Quotes by Mythologists - Page 4

The real education is when you awaken and nourish and guide the inner spirit, this inner genius. The community grows from the giving of the gifts of the people in it, which is really giving from the genius.
Michael Meade
Mentoring is an archetypal activity that has timeless elements which can connect us to the universal ground where nature renews itself and culture becomes reimagined. Youth and elder meet where the pressure of the future meets the presence of the past. Old and young are opposites that secretly identify with each other for neither fits well into the mainstream of life.
Michael Meade
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
A genuine education must somehow serve the wings of spirit and imagination that each child brings to life.
Michael Meade
A society that fails to water the life-seeds of its members may be capable of instructing its citizens, but will be incapable of truly educating its children or wholly embracing its youth.
Michael Meade
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
Each young person is a poet of sorts, trying to sort out the poetics of their inner life and its relation to the great world around it. Each elder is a philosopher of sorts, trying to sort out the meanings and gleanings of a life as well as the necessary implications of the presence of death.
Michael Meade
At critical moments in the life of individuals and of societies, it is not necessarily the facts that are needed as much as a profound narrative that makes sense of life’s conflicts and misunderstandings. When all seems to be falling apart and becoming less rational and more chaotic, it is usually a different story that is needed to make things whole again. Mythic imagination can break the spell of time and open us to a level of life that remains timeless. Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.
Michael Meade
Destiny is purpose seen from the other end of life.
Michael Meade
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
Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
Joseph Campbell
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Joseph Campbell
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
Joseph Campbell
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.
Joseph Campbell
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 with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
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
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
You enter the forestat the darkest point,where there is no path.Where there is a way or path,it is someone else's path.You are not on your own path.If you follow someone else's way,you are not going to realizeyour potential.
Joseph Campbell
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Joseph Campbell
If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
Joseph Campbell
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
Joseph Campbell