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God isn’t a fact. God is a symbol. As soon as you interpret God as a fact, you are off the beam. . .  Where I have used the word God  let us simply say brahman, a neuter noun that refers past itself…

Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creation going on. This energy is pouring into…

The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. . . . This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to –– as…

Mythology is the womb of mankind’s initiation to life and death.

Marsupial babies grow in a second womb, a womb with a view. We need mythology as the marsupial needs the pouch to develop beyond the stage of the incompetent infant to a stage where it can step out of the…

Myths, like dreams, are upworkings of the unconscious mind.

In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of…

If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you . . . Your adventure has to be coming…

Your adventure has to be coming right out of your own interior. If you are ready for it, then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you…

Nobody can give you a mythology. The images that mean something to you, you’ll find in your dreams, in your visions, in your actions – and you’ll find out what they are after you’ve passed them.

The life that lives in us is eternal life, there’s no doubt about it, and we are bubbles on top of it, and in our bubble existence, our existence in the field of time and space, it’s possible to become…

There is a general pattern to the hero journey––the quest of the hero into unknown realms, the powers that he meets there and overcomes, the stages of his crises of victory, and his return, then, with some boon that he…

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth.

The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The…

The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The…

You have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – and because the three of them have different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize…

Star Wars deals with the essential problem: Is the machine going to control humanity, or is the machine going to serve humanity? Darth Vader is a man taken over by a machine, he becomes a machine, and the state itself…

I think of grass—you know, every two weeks a chap comes out with a lawnmower and cuts it down. Suppose the grass were to say, ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s the use if you keep getting cut down this way?’…

Whenever the social structure of the unconscious is dissolved, the individual has to take a heroic journey within to find new forms. The biblical tradition, which provided the structuring myth for Western culture, is largely ineffective. . . .  So…

We are in the old age of our culture. It’s in a dissolving, disintegrating period. . . . There is an awful saying of Spengler that I ran into in a book of his, “Jahre der Entscheidung” (“Years of Decision”),…

In a wonderful essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that, once you have reached an advanced age, as I have, as you look back over your life, it can seem to…

I have two ways of writing. One is a programmed way: I know what I’m going to say and I write it and that’s third-rate stuff. The wonderful thing is when I get on a certain beam that hits the…

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…