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The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: say ‘yea’ to it all. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

Alan Watts used to tell the story of the Apollo astronaut who came back from space; some smart-aleck reporter asked, since he’d been to heaven, had he seen God? ‘Yes,’ answered the astronaut, ‘and she’s black.’

Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. That’s the first function of a mythology, to…

Mythology and the rites through which its imagery is rendered open the mind . . . not only to the local social order, but also to the mythic dimension of being – of nature – which is within as well…

You’ve got to translate these things into contemporary life and experience. Mythology is a validation of experience, giving it its spiritual or psychological dimension.⁠

Whenever we emphasize otherness or out-groups, we are making persons into “it.”

Self-preservation is only the second law of life. The first law is that you and the other are one. Politicians love to talk about “I worship in my way, and he in his.” But that doesn’t make sense if we…

Historical events are given spiritual meaning by being interpreted mythologically.

The central demand is to surrender our exclusivity, everything that defines us over against each other. . . . Whenever we emphasize otherness or out-groups, we are making persons into “it.”

Purgatory is a purging of ego, and compassion is the purging of ego. Passion is ego, it’s ego-bound. Compassion is the opening. It’s love, and ego is just the opposite to love.

When Yahweh creates, he creates man of the earth and breathes life into the formed body. He’s not himself there present in that form. But the Goddess is within as well as without. Your body is of her body. There…

Only death is no trouble. People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great the way it is.”

At the darkest moment comes the light.

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.

There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An…

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in the poem is what the myth does for you.

The inner harmonization, the opening of the heart to humanity, is the main thing––and it must open to all humanity. This is no retreat, but a rejection of the partial judgment on humanity that is characteristic of social theories. The…

“Whence do all these so widely shared themes and motifs derive?” we might ask. “Where do dragons come from? Where, for example, on the map, might I draw a circle to mark the homeland of the species dragon? Or is…

Myth, like dream, is an expression of the human imagination thus grounded in the realities of the psyche and, like dream, reflecting equally the influences of a specific social environment (nomadic hunting-and-gathering tribe; settled agricultural sib, city state, or nation;…

There is a Tantric saying, “To worship a god, one must become a god.” That is to say, you must hit that level of consciousness within yourself that is equivalent to the deity to whom you are addressing your attention.

The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe…

Mythologies . . . are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a ‘presence’ or ‘eternity’ that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great…

I can tell you that when a mythic dimension is opened to people, happiness, joy, and a sense of what might be called self-potentiality is opened to them as well. They have been given the saving image of human self-confidence…