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And in athletics, all this mysticism of track, and the rapture and ecstasy in sexual experiences – all these are mystical; all related to the loss of ego and its tenacity – yielding to a larger opening. That’s what mysticism…
I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import – what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood…
Tragedy is the shattering of forms and of our attachment to them; comedy the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible [together] they constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and…
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self.
The universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world … are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately…
Then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed…
From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of…
The mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents-even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing…
In short, my friends, what I find that I am saying is that our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy: except that, whereas they are…
The inward journeys of the mythological hero, the shaman, the mystic, and the schizophrenic are in principle the same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth: the birth, that is to say, of a…
All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are any- and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry now is archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination? We know their histories: we know by what stages they developed. Not only Freud and Jung, but all serious students of psychology and of…
Some such elementary course in comparative mythology as I have here suggested––conducted, however, by a team of scholar-specialists lecturing in their special fields and separately directing individual student projects––could be put together readily in any one of the major universities. It…
“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.” So we are told in a little twelfth-century book known as The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers. Each of us — whoever and wherever he may be —…
There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river. One was a god; he drank ambrosia. One was a man; he drank water. One was a demon; he drank filth. What you get is a function…
Evidently it is not science that has diminished man or divorced him from divinity. On the contrary… we are to recognize in this whole universe a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature; so that we are indeed its…
Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love…
Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is. . . . And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves. But where the power to respond succeeds, there…
When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our consciousness now, with the ecology movement, recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are…
Love as passion; love as com-passion — these are the two extreme poles of our subject. They have been often represented as absolutely opposed — physical, respectively, and spiritual; yet in both the individual is torn out of himself and…
It is for an obvious reason far easier to name examples of mythologies of war than mythologies of peace; for not only has conflict between groups been normal to human experience, but there is also the cruel fact to be…
The god you worship is the god you deserve.