo, to the spirit not only of Oriental art but also of Oriental life. And in keeping with this turn of mind, the individual is expected not to innovate or invent, but to perfect himself in the knowledge and rendition of norms.

Accordingly, the Oriental artist must not only address himself to standard themes, but also have no interest in any such thing as we understand by self-expression. Accounts, such as abound in the biographies of Western masters, of an artist’s solitary agony in long quest of his own special language to bring forward his personal message, we shall search for long and in vain in the annals of Oriental art. Such ego-oriented thinking is alien completely to Eastern life, thought, and religiosity, which are concerned, on the contrary, precisely with the quenching of ego and of all interest in this evanescent thing that is merely the “I” of a passing dream. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1134:The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1135:What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light? CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. “All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow—loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it. MOYERS: Do you really believe that? CAMPBELL: It is joyful just as it is. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to awake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a ~ Joseph Campbell,
1136:There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1137:3. Meeting the Mentor:For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance-promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just behind the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1138:CAMPBELL: Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts—but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It’s different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It’s another mythological plane of experience. When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we ~ Joseph Campbell,
1139:The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a think they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy. In a wasteland, people are fulfilling purposes that are not properly theirs but have been put upon them as inescapable laws. This is a killer.... The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn't something ruling over and above a fallen nature.... Our story of the fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1140:The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world. But there has been also, in numerous religious traditions, a consciously controlled pedagogical utilization of this architypal image for the purpose of the purguing balacning, and initiation of the mind into the nature of the visible world.....
The Universal Mother is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb. Thus she unites the good and bad, exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. the devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity. through this exercise, his spirit is purged of its infantile, inappropriate sentimentalities, and his mind opened to the inscrutable presence which exists, not as good and bad primarily with respect to his childlike human convenience, but as the law and image of the nature of being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1141:"Because I have called, and ye refused . . . I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you." "For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the prosperity of fools shall destroy them."

Time Jesum transeuntem et non revertentem: "Dread the passage of Jesus, for he does not return."

The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure. King Minos retained the divine bull, when the sacrifice would have signified submission to the will of the god of his society; for he preferred what he conceived to be his economic advantage. Thus he failed to advance into the liferole that he had assumed-and we have seen with what calamitous effect. The divinity itself became his terror; for, obviously, if one is oneself one's god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one's egocentric system, becomes a monster. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1142:Part 1 - Departure
1. The Call to Adventure ::: This first stage of the mythological journey-which we have designated the "call to adventure"-signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of grav­ ity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight. The hero can go forth of his own volition to accomplish the adventure, as did Theseus when he arrived in his father's city, Athens, and heard the horrible history of the Minotaur; or he may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven about the Mediterranean by the winds of the angered god, Poseidon. The adventure may begin as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures one away from the frequented paths of man. Examples might be multiplied, ad infinitum, from every corner of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces,
1143:The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life ; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full posession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.
Thus phrased, in the extremest of terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal humans. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with life situations must be laid to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serve as a general patter for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. therefore, it is formulated in the broadest terms. the individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. who and where are his ogres? those are the reflcetions of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. what are his ideals? those are the symptoms of his grasp of life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1144:Recommended Reading
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
DH Lawrence - The Rainbow
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera
Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle
Virginia Woolf - To The Lighthouse
Ben Lerner - The Topeka School
Sally Rooney - Conversations With Friends
Nell Zink - The Wallcreeper
Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment
Jack Kerouac - Dharma Bums
Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass
Michael Murphy - Golf in the Kingdom
Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer
Albertine Sarrazin - Astragal
Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby
Michael Paterniti - Love and Other Ways of Dying
Rainer Maria Rilke - Book of Hours
James Baldwin - Another Country
Roberto Calasso - Ka
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - Principle Upanisads
Chogyam Trungpa - Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
Translation by Georg Feuerstein - Yoga Sutra
Richard Freeman - The Mirror of Yoga
Translation by S. Radhakrishan - The Bhagavad Gita
Shrunyu Suzuki - Zen Mind Beginner's Mind
Heinrich Zimmer - Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization
Sogyal Rinpoche - The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Joseph Campbell - Myths of Light
Joseph Campbell - The Hero With A Thousand Faces
Sri Aurobindo - Savitri
Thomas Meyers - Anatomy Trains
Wendy Doniger - The Hindus ~ Jason Bowman, http://www.jasonbowmanyoga.com/recommended-reading,
1145:There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence. Martyrdom is for saints, but the common people have their institutions, and these cannot be left to grow like lilies of the field; Peter keeps drawing his sword, as in the garden, to defend the creator and sustainer of the world. The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word. How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of “yes” and “no” revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? ~ Joseph Campbell,
1146:5. Belly of the Whale:The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown and would appear to have died. This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshipper into a temple-where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. The devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero-dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1147:Moyers: What happened to the mythic imagination as humans beings turned from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds?
Campbell: There is a dramatic and total transformation, not just of the myths but of the psyche itself, I think. You see, an animal is a total entity, he is within a skin. When you kill that animal, he's dead – that's the end of him. There is no such think as a self-contained individual in the vegetal world. You cut a plant, and another sprout comes. Pruning is helpful to a plant. The whole thing is just a continuing inbeingness.
Another idea associated with the tropical forests is that out of rot comes life. I have seen wonderful redwood forests with great, huge stumps from enormous trees that were cut down decades ago. Out of them are coming these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. Also, if you cut off the limb of a plant, another one comes. Tear off the limb of an animal, and unless it is a certain kind of lizard, it doesn't grow again.
So in the forest and planting cultures, there is sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life. And the individual isn't quite an individual, he is a branch of a plant. Jese uses this image when he says, "I am the vine, and you are the branches." That vineyard image is a totally different one from the separate animals. When you have a planting culture, there is a fostering of thee plant that is going to be eaten. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1148:Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, the He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization (which have so absorbed the interest of Occidental theologians that they are today seriously discussed as the principal questions of religion), are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have the regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: "Judge not, that ye be not judged." The World Savior's cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1149:Zoroaster was the prophet of the Persians, the people who restored the Jews to Jerusalem, the same Persians who later gave rise to the Chaldeans. The basic idea in Zoroaster’s teaching is that there are two Gods, one good, the other evil. The good God is a God of Light, of Justice, of Wisdom, who created a perfectly good world. His name is Ahura Mazda, “First Father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their paths.” The Mazda bulbs were named after this God of Light. Against him stands a God of Evil, Angra Mainyu, “the Deceiver,” who is the god of lies, darkness, hypocrisy, violence, and malice. He it was who threw evil into this good and well-made world. Thus the world in which we live is a mixture of light and darkness, of good and evil. This worldview is the mythology of the Fall. In its biblical transformation, it is the Fall. There is then a nature world that is not good and one does not put oneself in accord with it. It is evil and one pulls out or away in order to correct it. From this view arises a mythology with this sequence: Creation, a Fall, followed by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who teaches the way of virtue that will bring a gradual restoration of goodness. On the last day, after a terrific battle known as Armageddon, or the Reckoning of Spirits, Zoroaster will appear, in a second incarnation, the evil power will be wiped out, and all will be peace, light, and virtue forever. This mythology is surely familiar to all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1150:A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.

That is the pattern of the myth, and that is the pattern of these fantasies of the psyche.

Now it was Dr Perry's thesis in his paper that in certain cases the best thing is to let the schizophrenic process run its course, not to abort the psychosis by administering shock treatments and the like, but, on the contrary, to help the process of disintegration and reintegration along. However, if a doctor is to be helpful in this way, he has to understand the image language of mythology. He has himself to understand what the fragmentary signs and signals signify that his patient, totally out of touch with rationally oriented manners of thought and communication, is trying to bring forth in order to establish some kind of contact. Interpreted from this point of view, a schizophrenic breakdown is an inward and backward journey to recover something missed or lost, and to restore, thereby, a vital balance. So let the voyager go. He has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning; yet, as in the old legend of Gilgamesh and his long, deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is the one green value of his life down there. Don't cut him off from it: help him through. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1151:9. Atonement with the Father/Abyss:Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god's tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve. It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father's ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one's faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis-only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same. The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands-and the two are atoned. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1152:But then I got into Joseph Campbell—The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell was the first person to really open my eyes to [the] compassionate side of life, or of thought. . . . Campbell was the guy who really kind of put it all together for me, and not in a way I could put my finger on. . . . It made you just glad to be alive, [realizing] how vast this world is, and how similar and how different we are.” * Most-gifted or recommended books? “You’re going to think I’m plugging you, but I probably have recommended The Art of Learning [by Josh Waitzkin, page 577] and The 4-Hour Body, I’m not kidding, more than any other books.” What Would You Say in a College Commencement Speech? “Well, I would say that if you are searching for status, and if you are doing things because there’s an audience for it, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. “I would say, ‘Listen to yourself.’ Follow your bliss, and Joseph Campbell, to bring it back around, said, ‘There is great security in insecurity.’ We are wired and programmed to do what’s safe and what’s sensible. I don’t think that’s the way to go. I think you do things because they are just things you have to do, or because it’s a calling, or because you’re idealistic enough to think that you can make a difference in the world. “I think you should try to slay dragons. I don’t care how big the opponent is. We read about and admire the people who did things that were basically considered to be impossible. That’s what makes the world a better place to live. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
1153:The Power of Myth For screenwriting, Jon recommends The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which he used to determine if Swingers was structurally correct. He is also a big fan of The Power of Myth, a video interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers. “With The Jungle Book, I really am going back and doubling down on the old myths.” TF: We recorded our podcast during the shooting of The Jungle Book, in his production office next to set. Months later, The Jungle Book was the #1 movie in the world and currently has a staggering 95% review average on Rotten Tomatoes. Long-Term Impact Trumps Short-Term Gross “Thanks to video, and later DVD and laser disc, everybody had seen this film [Swingers], and it had become part of our culture. That’s when I learned that it’s not always the movie that does the best [financially] that has the most impact, or is the most rewarding, or does the most for your career, for that matter.” Another Reason to Meditate “In the middle of [a meditation session], the idea for Chef hit me, and I let myself stop, which I don’t usually do, and I took out a pad. I scribbled down like eight pages of ideas and thoughts, [and then I] left it alone. If I look back on it, and read those pages, it really had 80% of the heavy lifting done, as far as what [Chef] was about, who was in it, who the characters were, what other movies to look at, what the tone was, what music I would have in it, what type of food he was making, the idea of the food truck, the Cuban sandwiches, Cuban music . . . so it all sort of grew out from that. ~ Timothy Ferriss,
1154:The mythological hero setting forth from his common-day hut or castle is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There, he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother battle, dragon battle, offering, charm) or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifiction). Beyond this threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamilir yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give him magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divination (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft), intrinsically, it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformational flight). At the return threshold, the transcendental powers must remain behind;; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (resurrection, return). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir, eternal life). ~ Joseph Campbell,
1155:The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again-if the powers have remained unfriendly to him-his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir). ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Keys,
1156:It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: 'There, words do not reach.' Such queries fall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi ('Thou art that') is the ultimate word in this connection.

By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1157:Nietzsche’s words that relate to this with respect to masks and the processes of life. He speaks of three stages in the life of the spirit incarnate in each of us. Three transformations of the spirit, he calls it. The first is that of the camel which gets down on its knees and asks, “Put a load on me.” That’s the period of these dear little children. This is the just-born life that has come in and is receiving the imprint of the society. The primary mask. “Put a load on me. Teach me what I must know to live in this society.” Once heavily loaded, the camel struggles to its feet and goes out into the desert — into the desert of the realization of its own individual nature. This must follow the reception of the culture good. It must not precede it. First is humility, and obedience, and the reception of the primary mask. Then comes the turning inward, which happens automatically in adolescence, to find your own inward life. Nietzsche calls this the transformation of the camel into a lion. Then the lion attacks a dragon; and the dragon’s name is Thou Shalt. The dragon is the concretization of all those imprints that the society has put upon you. The function of the lion is to kill the dragon Thou Shalt. On every scale is a “Thou Shalt,” some of them dating from 2000 b.c., others from this morning’s newspaper. And, when the dragon Thou Shalt has been killed — that is to say, when you have made the transition from simple obedience to authority over your own life — the third transformation is to that of being a child moving spontaneously out of the energy of its own center. Nietzsche calls it a wheel rolling out of its own center. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1158:I remember a vivid talk by the Japanese Zen philosopher Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki that opened with an unforgettable contrast of the Occidental and Oriental understandings of the God-man-nature mystery. Commenting first on the Biblical view of the state of man following the Fall in Eden, “Man,” he observed, “is against God, Nature is against God, and Man and Nature are against each other. God’s own likeness (Man), God’s own creation (Nature) and God himself - all three are at war.” Then, expounding the Oriental view, “Nature,” he said, “is the bosom whence we come and whither we go.” “Nature produces Man out of itself; Man cannot be outside of Nature.” “I am in Nature and Nature is in me.” The Godhead as highest Being is to be comprehended, he continued, as prior to creation, “in whom there was yet neither Man nor Nature.” “As soon as a name is given, the Godhead ceases to be Godhead. Man and Nature spring up and we get caught in the maze of abstract conceptual vocabulary.”

We in the West have named our God; or rather, we have had the Godhead named for us in a book from a time and place that are not our own. And we have been taught to have faith not only in the absolute existence of this metaphysical fiction, but also in its relevance to the shaping of our lives. In the great East, on the other hand, the accent is on experience: on one’s own experience, furthermore, not a faith in someone else’s. And the various disciplines taught are of ways to the attainment of unmistakable experiences - ever deeper, ever greater - of one’s own identity with whatever one knows as “divine”: identity, and beyond that, then, transcendence. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1159:There is a passage in the Old French Queste del Saint Graal that epitomizes the true spirit of Western man. It tells of a day when the knights of Arthur’s court gathered in the banquet hall waiting for dinner to be served. It was a custom of that court that no meal should be served until an adventure had come to pass. Adventures came to pass in those days frequently so there was no danger of Arthur’s people going hungry. On the present occasion the Grail appeared, covered with a samite cloth, hung in the air a moment, and withdrew. Everyone was exalted, and Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur, rose and suggested a vow. “I propose,” he said, “that we all now set forth in quest to behold that Grail unveiled.” And so it was that they agreed. There then comes a line that, when I read it, burned itself into my mind. “They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. Each entered the forest at the point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and there was no way or path.” No way or path! Because where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. And that is what marks the Western spirit distinctly from the Eastern. Oriental gurus accept responsibility for their disciples’ lives. They have an interesting term, “delegated free will.” The guru tells you where you are on the path, who you are, what to do now, and what to do next. The romantic quality of the West, on the other hand, derives from an unprecedented yearning, a yearning for something that has never yet been seen in this world. What can it be that has never yet been seen? What has never yet been seen is your own unprecedented life fulfilled. Your life is what has yet to be brought into being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1160:The asceticism of the medieval saints and of the yogis of India, the Hellenistic mystery initiations, the ancient philosophies of the East and of the West, are techniques for the shifting of the emphasis of individual consciousness away from the garments. The preliminary meditations of the aspirant detach his mind and sentiments from the accidents of life and drive him to the core. “I am not that, not that,” he meditates: “not my mother or son who has just died; my body, which is ill or aging; my arm, my eye, my head; not the summation of all these things. I am not my feeling; not my mind; not my power of intuition.” By such meditations he is driven to his own profundity and breaks through, at last, to unfathomable realizations. No man can return from such exercises and take very seriously himself as Mr. So-an-so of Such-and-such a township, U.S.A.—Society and duties drop away. Mr. So-and-so, having discovered himself big with man, becomes indrawn and aloof. This is the stage of Narcissus looking into the pool, of the Buddha sitting contemplative under the tree, but it is not the ultimate goal; it is a requisite step, but not the end. The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world. Furthermore: the world too is of that essence. The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence—for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness. Thus, just as the way of social participation may lead in the end to a realization of the All in the individual, so that of exile brings the hero to the Self in all. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1161:The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told.
In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets - Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved.
Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship.
Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, "Young man, haven't you read the morning papers? Don't you know what there is to be done today?" The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, "This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense." Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism. p171-2 ~ Joseph Campbell,
1162:Many a tale of inguldgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. When the child outgrows the popular idyle of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the sphere of the father-who becomes for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the good and evil, so does now the father, but with this complication - that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world.
The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes-for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1163:I've heard youngsters use some of George Lucas' terms––"the Force and "the dark side." So it must be hitting somewhere. It's a good sound teaching, I would say.

The fact that the evil power is not identified with any specific nation on this earth means you've got an abstract power, which represents a principle, not a specific historical situation. The story has to do with an operation of principles, not of this nation against that. The monster masks that are put on people in Star Wars represent the real monster force in the modern world. When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

Darth Vader has not developed his humanity. He's a robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? . . . The thing to do is to learn to live in your period of history as a human being ...[b]y holding to your own ideals for yourself and, like Luke Skywalker, rejecting the system's impersonal claims upon you.

Well, you see, that movie communicates. It is in a language that talks to young people, and that's what counts. It asks, Are you going to be a person of heart and humanity––because that's where the life is, from the heart––or are you going to do whatever seems to be required of you by what might be called "intentional power"? When Ben Knobi says, "May the Force be with you," he's speaking of the power and energy of life, not of programmed political intentions.

... [O]f course the Force moves from within. But the Force of the Empire is based on an intention to overcome and master. Star Wars is not a simple morality play. It has to do with the powers of life as they are either fulfilled or broken and suppressed through the action of man. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1164:The word zen itself is a Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word ch’an, which, in turn, is a Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit dhyana, meaning “contemplation, meditation.” Contemplation, however, of what?

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment in the lecture hall where I originally presented the material for this chapter. Above, we see the many lights. Each bulb is separate from the others, and we may think of them, accordingly, as separate from each other. Regarded that way, they are so many empirical facts; and the whole universe seen that way is called in Japanese ji hokkai, “the universe of things.”

But now, let us consider further. Each of those separate bulbs is a vehicle of light, and the light is not many but one. The one light, that is to say, is being displayed through all those bulbs; and we may think, therefore, either of the many bulbs or of the one light. Moreover, if this or that bulb went out, it would be replaced by another and we should again have the same light. The light, which is one, appears thus through many bulbs.

Analogously, I would be looking out from the lecture platform, seeing before me all the people of my audience, and just as each bulb seen aloft is a vehicle of light, so each of us below is a vehicle of consciousness. But the important thing about a bulb is the quality of its light. Likewise, the important thing about each of us is the quality of his consciousness. And although each may tend to identify himself mainly with his separate body and its frailties, it is possible also to regard one’s body as a mere vehicle of consciousness and to think then of consciousness as the one presence here made manifest through us all. These are but two ways of interpreting and experiencing the same set of present facts. One way is not truer than the other. They are just two ways of interpreting and experiencing: the first, in terms of the manifold of separate things; the second, in terms of the one thing that is made manifest through this manifold. And as, in Japanese, the first is known as ji hokkai, so the second is ri hokkai, the absolute universe. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1165:There is one point in particular I would like to single out and stress, namely, the notion of evolution. It is common to assume that one of the doctrines of the perennial philosophy... is the idea of involution-evolution. That is, the manifest world was created as a "fall" or "breaking away" from the Absolute (involution), but that all things are now returning to the Absolute (via evolution). In fact, the doctrine of progressive temporal return to Source (evolution) does not appear anywhere, according to scholars as Joseph Campbell, until the axial period (i.e. a mere two thousand years ago). And even then, the idea was somewhat convoluted and backwards. The doctrine of the yugas, for example, sees the world as proceeding through various stages of development, but the direction is backward: yesterday was the Golden Age, and time ever since has been a devolutionary slide downhill, resulting in the present-day Kali-Yuga. Indeed, this notion of a historical fall from Eden was ubiquitous during the axial period; the idea that we are, at this moment, actually evolving toward Spirit was simply not conceived in any sort of influential fashion.

  But sometime during the modern era-it is almost impossible to pinpoint exactly-the idea of history as devolution (or a fall from God) was slowly replaced by the idea of history as evolution (or a growth towards God). We see it explicitly in Schelling (1775-1854); Hegel (1770-1831) propounded the doctrine with a genius rarely equaled; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) made evolution a universal law, and his friend Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied it to biology. We find it next appearing in Aurobindo (1872-1950), who gave perhaps its most accurate and profound spiritual context, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who made it famous in the West.

  But here is my point: we might say that the idea of evolution as return-to-Spirit is part of the perennial philosophy, but the idea itself, in any adequate form, is no more than a few hundred years old. It might be 'ancient' as timeless, but it is certainly not ancient as "old."...

  This fundamental shift in the sense or form of the perennial philosophy-as represented in, say, Aurobindo, Hegel, Adi Da, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Radhakrishnan, to name a few-I should like to call the "neoperennial philosophy." ~ Ken Wilber, The Eye Of Spirit,
1166:[T]here was a prophetic medieval Italian abbot, Joachim of Floris, who in the early thirteenth century foresaw the dissolution of the Christian Church and dawn of a terminal period of earthly spiritual life, when the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. His view, like that of Frobenius, was of a sequence of historic stages, of which our own was to be the last; and of these he counted four. The first was, of course, that immediately following the Fall of Man, before the opening of the main story, after which there was to unfold the whole great drama of Redemption, each stage under the inspiration of one Person of the Trinity. The first was to be of the Father, the Laws of Moses and the People of Israel; the second of the Son, the New Testament and the Church; and now finally (and here, of course, the teachings of this clergyman went apart from the others of his communion), a third age, which he believed was about to commence, of the Holy Spirit, that was to be of saints in meditation, when the Church, become superfluous, would in time dissolve. It was thought by not a few in Joachim’s day that Saint Francis of Assisi might represent the opening of the coming age of direct, pentecostal spirituality. But as I look about today and observe what is happening to our churches in this time of perhaps the greatest access of mystically toned religious zeal our civilization has known since the close of the Middle Ages, I am inclined to think that the years foreseen by the good Father Joachim of Floris must have been our own.

For there is no divinely ordained authority any more that we have to recognize. There is no anointed messenger of God’s law. In our world today all civil law is conventional. No divine authority is claimed for it: no Sinai; no Mount of Olives. Our laws are enacted and altered by human determination, and within their secular jurisdiction each of us is free to seek his own destiny, his own truth, to quest for this or for that and to find it through his own doing. The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident and of the Orient - of Europe, the Near and Middle East, the Far East, even early America - derived their truths and lives, are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1167:reading :::
   Self-Help Reading List:
   James Allen As a Man Thinketh (1904)
   Marcus Aurelius Meditations (2nd Century)
   The Bhagavad-Gita
   The Bible
   Robert Bly Iron John (1990)
   Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy (6thC)
   Alain de Botton How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
   William Bridges Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (1980)
   David Brooks The Road to Character (2015)
   Brené Brown Daring Greatly (2012)
   David D Burns The New Mood Therapy (1980)
   Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth (1988)
   Richard Carlson Don't Sweat The Small Stuff (1997)
   Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
   Deepak Chopra The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success (1994)
   Clayton Christensen How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012)
   Paulo Coelho The Alchemist (1988)
   Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989)
   Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991)
   The Dalai Lama & Howard Cutler The Art of Happiness (1999)
   The Dhammapada (Buddha's teachings)
   Charles Duhigg The Power of Habit (2011)
   Wayne Dyer Real Magic (1992)
   Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance (1841)
   Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves (1996)
   Viktor Frankl Man's Search For Meaning (1959)
   Benjamin Franklin Autobiography (1790)
   Shakti Gawain Creative Visualization (1982)
   Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence (1995)
   John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus (1992)
   Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life (1984)
   James Hillman The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling (1996)
   Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway (1987)
   Richard Koch The 80/20 Principle (1998)
   Marie Kondo The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014)
   Ellen Langer Mindfulness: Choice and Control in Everyday Life (1989)
   Lao-Tzu Tao-te Ching (The Way of Power)
   Maxwell Maltz Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
   Abraham Maslow Motivation and Personality (1954)
   Thomas Moore Care of the Soul (1992)
   Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963)
   Norman Vincent Peale The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
   M Scott Peck The Road Less Traveled (1990)
   Anthony Robbins Awaken The Giant Within (1991)
   Florence Scovell-Shinn The Game of Life and How To Play It (1923)
   Martin Seligman Learned Optimism (1991)
   Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859)
   Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955)
   Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)
   Marianne Williamson A Return To Love (1993)
   ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon, 50 Self-Help,
1168:The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous “recurrence of birth” a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.

The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should indeed become the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, “discrimination. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1169:[the virgin birth account] occurs everywhere. When the Herod figure ( the extreme figure of misgovernment) has brought man to the nadir of spirit, the occult forces of the cycle begin to move. In an inconspicuous village, Mary is born who will maintain herself undefiled by fashionable errors of her generation. Her womb, remaining fallw as the primordial abyss, summons itself by its very readiness the original power that fertilzed the void.
Mary's virgin birth story is recounted everywhere. and with such striking unity of the main contours, that early christian missionaries had to think the devil must be creating mockeries of Mary's birth wherever they testified. One missionary reports that after work was begun among Tunja and Sogamozzo South American Indians, "the demon began giving contrary doctrines. The demon sought to discredit Mary's account, declaring it had not yet come to pass; but presently, the sun would bring it to pass by taking flesh in the womb of a virgin in a small village, causing her to conceive by rays of the sun while she yet remained virgin."
Hindu mythology tells of the maiden parvati who retreated to the high hills to practice austerities. Taraka had usurped mastery of the world, a tyrant. Prophecy said only a son of the high god Shiva could overthrow him. Shive however was the pattern god of yoga-alone, aloof, meditating. It was impossible Shiva could be moved to beget.
Parvati tried changing the world situation by metching Shiva in meditation. Aloof, indrawn in her soul meditating, she fasted naked beneath the blazing sun, even adding to the heat by building four great fires. One day a Brahmin youth arrived and asked why anyone so beautiful should be destroying herself with such torture. "My desire," she said "is Shiva, the Highest. He is the god of solitude and concentration. I therefore imitate his meditation to move him from his balance and bring him to me in love."
Shiva, the youth announced, is a god of destruction, shiva is World Annhilator. Snakes are his garlands.
The virgin said: He is beyond the mind of such as you. He is terrifying but the source of grace. snake garlands or jewel garlands he can assume or put off at will. Shiva is my love.
The youth thereupon put away his disguise-he was Shiva.
The Buddha descended from heaven to his mother's womb in the shape of a milk white elephant. The Aztec Coatlicue was approached by a god in the form of a ball of feathers. The chapters of Ovid's Metamorphoses swarm with nymphs beset by gods in sundry masquerades: jove as a bull, a swan, a shower of gold. Any leaf, any nut, or even the breath of a breeze, may be enough to fertilize the ready virgin womb. The procreating power is everywhere. And according to whim or destiny of the hour, either a hero savior or a world--annihilating demon may be conceived-one can never know. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1170:[The Christian story] amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the wold. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist the has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.... I don't know of it [the idea of woman as sinner...in other mythologies] elsewhere. The closest thing to it would be perhaps Pandora with Pandora's box, but that's not sin, that's just trouble. The idea in the biblical tradition of the all is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we'd all be a bunch of babies still Eden, without any participation in life. Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother o this temporal wold. Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden – no time, no birth, no death – no life. The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent's place. It is an old, old story. We have Sumerian seals from as early as 3500 B.C. showing the serpent and the tree and the goddess, with the goddess giving the fruit of life to a visiting male. The old mythology of he goddess is right there.... There is actually a historical explanation [of the change of this image of the serpent and the snake in Genesis] based on the coming of the Hebrews into Canaan. The principal divinity of the people of Canaan was the Goddess and associated with the Goddess is the serpent. This is the symbol of the mystery of life. The male-god-oriented groups rejected it. In other words, there is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the story of the Garden of Eden.
Moyers: It does seem that this story has done women a great disservice by casting Eve as responsible for the Fall. Why...?
Campbell: They represent life. Man doesn't enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into this wold of pairs of opposites and suffering.... Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition is the human and God. Good and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil in the world. And so Adm and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites. ~ Joseph Campbell,
1171:Apotheosis ::: One of the most powerful and beloved of the Bodhisattvas of the Mahayana Buddhism of Tibet, China, and Japan is the Lotus Bearer, Avalokiteshvara, "The Lord Looking Down in Pity," so called because he regards with compassion all sentient creatures suffering the evils of existence. To him goes the millionfold repeated prayer of the prayer wheels and temple gongs of Tibet: Om mani padme hum, "The jewel is in the lotus." To him go perhaps more prayers per minute than to any single divinity known to man; for when, during his final life on earth as a human being, he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow that before entering the void he would bring all creatures without exception to enlightenment; and since then he has permeated the whole texture of existence with the divine grace of his assisting presence, so that the least prayer addressed to him, throughout the vast spiritual empire of the Buddha, is graciously heard. Under differing forms he traverses the ten thousand worlds, and appears in the hour of need and prayer. He reveals himself in human form with two arms, in superhuman forms with four arms, or with six, or twelve, or a thousand, and he holds in one of his left hands the lotus of the world.

Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. "When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change." This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain-through herohood; for, as we read: "All things are Buddha-things"; or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement) : "All beings are without self."

The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva ("he whose being is enlightenment"); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them-and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. "He wears a garland of eight thousand rays, in which is seen fully reflected a state of perfect beauty.

The color of his body is purple gold. His palms have the mixed color of five hundred lotuses, while each finger tip has eighty-four thousand signet-marks, and each mark eighty-four thousand colors; each color has eighty-four thousand rays which are soft and mild and shine over all things that exist. With these jewel hands he draws and embraces all beings. The halo surrounding his head is studded with five hundred Buddhas, miraculously transformed, each attended by five hundred Bodhisattvas, who are attended, in turn, by numberless gods. And when he puts his feet down to the ground, the flowers of diamonds and jewels that are scattered cover everything in all directions. The color of his face is gold. While in his towering crown of gems stands a Buddha, two hundred and fifty miles high." - Amitayur-Dhyana Sutra, 19; ibid., pp. 182-183. ~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Apotheosis,
1172:Patriotism comes from the same Latin word as father. Blind patriotism is collective transference. In it the state becomes a parent and we citizens submit our loyalty to ensure its protection. We may have been encouraged to make that bargain from our public school education, our family home, religion, or culture in general. We associate safety with obedience to authority, for example, going along with government policies. We then make duty, as it is defined by the nation, our unquestioned course. Our motivation is usually not love of country but fear of being without a country that will defend us and our property. Connection is all-important to us; excommunication is the equivalent of death, the finality we can’t dispute. Healthy adult loyalty is a virtue that does not become blind obedience for fear of losing connection, nor total devotion so that we lose our boundaries. Our civil obedience can be so firm that it may take precedence over our concern for those we love, even our children. Here is an example: A young mother is told by the doctor that her toddler is allergic to peanuts and peanut oil. She lets the school know of her son’s allergy when he goes to kindergarten. Throughout his childhood, she is vigilant and makes sure he is safe from peanuts in any form. Eighteen years later, there is a war and he is drafted. The same mother, who was so scrupulously careful about her child’s safety, now waves goodbye to him with a tear but without protest. Mother’s own training in public school and throughout her life has made her believe that her son’s life is expendable whether or not the war in question is just. “Patriotism” is so deeply ingrained in her that she does not even imagine an alternative, even when her son’s life is at stake. It is of course also true that, biologically, parents are ready to let children go just as the state is ready to draft them. What a cunning synchronic-ity. In addition, old men who decide on war take advantage of the timing too. The warrior archetype is lively in eighteen-year-olds, who are willing to fight. Those in their mid-thirties, whose archetype is being a householder and making a mark in their chosen field, will not show an interest in battlefields of blood. The chiefs count on the fact that young braves will take the warrior myth literally rather than as a metaphor for interior battles. They will be willing to put their lives on the line to live out the collective myth of societies that have not found the path of nonviolence. Our collective nature thus seems geared to making war a workable enterprise. In some people, peacemaking is the archetype most in evidence. Nature seems to have made that population smaller, unfortunately. Our culture has trained us to endure and tolerate, not to protest and rebel. Every cell of our bodies learned that lesson. It may not be virtue; it may be fear. We may believe that showing anger is dangerous, because it opposes the authority we are obliged to appease and placate if we are to survive. This explains why we so admire someone who dares to say no and to stand up or even to die for what he believes. That person did not fall prey to the collective seduction. Watching Jeopardy on television, I notice that the audience applauds with special force when a contestant risks everything on a double-jeopardy question. The healthy part of us ardently admires daring. In our positive shadow, our admiration reflects our own disavowed or hidden potential. We, too, have it in us to dare. We can stand up for our truth, putting every comfort on the line, if only we can calm our long-scared ego and open to the part of us that wants to live free. Joseph Campbell says encouragingly, “The part of us that wants to become is fearless.” Religion and Transference Transference is not simply horizontal, from person to person, but vertical from person to a higher power, usually personified as God. When ~ David Richo,

IN CHAPTERS [3/3]



   2 Psychology


   2 Jordan Peterson


   2 Maps of Meaning


1.04 - THE APPEARANCE OF ANOMALY - CHALLENGE TO THE SHARED MAP, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  surprisingly long way provided only that you start with something approximating what Joseph Campbell
  called a mythologically instructed community.395 The transmission of what is generally regarded as

1.05 - THE HOSTILE BROTHERS - ARCHETYPES OF RESPONSE TO THE UNKNOWN, #Maps of Meaning, #Jordan Peterson, #Psychology
  in Jung, C.G. (1967a); Joseph Campbell (particularly in Campbell, J. (1987); and Campbell, J. (1968); Northrop Frye
  (particularly in Frye, N. (1982); and Frye, N. (1990)) and Erich Neumann (particularly in Neumann, E. (1954); and

3-5 Full Circle, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
  Gerald Clarke's comment in a Time Essay has the sharpest point: "The mythologists (such as Joseph Campbell) are not providing myths, but they are indicating that something is missing without them. They are telling modern man that he has not outgrown mythology and will never outgrow it".44
  The thing that has been missing is a reliable, practical, and spacious bridge between our old and enormous Literary Culture, whose language is basically myth in the sense of veiled truth; and our new Scientific Culture whose language is basically technical--in the sense of, for many, incomprehensible truth. I shall now bring evidence to show that with this bridge, the missing "something" is in place; that now at last science has come full circle. That the people who belong to our Two Cultures can now communicate across the Industrial world's cultural chasm, can orient each other, and together can transmute our Lower Industrial civilization as a whole into the Higher Industrial Period, Human Period 7. Switzerl and has transmuted herself spontaneously. She is our little pilot plant, presenting us with decades of research and development, giving us vast amounts of data and experience on which to base our Creative Centrist alternative to the political ideologies of Extreme Left and Extreme Right (Figure II-16) on how to damp out their fatal rhythm of disintegration.

WORDNET



--- Overview of noun joseph_campbell

The noun joseph campbell has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
              
1. Campbell, Joseph Campbell ::: (United States mythologist (1904-1987))


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun joseph_campbell

1 sense of joseph campbell                      

Sense 1
Campbell, Joseph Campbell
   INSTANCE OF=> mythologist
     => expert
       => person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
         => organism, being
           => living thing, animate thing
             => whole, unit
               => object, physical object
                 => physical entity
                   => entity
         => causal agent, cause, causal agency
           => physical entity
             => entity


--- Hyponyms of noun joseph_campbell
                                    


--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun joseph_campbell

1 sense of joseph campbell                      

Sense 1
Campbell, Joseph Campbell
   INSTANCE OF=> mythologist




--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun joseph_campbell

1 sense of joseph campbell                      

Sense 1
Campbell, Joseph Campbell
  -> mythologist
   HAS INSTANCE=> Campbell, Joseph Campbell




--- Grep of noun joseph_campbell
joseph campbell



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