Joseph Campbell Quotes - Page 2

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
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
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
You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.
Joseph Campbell
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
All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.
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
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
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
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
You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.
Joseph Campbell
Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous
Joseph Campbell
It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughlyknown; we have only to follow the thread of the heropath. 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, weshall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
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
A bit of adviceGiven to a young Native AmericanAt 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
If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.
Joseph Campbell
We're in a free fall into the 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. But 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 . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.
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
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 audiblecall that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without
Joseph Campbell
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
[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
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell
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
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
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
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
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
The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves
Joseph Campbell
Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell
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
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
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
Myth is what we call other people's religion.
Joseph Campbell
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
All religions are true but none are literal.
Joseph Campbell
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
Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
Joseph Campbell
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).
Joseph Campbell
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
Joseph Campbell