# Myths to Live By  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joseph Campbell]] - Full Title: Myths to Live By - Category: #divinity #heros-journey ## Highlights - This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology. ([Location 450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=450)) - In every one of the mythological systems that in the long course of history and prehistory have been propagated in the various zones and quarters of this earth, these two fundamental realizations—of the inevitability of individual death and the endurance of the social order—have been combined symbolically and constitute the nuclear structuring force of the rites and, thereby, the society. ([Location 456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=456)) - In the Buddhist view, that is to say, 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. ([Location 554](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=554)) - 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. ([Location 589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=589)) - 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. ([Location 800](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=800)) - Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths. ([Location 822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=822)) - Our ideal for a society, in other words, is not that it should be a perfectly static organization, founded in the age of the ancestors and to remain unchanging through all time. It is rather of a process moving toward a fulfillment of as yet unrealized possibilities; and in this living process each is to be an initiating yet cooperating center. We have, consequently, the comparatively complex problem in educating our young of training them not simply to assume uncritically the patterns of the past, but to recognize and cultivate their own creative possibilities; not to remain on some proven level of earlier biology and sociology, but to represent a movement of the species forward. ([Location 855](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=855)) - It is this: that in a small community like Athens the relationship of the creative artist to the local social leaders would be forthright and direct, they would have known each other since boyhood; whereas in such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places. They have not been quite enough engaged in the agony of solitary creative work to press beyond their first acquisitions of marketable styles and techniques. And the next consequence is “instant art,” where some clever individual with as little formal agony as possible simply renders something unforeseen—which is then criticized and either advertised or suppressed by either friendly or unfriendly newspaper folk, who have also had a lot of socializing to attend to and, with insufficient time for extracurricular study or experience, find themselves baffled before anything really complex or significantly new. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=881)) - The secret cause of all suffering is, of course, mortality itself, which is the prime precondition of life, and so is indeed “grave and constant.” It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed. ([Location 1038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=1038)) - Spengler had declared that in periods like ours, of the passage from Culture to Civilization, there is a dropping off and away of the Culture forms: and indeed, in my own teaching I am today encountering more and more students who profess to find the whole history of our Western culture “irrelevant.” ([Location 1431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=1431)) - However, the darker vision of Spengler foresees only desolation here too. For science and the machine are in his view expressions of the mentality of Western man, which are being taken over by non-Western peoples only as a means by which to undo and destroy the West. ([Location 1473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=1473)) - for the ultimate secret of the appeal of the Orient is that its disciplines are inward-pointing, mystical, and psychological. ([Location 1489](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=1489)) - A distinguished professor in psychiatry at the University of California, Dr. John W. Perry, has characterized the living mythological symbol as an “affect image.” It is an image that hits one where it counts. It is not addressed first to the brain, to be there interpreted and appreciated. On the contrary, if that is where it has to be read, the symbol is already dead. An “affect image” talks directly to the feeling system and immediately elicits a response, after which the brain may come along with its interesting comments. ([Location 1507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=1507)) - The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows—moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion. ([Location 2615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00537W8I2&location=2615))