Quotes by Mythologists - Page 2

[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
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
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves
Joseph Campbell
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
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
In order to understand the conditions we are in, we must place ourselves not in the mainstream of life but in the timeless stream of myth. As the fabric of life loosens, the veil between this world of hard facts and the otherworld of great imagination also becomes thinner and more permeable. Just as time seems to be running out, timeless things try to slip back into human awareness.
Michael Meade
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
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
A hero ventures forth from the worldof common day into a region ofsupernatural wonder. Fabulous forcesare there encountered and a decisivevictory is won.
Joseph Campbell
Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it's called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that's the economy of the soul.
Michael Meade
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
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
When we place our immediate conflicts in the territory of an archetypal story we can better see the nature of our problems and find solutions that bring creative imagination to bear in the realm of hard facts and hardening dilemmas.
Michael Meade
Awe is what moves us forward.
Joseph Campbell
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
What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.
Michael Meade
One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life’s burning question has been inscribed in one’s soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim’s soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.
Michael Meade
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
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Joseph Campbell
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
Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.
Joseph Campbell
Neither death nor wisdom has a full stop. There are only commas-no destinations, only waiting rooms.
Devdutt Pattanaik
The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.
Joseph Campbell
Every human creates his own imagined version of the world, and of himself. Every human is therefore Brahma, creator of his own aham.Aham Brahmasmi, I am Brahma. Tat tvam asi, so are you.
Devdutt Pattanaik
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
You can die from kitsch. And we're close to it.
John Lamb Lash
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Joseph Campbell
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
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
Joseph Campbell
Only the ignorant think they alone are responsible for an outcome
Devdutt Pattanaik
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
Fate and destiny are close woven within us and near them can be found the true genius of our lives.
Michael Meade
If we want the world to change, the healing of culture and greater balance in nature, it has to start inside the human soul.
Michael Meade
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
Healing is a revolutionary act and we are here to awaken to the true nature of our own souls and the gifts we have to give to the world.
Michael Meade
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
The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.
Michael Meade
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
The thread that ties us to the center is the hidden cord of the heart, it is the thread of genius that can connect the mind with the heart, that allows the mind to feel and reveals the thought set within the heart.
Michael Meade
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
We may be closest to hearing the call when we feel most alone or in trouble, for genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.
Michael Meade
Whereas literalists and fundamentalists tend to choose one pole of any dilemma or opposition, whereas modern political parties and religious groups tend towards demonizing each other, the creative individual must be born again and again in the crucible created by the tension between opposing instincts, conflicted feelings, and contrasting ideas.
Michael Meade
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
Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.
Michael Meade
When a situation feels like a matter of life and death the deep self is close at hand and it already carries inner medicine and its own life remedy.
Michael Meade
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
Joseph Campbell
Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
Joseph Campbell
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
Myth offers a third place to stand or a third way to see when we find ourselves caught between opposing ideas and hardening ideologies.
Michael Meade
For centuries, pilgrims have travelled to Ayodhya identifying it as a birthplace of Ram. But the exact location is a subject of dispute and political turmoil. Ever since colonial times, Hinduism has felt under siege, forced to explain itself using European templates, make itself more tangible, more structured, more homogenous, more historical, more geographical, less psychological, less emotional, to render itself as valid as the major religions of the world like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The fallout of this pressure is the need to locate matters of faith in a particular spot. What used to be once a matter of faith becomes a territorial war zone where courts have to intervene
Devdutt Pattanaik
Education at a deep level means to ‘lead out’ what is trying to be born from within. The job of a true teacher is to help awaken the inner pupil that has its own way of being and unique way of perceiving the world.
Michael Meade
In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul. Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man’s inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness that can light the way in dark times.
Michael Meade
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
The ability to be tough-minded remains useful; but by now, the fact that we are all in trouble in terms of both nature and culture can only be denied by those who become overly conservative and blindly reactionary. The more tender-hearted imagination that suggests we are all in this together and that there must be an underlying unity in life may be the only way to survive.
Michael Meade
Many people believe that eliminating the apparent causes of fear will eliminate it, but fear, like beauty, is part of the world. The fear of fear results in the growth of terror as well as a loss of the beauty and wonder of the world. By fearing fear, we create the room for terror and panic to grow. People become blinded by fear, driven by anxieties, and increasingly ruled by phobias and obsessions. When we fail to recognize how fear works in the world, we become ruled by it. The point is not to become paralyzed with foreboding or be caught in the panic that can grip the collective and cause people to run blindly in the wrong direction. The point is to willingly go where most fear to go, to follow where the fear might lead and face the ways that the world roars at us.
Michael Meade
Set within the seed of the soul is not jut a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out.
Michael Meade
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
You have to learn to recognize your own depths.
Joseph Campbell
Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.
Joseph Campbell
[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