# The Power of Myth  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers]] - Full Title: The Power of Myth - Category: #divinity #heros-journey ## Highlights - 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.’ ([Location 77](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=77)) - “That’s not what the hero’s journey is about. It’s not to deny reason. To the contrary, by overcoming the dark passions, the hero symbolizes our ability to control the irrational savage within us.” ([Location 106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=106)) - The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=114)) - “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.” ([Location 143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=143)) - Preachers err, he told me, by trying “to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.” ([Location 144](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=144)) - A myth is a mask of God, too—a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. ([Location 185](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=185)) - 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 within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. ([Location 227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=227)) - they’re lovable because they’re so imperfect. ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=272)) - It’s Christ on the cross that becomes lovable. MOYERS: What do you mean? CAMPBELL: Suffering. Suffering is imperfection, is it not? ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=276)) - Myths are stories of 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 life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are. ([Location 282](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=282)) - 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 within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves. ([Location 285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=285)) - Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. ([Location 290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=290)) - 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. ([Location 298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=298)) - 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. ([Location 301](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=301)) - 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. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=333)) - Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. ([Location 358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=358)) - That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body anymore, you’re something else entirely. ([Location 362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=362)) - But 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. ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=383)) - What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=394)) - Specialization tends to limit the field of problems that the specialist is concerned with. Now, the person who isn’t a specialist, but a generalist like myself, sees something over here that he has learned from one specialist, something over there that he has learned from another specialist—and neither of them has considered the problem of why this occurs here and also there. ([Location 400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=400)) - The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in the religions that were taught to them, and they go inside. ([Location 477](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=477)) - The bird is symbolic of the release of the spirit from bondage to the earth, just as the serpent is symbolic of the bondage to the earth. The airplane plays that role now. ([Location 591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=591)) - You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances. ([Location 637](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=637)) - He asks his father to bring food for the bird, and the father doesn’t want to feed a mere bird, so he kills it. And the legend says the man killed the bird, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song, himself. He dropped dead, completely dead, and was dead forever. ([Location 659](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=659)) - Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body. ([Location 666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=666)) - But in the Bible, eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile. ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=709)) - We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet. ([Location 717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=717)) - That’s why our founders opposed religious intolerance— CAMPBELL: That was out entirely. And that’s why they rejected the idea of the Fall, too. All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people. ([Location 812](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=812)) - Is the Masonic order an expression somehow of mythological thinking? CAMPBELL: Yes, I think it is. This is a scholarly attempt to reconstruct an order of initiation that would result in spiritual revelation. These founding fathers who were Masons actually studied what they could of Egyptian lore. In Egypt, the pyramid represents the primordial hillock. After the annual flood of the Nile begins to sink down, the first hillock is symbolic of the reborn world. That’s what this seal represents. ([Location 824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=824)) - Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe. ([Location 837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=837)) - How do we live without myths then? CAMPBELL: The individual has to find an aspect of myth that relates to his own life. Myth basically serves four functions. ([Location 847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=847)) - 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. ([Location 849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=849)) - The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned—showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through. ([Location 853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=853)) - The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order. ([Location 857](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=857)) - 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. ([Location 863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=863)) - 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. ([Location 878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=878)) - “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ([Location 916](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=916)) - Polynesian saying goes, you are then “standing on a whale fishing for minnows.” ([Location 971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=971)) - Why is a myth different from a dream? CAMPBELL: 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. ([Location 997](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=997)) - 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. ([Location 1007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1007)) - In both of these stories the snake is the symbol of life throwing off the past and continuing to live. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1071)) - 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. ([Location 1073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1073)) - 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 in Eden, without any participation in life. Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother of this temporal world. 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. ([Location 1100](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1100)) - And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites. ([Location 1121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1121)) - Out of one comes two. All things in the field of time are pairs of opposites. So this is the shift of consciousness from the consciousness of identity to the consciousness of participation in duality. And then you are into the field of time. ([Location 1128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1128)) - “God” is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known. But the transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name “God.” God is beyond names and forms. ([Location 1136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1136)) - The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes. ([Location 1174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1174)) - They are elementary ideas, what could be called “ground” ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. “Archetype” is the better term because “elementary idea” suggests headwork. Archetype of the unconscious means it comes from below. The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious and Freud’s complexes is that the archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime. ([Location 1201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1201)) - Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, “Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.” Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative. ([Location 1294](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1294)) - If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu. ([Location 1315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1315)) - Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. ([Location 1331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1331)) - 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. ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1354)) - The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced. ([Location 1404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1404)) - I think our clergy is really not doing its proper work. It does not speak about the connotations of the metaphors but is stuck with the ethics of good and evil. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1406)) - The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had an experience. In our tradition it is the monk who seeks the experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community. ([Location 1409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1409)) - God as the ultimate mystery of being is beyond thinking. ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1461)) - Ritual is group participation in the most hideous act, which is the act of life—namely, killing and eating another living thing. We do it together, and this is the way life is. The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge. ([Location 1551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1551)) - Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. The problem with heaven is that you will be having such a good time there, you won’t even think of eternity. You’ll just have this unending delight in the beatific vision of God. But the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life. ([Location 1599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1599)) - People resist the door of death. But this body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch this body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another—but it’s predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment. ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1644)) - After the animal has been shot and is dying painfully of the poison, the hunters have to fulfill certain taboos of not doing this and not doing that in a kind of “participation mystique,” a mystical participation in the death of the animal, whose meat has become their life, and whose death they have brought about. There’s an identification, a mythological identification. Killing is not simply slaughter, it’s a ritual act, as eating is when you say grace before meals. A ritual act is a recognition of your dependency on the voluntary giving of this food to you by the animal who has given its life. The hunt is a ritual. ([Location 1697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1697)) - Killing the animal is not a personal act. You are performing the work of nature. ([Location 1717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1717)) - the samurai, the Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. When he cornered the man who had murdered his overlord, and he was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, the man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in the warrior’s face. And the warrior sheathed the sword and walked away. MOYERS: Why? CAMPBELL: Because he was made angry, and if he had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act. And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of vengeance. ([Location 1750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1750)) - A temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. ([Location 1849](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1849)) - There is the problem of turning ungovernable children, who express just the naive impulses of nature, into members of the society. That takes a lot of doing. These people could not tolerate anybody who wouldn’t follow the rules. The society couldn’t support them. They would kill them. MOYERS: Because they were a threat to the health of the whole? CAMPBELL: Well, of course. They were like cancers, something that was tearing the body apart. These tribal groups were living on the edge all the time. ([Location 1911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1911)) - The altar was turned so that the priest’s back was to you, and with him you addressed yourself outward. Now they’ve turned the altar around—it looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration—all homey and cozy. MOYERS: And they play a guitar. CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. They’ve forgotten that the function of ritual is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time. ([Location 1928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=1928)) - The twelfth-century troubadour poetry of courtly love was a protest against this supernaturally justified violation of life’s joy in truth. So too the Tristan legend and at least one of the great versions of the legend of the Grail, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach. The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. ([Location 2169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2169)) - There’s a major difference, as I see it, between a shaman and a priest. 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. ([Location 2193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2193)) - But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, that figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food. Christ is crucified, and from his body the food of the spirit comes. ([Location 2357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2357)) - When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. You eat the duality, and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that J and the Father are one. ([Location 2360](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2360)) - Jesus on the cross is on a tree, the tree of immortal life, and he is the fruit of the tree. ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2366)) - Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life. This is a metaphysical truth which may become spontaneously realized under circumstances of crisis. For it is, according to Schopenhauer, the truth of your life. The hero is the one who has given his physical life to some order of realization of that truth. The concept of love your neighbor is to put you in tune with this fact. But whether you love your neighbor or not, when the realization grabs you, you may risk your life. ([Location 2449](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2449)) - So when Jesus says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he is saying in effect, “Love thy neighbor because he is yourself.” ([Location 2455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2455)) - At the very end of the Divine Comedy, Dante realizes that the love of God informs the whole universe down to the lowest pits of hell. That’s very much the same image. ([Location 2459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2459)) - The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. ([Location 2553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2553)) - I didn’t feel poor, I just felt that I didn’t have any money. ([Location 2621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2621)) - Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. ([Location 2650](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2650)) - A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. ([Location 2661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2661)) - there are two types of deed. One is the physical deed, in which the hero performs a courageous act in battle or saves a life. The other kind is the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message. ([Location 2664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2664)) - But 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. ([Location 2685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2685)) - So does heroism have a moral objective? CAMPBELL: The moral objective is that of saving a people, or saving a person, or supporting an idea. The hero sacrifices himself for something—that’s the morality of it. ([Location 2740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2740)) - 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. ([Location 2787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2787)) - A questionnaire was once sent around one of the high schools in Brooklyn which asked, “What would you like to be?” Two thirds of the students responded, “A celebrity.” They had no notion of having to give of themselves in order to achieve something. ([Location 2850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=2850)) - That’s the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there. ([Location 3027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3027)) - Myths primarily are for fundamental instruction in these matters. Our society today is not giving us adequate mythic instruction of this kind, and so young people are finding it difficult to get their act together. I have a theory that, if you can find out where a person is blocked, it should be possible to find a mythological counterpart for that particular threshold problem. ([Location 3058](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3058)) - A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands. ([Location 3073](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3073)) - Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s a robot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in terms 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, ([Location 3094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3094)) - The adventure is its own reward—but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control. We are following our own way, not our daddy’s or our mother’s way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know. One has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field, and here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect. ([Location 3411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3411)) - Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny. ([Location 3439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3439)) - 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 unraveled 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 that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. ([Location 3491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3491)) - 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.” ([Location 3495](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3495)) - Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. ([Location 3501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3501)) - The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things, whether in the vision of time these things are judged as good or as evil. To come to this, you must release yourself completely from desiring the goods of this world and fearing their loss. “Judge not that you be not judged,” we read in the words of Jesus. “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” wrote Blake, “man would see everything as it is, infinite.” ([Location 3534](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3534)) - Myths of the Great Goddess teach compassion for all living beings. There you come to appreciate the real sanctity of the earth itself, because it is the body of the Goddess. ([Location 3571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3571)) - That’s who the Goddess is, the field that produces forms. ([Location 3642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3642)) - That is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are projected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deuteronomy. ([Location 3710](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3710)) - Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves. ([Location 3971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3971)) - Eros is a biological urge. It’s the zeal of the organs for each other. The personal factor doesn’t matter. MOYERS: And Agape? CAMPBELL: Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself—spiritual love. It doesn’t matter who the neighbor is. ([Location 3974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=3974)) - Love is the meaning of life—it is the high point of life. ([Location 4062](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4062)) - The Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. ([Location 4174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4174)) - Nature and spirit are yearning for each other to meet in this experience. And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what has been divided, the peace that comes from joining. ([Location 4189](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4189)) - Tibetan monks practice sand painting, drawing cosmic images to represent the forces of the spiritual powers that operate in our lives. ([Location 4616](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4616)) - That’s the inexhaustible center that is represented by the Grail. When life comes into being, it is neither afraid nor desiring, it is just becoming. Then it gets into being, and it begins to be afraid and desiring. When you can get rid of fear and desire and just get back to where you’re becoming, you’ve hit the spot. ([Location 4643](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4643)) - When I started teaching comparative mythology, I was afraid I might destroy my students’ religious beliefs, but what I found was just the opposite. Religious traditions, which didn’t mean very much to them, but which were the ones their parents had given them, suddenly became illuminated in a new way when we compared them with other traditions, where similar images had been given a more inward or spiritual interpretation. ([Location 4657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4657)) - I had Christian students, Jewish students, Buddhist students, a couple of Zoroastrian students—they all had this experience. There’s no danger in interpreting the symbols of a religious system and calling them metaphors instead of facts. What that does is to turn them into messages for your own inward experience and life. The system suddenly becomes a personal experience. ([Location 4660](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4660)) - Ethics is a way of teaching you how to live as though you were one with the other. You don’t have to have the experience because the doctrine of the religion gives you molds of actions that imply a compassionate relationship with the other. It offers an incentive for doing this by teaching you that simply acting in your own self-interest is sin. That is identification with your body. ([Location 4764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4764)) - Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive. ([Location 4796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4796)) - Poetry is a language that has to be penetrated. Poetry involves a precise choice of words that will have implications and suggestions that go past the words themselves. Then you experience the radiance, the epiphany. The epiphany is the showing through of the essence. ([Location 4806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4806)) - “Follow your bliss.” ([Location 4828](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4828)) - 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. ([Location 4829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004QZACH6&location=4829))