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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

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In The Orient The

Joseph Campbell

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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.

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When Before The Beauty Of A Sunset Or A Mountain, You Pause And Exclaim, 'ah,' You Are Participating In Divinity.

The Perfect Human Being Is Uninteresting.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Sound Precipitates Air, Then Fire, Then Water And Earth- And That's How The World Becomes.

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.

The Adventure Evoked A Quality Of His Character That He Didn't Know He Possessed.

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.

For People Who Are Really Alive To Have Life Awakened Is More Important Than To Get A Sandwich.

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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.

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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.

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.

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The Goal Of Life Is Rapture. Art Is The Way We Experience It.

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Where There Is A Way Or Path, It Is Someone Else's. Each Of Us Has To Find His Own Way.

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The Hero, Therefore, Is The Man Or Woman Who Has Been Able To Battle Past His Personal And Local Historical Limitations.

In Choosing Your God, You Choose Your Way Of Looking At The Universe. There Are Plenty Of Gods. Choose Yours.

If You're Going To Have A Story, Have A Big Story, Or None At All.

Our Life Evokes Our Character And You Find Out More About Yourself As You Go On.

If The Path Before You Is Clear, You're Probably On Someone Else's.

We're All Seeking...the Rapture Of Being Alive.

The Ultimate Aim Of The Quest Must Be Neither Release Nor Ecstasy For Oneself, But The Wisdom And The Power To Serve Others.

It Has Always Been The Prime Function Of Mythology And Rite To Supply The Symbols That Carry The Human Spirit Forward.

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.

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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.

The Call To Adventure Signifies That Destiny Has Summoned The Hero.

He Who Thinks He Knows, Doesn't Know. He Who Knows That He Doesn't Know, Knows.

What Am I? Am I The Bulb That Carries The Light, Or Am I The Light Of Which The Bulb Is A Vehicle?

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.

The Adventure Of The Hero Is The Adventure Of Being Alive

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.

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.

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. -

The Sin Of Inadvertence, Not Being Alert, Not Quite Awake, Is The Sin Of Missing The Moment Of Life-live With Unremitting Alertness.

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.

...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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

Love Is Exactly As Strong As Life.

When We Follow Our Bliss, We Are Met By A Thousand Unseen Helping Hands.

To Find Your Own Way Is To Follow Your Bliss.

Follow Your Bliss

You Know, When Real Trouble Comes Your Humanity Is Awakened. The Fundamental Human Experience Is That Of Compassion.

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.

You Become Mature When You Become The Authority Of Your Own Life.

Every Religion, Every Mythology Is True In This Sense: It Is True As Metaphorical Of The Human And Cosmic Mystery.

People Who Don't Have A Concept Of The Whole Can Do Very Unfortunate Things.

Unfortunate Things

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.

The Ultimate Dragon Is Within You, It Is Your Ego Clamping You Down.

Knowing Who You Are

The Function Of Artists Is "the Mythologization Of The World."

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.

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.

In Marriage You Are Not Sacrificing Yourself To The Other Person. You Are Sacrificing Yourself To The Relationship.

Sacrificing Yourself

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.

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.

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.

Individual Choice

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.

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.

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."

No One In The World Was Ever You Before, With Your Particular Gifts And Abilities And Possibilities.

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.

It May Be A Species Of Impudence To Think That The Way You Understand God Is The Way God Is. (60).

The Hero Journey Is Inside Of You; Tear Off The Veils And Open The Mystery Of Your Self.

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.

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.

Mind Your Own Business

The Demon That You Can Swallow Gives You It’s Power, And The Greater Life’s Pain, The Greater Life’s Reply.

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.

There Is A Condescension On The Part Of The Infinite To The Mind Of Man. That Is What Looks Like God.

For The Bliss Of The Deep Abode Is Not Lightly Abandoned In Favor Of The Self-scattering Of The Wakened State.

When Everything Is Lost, And All Seems Darkness, Then Comes The New Life And All That Is Needed.

Each Of Us Has Capacities. The Real Trick Is Knowing The Machinery Of The Boat In Which You Are Crossing The Channel.

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.

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.

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.

It's Only When A Man Tames His Own Demons That He Becomes The King Of Himself If Not Of The World.

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)

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

There Is No Greater Privilege In Life Than Being Yourself.

The Influence Of A Vital Being Vitalizes.

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.

The Process Of Nature Cannot Be Evil.

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.

Finding Yourself

Preachers Err By Trying To Talk People Into Belief; Better They Reveal The Radiance Of Their Own Discovery.

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.

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.

The Deadheads Are Doing The Dance Of Life And This I Would Say Is The Answer To The Atom Bomb.

The Best We Can Do Is Lean Towards The Light.

There Is Perhaps Nothing Worse Than Reaching The Top Of The Ladder And Discovering That You’re On The Wrong Wall.

Reaching The Top

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.

A Real Artist Is The One Who Has Learned To Recognize And To Render... The 'radiance' Of All Things As An Epiphany Or Showing Forth Of The Truth.

The Adventure That The Hero Is Ready For Is The One He Gets.

First You Must Find Your Trajectory, And Then Comes The Social Coordination.

Where You Stumble And Fall, There You Will Find Gold.

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.

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)

When You Are Required To Exhibit Strength, It Comes.

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.

Our True Reality Is In Our Identity And Unity With All Life.

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.

Man Was Not Breathed Into The Earth. Man Came Out Of The Earth.

The Best Advise Is To Take It All As If It Had Been Your Intention.

Knowing Who You Are

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.

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.

You've Got To Say Yes To This Miracle Of Life As It Is, Not On Condition That It Follow Your Rules.

Knowing Who You Are

You've Got To Find The Force Inside You.

Eternity Is Not The Hereafter...this Is It. If You Don't Get It Here You Won't Get It Anywhere.

Follow Your Bliss

You Have To Learn To Recognize Your Own Depth.

The Object Becomes Aesthetically Significant When It Becomes Metaphysically Significant.

Money Is Congealed Energy, And Releasing It Releases Life's Possibilities.

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.

People Forget Facts, But They Remember Stories.

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.

Your Life Is The Fruit Of Your Own Doing. You Have No One To Blame But Yourself.

Myth Is What We Call Other People's Religion.

It Is By Going Down Into The Abyss That We Recover The Treasures Of Life. Where You Stumble, There Lies Your Treasure.

Follow Your Bliss. The Heroic Life Is Living The Individual Adventure.

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.

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.

For We Have Not Even To Risk The Adventure Alone, For The Heros Of All Time Have Gone Before Us.

I Think It's Important To Live Life With A Knowledge Of Its Mystery, And Of Your Own Mystery.

The Myth Is The Public Dream And The Dream Is The Private Myth.

There Is No Way You Can Use The Word “reality” Without Quotation Marks Around It.

Knowing Who You Are

Quotation Marks

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.

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.

Marriage . . . Is Not A Love Affair; It Is An Ordeal. (92)

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.

When You See The Earth From The Moon, You Don't See Any Divisions There Of Nations Or States. This Might Be The Symbol, Really, For The New Mythology To Come. That Is The Country That We Are Going To Be Celebrating. And Those Are The People That We Are One With.

When You Make The Sacrifice In Marriage, You're Sacrificing Not To Each Other But To Unity In A Relationship.

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

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.

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.

The Place To Find Is Within Yourself.

The Function Of The Society Is To Cultivate The Individual. It Is Not The Function Of The Individual To Support Society.

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.

Mythology Is Often Defined As 'other Peoples' Religions', Religion Can Be Thought Of As Misinterpreted Mythology.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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