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.

All of the great cathedrals of Europe were built during this lunatic century between 1150 and 1250. People didn’t have enough money then to buy two cows, let alone two cars. What were they living for? And you mustn’t think of slave drivers; that isn’t what built the cathedrals. It was a community seizure, a mythic zeal.

The artist . . . is the true seer and prophet of his century, the justifier of life and as such, of course, a revolutionary far more fundamental in his penetration of the social mask of his day than any fanatic idealist spilling blood over the pavement in the name simply of another unnatural mask.

An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock; rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time.

Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people’s religion. And religion may, in a real sense, be understood as a popular misunderstanding of mythology.

The Promised Land is not a place to be conquered by armies and solidified by displacing other people. The Promised Land is a corner in the heart.

It is inevitable that children should be taught in purely concrete terms. But then the child grows up and realizes who Santa Claus is. He is really Daddy. So, too, we must grow in the same way in learning about God, and the institutional churches must grow in presenting the message of the symbols to adults.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.

Human adulthood is not achieved until the twenties: [George Bernard] Shaw put it in the seventies: not a few look ahead to Purgatory.

Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing.

People feel panicky at the thought that we might all have something in common, that they are giving up some exclusive hold on the truth. It is something like discovering that you are a Frenchman and a human being at the same time. That is exactly the challenge that the great religions face in the Space Age.

There is one phrase in Finnegans Wake that seems to me to epitomize the whole sense of Joyce. He says, “Oh Lord, heap mysteries upon us, but entwine our work with laughter low.” And this is the sense of the Buddhist bodhisattva: joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

In the way of nature one may experience, from time to time, glimpses of the world in this [transcendent] light – after the pelvic bioenergetic commitments have been honored and fulfilled, so that, freed from the dictatorship of the species, one is released to live as an individual (some little time, say, after the age of about thirty-five).

What, we may ask, is an authentic marriage? It is a mystery in which two bodies become one flesh; it is not a negotiation in which two bank accounts merge into one.

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.

The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth–that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the Kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

The folk-tale is the primer of the picture language of the soul.

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 resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

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 you ought to be living is the one you are living … I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

What myth does for you is to point beyond the phenomenal field toward the transcendent. A mythic figure is like the compass that you used to draw circles and arcs in school, with one leg in the field of time and the other in the eternal. The image of a god may look like a human or animal form, but its reference is transcendent of that.

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.

Your sacred space
is where you can find yourself
again and again.

A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning in existence, which, my dear friend, has no meaning––it simply is. But the mind goes asking for meanings; it can’t play unless it knows (or makes up) the rules.

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 evoke in the individual a sense of grateful affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such that will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one’s heirs one’s own paranoia.

Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are cought in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it, also, inward. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer hold our loves at home and project our aggressions elsewhere; for on this spaceship Earth there is no “elsewhere” anymore. And no mythology that continues to speak or to teach of “elsewhere” and “outsiders” meets the requirement of this hour

The privilege of a lifetime
is being who you are.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

The Kingdom of God is within us. Easter and Passover remind us that we have to let go in order to enter it.

Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon, but to our ignorance and complacency coming to an end.

The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and whos 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.

You follow your bliss, you’ll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don’t even have that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way.

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The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.

But there’s also the possibility of bliss.

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?

For it is the artist who brings the images of a mythology to manifestation, and without images (whether mental or visual) there is no mythology.

[Quoting Jean Erdman Campbell:] “The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft.”

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.

For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are the spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

And so, to return to our opening question: What is –– or what is to be –– the new mythology?

It is — and will forever be, as long as our human race exists –– the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples,” but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large –– each in his own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

Mythology is not a lie; mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth –– penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

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.

One must remember the central truth about Easter and Passover. We are called out of the house of bondage, even as the Jews were called out of their bondage in Egypt. We are called out of bondage in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to emerge anew, in the way the life throws off its shadow of death. Easter and Passover have the same roots; we are called out of bondage to our old tradition. Easter is not Easter and Passover is not Passover, unless they release us even from the tradition that gives us these feasts.

The hero’s death and resurrection
is a model for
the casting off of the old life
and moving into the new.

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.

You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else’s path.

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it.

We’re in a freefall into 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. And 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 and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence — for he has the perfected eye to see. There is no separateness.

No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.

For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.

The tribal ceremonies of birth, initiation, marriage, burial, installation, and so forth, serve to translate the individual’s life-crises and life-deeds into classic, impersonal forms. They disclose him to himself, not as this personality or that, but as the warrior, the bride, the widow, the priest, the chieftain; at the same time rehearsing for the rest of the community the old lesson of the archetypal stages.

It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.

The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul.

The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth. You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions, in their own time were scientifically correct. That is to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age.

I will participate in the game. It’s a wonderful, wonderful opera–except that it hurts.

People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world, about how terrible it is?” And I say, “Yes, it’s great the way it is”

I think it’s important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Moyers: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?
Campbell: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that 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. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

We are the sensing organs of the Earth. We are the senses of the universe. We have it all right here within us. And the deities that we once thought were out there, we now know, were projected out of ourselves. They are the products of our human imagination seeking to interpret, one way or another, the mysteries of the universe….

We must not understand apocalypse literally, not as some physical destruction and judgment of the world, or as something that is going to occur in the future. The kingdom is here; it does not come through expectation. One looks at the world and sees the radiance. The Easter revelation is right there.

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 of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.

Participate joyfully
in the sorrows of the world.

We cannot cure the world of sorrows,
but we can choose to live in joy.

The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man.

Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn’t matter what his name is.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it’s true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

You know, the virtue manager is the real curse of the modern world, I think. The one who’s got righteousness on his side and knows that everyone else is to be corrected.

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’

What is the cause… of the growth of an acorn? The oak that is to come! What is to happen in the future is then the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. In addition, a great number of things round about, on every side, are causing what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.

Life as an art and art as a game––as action for its own sake, without thought of gain or of loss, praise or blame––is the key, then, to the turning of living itself into a yoga, and art into the means to such a life.

Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one’s own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims and values by which one’s life is subliminally ordered.

The absolute hangs like the moon above the water, and the water is my very own soul. Winds of desire stir my soul and my vision of the absolute. My reflection of the moon, my notion of eternity is in splinters, but I desire only to see the truth, to reflect the moon, and the winds die slowly …

‘All life,’ said the Buddha, ‘is sorrowful’; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. ‘The world,’ said the Buddha, ‘is an ever-burning fire.’ And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding.

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.

All mythologies, finally, are works of art . . .

On John Lennon: “He definitely was a hero. In the mythological sense, he was an innovator. The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music . . . We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started.”

In Japan all things are Buddha things. All things are themselves the real. The fluid aspect of impermanence is itself the absolute state.

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.”

Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities … Money experienced as life energy is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the life of others.

The sun is our second symbol of rebirth … 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; that is the insight rendered in term of the solar mystery, the solar light.

We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth––the Virgin Birth––in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave. Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing. There’s a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there’s no such thing as work, and there’s no such thing as getting tired. That’s been my own experience …

If you follow your bliss,
you will always have your bliss,
money or not.

If you follow money,
you may lose it,
and you will have nothing.

You are in the field of time when you are man. And one of the problems of life is to live in the realization of both terms. That is to say, I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal apparitions.

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.

You begin by breath control, by breathing to certain paces, and the breath is very curious ; The notion is that emotion and feeling and state of mind are related to breath. When you are at rest, the breathing is in a nice, even order. When you are stirred with shock, the breathing changes. With passion the breathing changes. Change the breathing, and you change the state.

The right word, le mot juste, Tonio Kröger had recognized, can wound; can even kill. Yet the duty of the writer must be to observe and to name exactly: wounding, even possibly killing. For what the writer must name in describing are inevitable imperfections

Have we heard? Have we understood? ”All life is sorrowful!” The important word here is “all,” which cannot be translated to mean “modern” life, or (as I have recently heard) “life under capitalism,” so that if the social order were altered, people then might become happy. Revolution is not what the Buddha taught. His First Noble Truth was that life – all life – ”is sorrowful. And his cure, therefore, would have to be able to produce relief, no matter what the social, economic, or geographical circumstances of the invalid.

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call “following your bliss.”

As you proceed through life,

following your own path,

birds will shit on you.

Don’t bother to brush it off.

Getting a comedic view

of your situation

gives you spiritual distance.

Having a sense of humor saves you.

If you follow someone else’s way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.
The goal of the hero trip
down to the jewel point
is to find those levels in the psyche
that open, open, open,
and finally open to the mystery
of your Self being
Buddha consciousness
or the Christ.

That’s the journey.

In choosing your god, you choose
your way of looking at the universe.
There are plenty of Gods.
Choose yours.

The god you worship
is the god you deserve.

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 recognized that killing is the precondition of all living whatsoever: life lives on life, eats life, and would otherwise not exist.

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 opened to an experience of rediscovered identity in a larger, more abiding format.

Is the conscientious teacher––concerned for the moral character as well as for the book-learning of his students––to be loyal first to the supporting myths of our civilization or to the “factualized” truths of his science? Are the two, on level, at odds? Or is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again?

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 swimming in it, he is drowning.

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 “twice-born” ego, no longer bound in by its daylight-world horizon.

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 comparative religions today, have recognized and hold that the forms of myth and the figures of myth are of the nature essentially of dream.

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 would
serve not only to open to students a view of the whole range of possibilities before them, when they enter as wide-eyed youngsters the enchanted wood
of the world’s learning, but also to lead them along, through paths of their own choosing, to explorations of its deep groves.

“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 — is then the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at Large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well.

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 really cutting off the energy and source of our own living.

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 of your own consciousness.

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 comes a new amplification of life and consciousness.

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 affair isn’t that. That is a relationship of pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it’s off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you are not married.

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 ears, its eyes, its thinking, and its speech – or, in theological terms, God’s ears, God’s eyes, God’s thinking, and God’s Word; and, by the same token, participants here and now in an act of creation that is continuous in the whole infinitude of that space of our mind through which the planets fly, and our fellows of earth now among them.

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 love if he is to be purged of the contagion of sin and death.

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 dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as Shakti, and the Christians as the power of God.

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 as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.

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 life in time and space––economics, politics, and even morality––will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life.

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 it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god.

‘The fool says in his heart there is no God’ (Psalms 14:1). There is, however, another type of fool, more dangerous and sure of himself, who says in his heart and proclaims to all the world, ‘There is no God but mine.’

When real trouble comes, your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

When you see the Earth from the Moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. This is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.

When life produces what the intellect names evil, we may enter into righteous battle, contending from “loyalty of heart”: however, if the principle of love (Christ’s “Love your enemies!”) is lost, our humanity too will be lost. “Man,” in the words of the American novelist Hawthorne, “must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.”

Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average age for that to happen – but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are.

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at 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.”

If ever there was an art in which the whole community of man has worked – seasoned with the philosophy of the codger on the wharf and singing with the music of the spheres – it is this of the ageless tale.

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 today.There’s no real conflict between science & religion … What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC … and the science of the 20th century AD.

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 is, and these are the foregrounds, the shallows of that depth.

Successful marriage

is leading innovative lives together,

being open, non-programmed.

It’s a free fall: how you handle

each new thing as it comes along.

I personally don’t even think that unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it. In fact, I have a list. If anybody has a working guillotine, I’d be glad to give them my list.

Survival is the second law of life.

The first is that we are all one.

The myths are clues to unite the forces within us.

Myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the mystery of the universe. It gives us a map or picture of the universe and allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. It supports and validates a certain social and moral order. The Ten Commandments being given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example of this. Lastly, it helps us pass through and deal with the various stages of life from birth to death.

“What will they think of me?”

must be put aside for bliss.

My experience is that I can feel that I’m in the Grail Castle when I’m living with people I love, doing what I love. I get that sense of being fulfilled. But, by god, it doesn’t take much to make me feel I’ve lost the Castle, it’s gone. One way to lose the Grail is to go to a cocktail party. That’s my idea of not being there at all.

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…. 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 must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

I work out on a veranda––they call it a “lanai” out there––with my back to the ocean and to what’s going on. What’s going on is usually a startling bikini walking past. I couldn’t write about anything but the Goddess if I were looking in the other direction. So mine is a nice sort of forest to retire to.

If the body is a light bulb, and it burns out,

does that mean there’s no more electricity?

The source of energy remains.

We can discard the body and go on.

We are the source.

Eternity is not a continuation of time. Eternity is a dimension of here and now.

To see life as a poem and yourself participating in that poem is what the myth does for you.

I think the idea of life after death is a bad idea. It distracts you from appreciating the uniqueness of the here and now, the moment you are living for.

Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy.

Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world.

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.

The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent in its meanings. It’s your dream, the manifestation of your will, and yet you are surprised by it … Write down your dreams. They are your myths.

The priest presents for consideration a compound of inherited forms with the expectation (or at times, even the requirement) that one should interpret and experience them in a certain authorized way, whereas the artist first has an experience of his own, which he then seeks to interpret and communicate through effective forms. Not the forms first and then the experience, but the experience first and then the forms.

No experience can be taught; all that can be taught is the way to an experience. Hence Buddhism is something that is implicit in ourselves and is to be achieved through experience but cannot be delivered to us like a package. No sooner did [the Buddha] have this illumination than the deities themselves came down and they said, “Teach.” So he said, “For the good of man and the gods I will teach.” But what he teaches is not Buddhism; what he teaches is the way to Buddhism; and this is called the Middle Way

When one looks at the glorious panorama of Indian art one sees a repetition of themes; beautiful themes, dependable themes, motifs that recur time and time again. And if you compare that galaxy of forms with their counterparts in post-Renaissance Europe, you’ll be struck by the absence of individual inflection in any of these works.

I had my first rock and roll experience at a performance of the Grateful Dead. Rock music had always seemed a bore to me, but I can tell you, at that concert, I found eight thousand people standing in mild rapture for five hours. The place was just a mansion of dance. And I thought, “Holy God! Everyone has just lost themselves in everybody else here!”

Let me now remark, as a comparative mythologist whose professional career has been spent comparing the mythological traditions of mankind, that I find it extremely useful to let the mind range over the whole field, observing that what is said one way in one tradition is said another way in another. They are all mutually illuminating.

Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.

Our first tangible evidences of mythological thinking are from the period of Neanderthal Man, which endured from ca. 250,000 to ca. 50,000 B.C.; and these comprise, first, burials with food supplies, grave gear, tools, sacrificed animals, and the like; and second, a number of chapels in high-mountain caves, where cave-bear skulls, ceremonially disposed in symbolic settings, have been preserved.

Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.

In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.”

Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.

Myths, according to Freud’s view, are of the psychological order of dream. Myths, so to say, are public dreams; dreams are private myths.

In the Buddhist view, that is to say, what is keeping us out of the garden is not the jealousy or wrath of any god, but our own instinctive attachment to what we take to be our lives.

When we consider, however, instead of the physical, the psychological character of our species, the most evident distinguishing sign is man’s organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws.

Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch.

And one can readily understand, even share in some measure, their anxiety, since lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few.

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.

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.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.

Every commitment is a narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold to it.

Marriage is not a love affair,

it’s an ordeal.

It is a religious exercise, a sacrament,

the grace of participating in another life.

(The Greeks) did not personify that mystery in a being before whom the human spirit should abdicate but, on the contrary, recognized that the supreme manifestation on earth of that same mystery and wonder is the human mind itself, well housed in the beautiful human body.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say “yea” to it all.

In my writing and my thinking and my work I’ve thought of myself as addressing artists and poets and writers. The rest of the world can take it or leave it as far as I’m concerned.

One is your judgment in the field of time, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer. You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents, that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent, that’s saying no to that situation.

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 simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

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.

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

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 writing in your mind now.

I don’t have to have faith. I have experience

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments to your destiny.

And when you think of this! The number of men who are in fact responsible for the condition of the world right now could all be contained in this room, and they are acting as though there were no way of common understanding. The world is in chaos simply as a function of their inability to assume the middle position in a conversation.

Now the energies of nature are present in the outer world, but also inside ourselves, because we are particles of nature. So when you are meditating on a deity, you are meditating on power of your own spirit and psyche, and on powers that are also out there.

.

All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future––it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it.

It is one of the glories … of the Celtic tradition that in its handling even of religious themes it retranslates them from the languages of imagined fact into a mythological idiom, so that they may be experienced not as time-conditioned but as timeless, telling not of miracles long past but of miracles potential within ourselves, here, now, and forever.

Nobility of spirit is the grace—or ability—to play, whether in heaven or on earth.

For although life, as Nietzsche declares, “wants to be deceived and lives on deception,” there is need also, at certain times, for a moment of truth.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

Since the power of nature in this dreamer, in that dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only differently inflected, the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world. All the gods are within: within you––within the world.

In the older mother myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness––to which, also, a negative moral judgment was now added.

So I came back to New York in 1929 and Booommm! . . . I wanted to write, I wanted to be an anthropologist – I didn’t know what! A new world was around. So I said, “To hell with it, Columbia!” I’m writing short stories. I discover American literature, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, the whole bunch. Hemingway just knocks me over, those early things of his – In Our Time, Men Without Women, The Sun Also Rises. Like every callow young author, I wanted to write like him; meanwhile Joyce was interesting. Five years, no job! . . . Writing stories nobody would buy.

The spirit is really the bouquet of life. It is not something breathed into life, it comes out of life. This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something ruling over and above a fallen nature….

When  writing, don’t criticize the words coming out. Just let them come. Let go the critical factor: Will I make money? Am I wasting my time?

We are, in fact, productions of this earth. We are, as it were, its organs. Our eyes are the eyes of the earth; our knowledge is the earth’s knowledge.

As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the Earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic dependencies that now enfolds the planet is of one life. All that is required is a general change of vision to accord with these contemporary facts. And that this will occur is certain. It is, in fact, already occurring. Moreover, the vision required is nothing new, nor unnatural. What are unnatural, artificial, and contrived, are the separations.

“One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight’s dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart.”

The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in a realization of transcendence, infinity, and abundance.

Indeed, the first and most essential service of a mythology is this one, of opening the mind and heart to the utter wonder of all being. And the second service, then is cosmological: of representing the universe and the whole spectacle of nature, both as known to the mind and as beheld by the eye, as an epiphany of such kind that when lightning flashes, or a setting sun ignites the sky, or a deer is seen standing alerted, the exclamation ‘Ah!’ may be uttered as a recognition of divinity.

Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die, there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.

But there’s also the possibility of bliss.

Amor is neither of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and community of man), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes, and their message to the heart.

Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love––and I mean love, not lust––is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real human peeks through, say, “This is a challenge to my compassion.” Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.

A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving, you’re not giving to the other person: you’re giving to the relationship. And if you realize you are in the relationship just as the other person is, then it becomes life building, a life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you’re giving to somebody else … This is the challenge of a marriage.

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. 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, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

This is what Joyce called the monomyth: an archetypal story that springs from the collective unconscious. Its motifs can appear not only in myth and literature, but, if you are sensitive to it, in the working out of the plot of your own life. The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, “Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.” And so it starts.

The heroine will, of course, encounter difficulties and advantages which are not those that the male meets, but whether one is male or female, the stages of the inner journey, the visionary quest, are the same, even though the imagery is going to be a little different.

The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

Underneath the verbal ambiguities and philological traps of the Wake, deep speaks to deep about such everyday matters as marital discord, sibling strife, military slaughter, racial violence, theological differences, and financial thimblerigging — fascinating material that academicians (at their peril) fail to discuss or continue to ignore.

What the mythic image shows is the way in which the cosmic energy manifests itself in time, and as the times change, the modes of manifestation change.

If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that relationship and emphasize instead the calamity of the event. . . . But crucifixion is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through Christ’s crucifixion we were unshelled, which enabled us to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. So, we must take a fresh look at this event if its symbolism is to be sensed.

The hero’s death and resurrection is a model for the casting off of the old life and moving into the new.

The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are a wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance

My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero’s journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations.

When you just now rang my doorbell, I was right in the middle of a sentence about an American Indian initiation: an initiation myth having to do with two boys––twin heroes––born of a virgin. Their father is the Sun. Monsters are troubling the land, and the boys––one a warrior and the other a medicine man––journey to their father the Sun to get weapons. The father puts them through a series of four terrible tests, and when they survive these tests, he initiates them, tells them what their true names are. That’s it––the awakening to the inward self, to the knowledge of who you truly are.

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at 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.”

It is important to know how old you are in spiritual development, where you are on this path. The function of initiations is to commit one’s whole psychological pitch to the requirements of a particular stage in life. The big initiation is when one has to leave the psychology of childhood behind: the death of the infantile ego, which is dependant and obedient, and the birth of the self-reliant adult participating in the society.

My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it.

If you go into marriage with a program, you will find that it won’t work. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, 
being open, non-programmed.
 It’s a free fall: how you handle
 each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.

The rules of love, they really are severe. If you’re giving up everything for something, then give up everything for something and stay with it with your mind on where you’re going.

Through your own integrity, you evoke your destiny, which is a destiny that never existed before.

Marriage took place in the psyche first, and the physical realization of their love [Parzival and Condwiramurs] was the fulfillment of a spiritual marriage; it did not work the there way around. No priest confirmed the marriage. It was confirmed in love and was itself the sacrament of love. And neither lust nor fear, but courage and compassion, were its motivations…

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.

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. When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.

“A bit of advice
given to a young Native American
at 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.”

I have a firm belief in this now, not only in terms of my own experience, but in knowing the experiences of other people. When you follow your bliss, and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it, and doing what the push is out of your own existence—it may not be fun, but it’s your bliss and there’s bliss behind pain too.

I think the best thing I can say is to follow your bliss. If your bliss is just your fun and your excitement, you’re on the wrong track. I mean, you need instruction. Know where your bliss is. And that involves coming down to a deep place in yourself

You have to learn to recognize your own depths

Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them, but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals.

For me, myth is primarily visual, not linguistic. It comes from visions and cuts across linguistic provinces. Language is secondary. It has to do with the communication of myth.

There’s 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, and become a realization of your own personal myth

I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

Blunders are not the merest chance. They are the results of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep—as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny.

What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that’s a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.

Work begins when you don’t like what you’re doing. And if your life isn’t play, or if you are engaged in play and having no fun, well, quit! The spirit of the sacred space is Śiva dancing. All responsibilities are cast off. There are various ways of doing this casting off. and it doesn’t matter how it happens. The rest is play.

How does the ordinary person come to an experience of 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. There are many ways, however, of coming to the transcendent experience.

What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans.’

“All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there weren’t temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it

Life is joyful just as it is. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ And the way to wake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.

The Waste Land, let us say then, is any world in which (to state the problem pedagogically) force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experience, prevail in the ordering of lives, and where the myths and rites enforced and received are consequently unrelated to the actual inward realizations, needs, and potentialities of those upon whom they are impressed.

For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone—the creator and the destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods.

The goal of all meditation and mystery journeys is to go between the pair of opposites

You become mature when you become the authority for your own life

For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splittings and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbit of the stars.

That font of life is the core of the individual, and within himself he will find it—if he can tear the coverings away

The aim of all religious exercises is a psychological transformation. You can make up your own meditations and rites based on knowing, loving, and serving the deity in caring for your children, doctoring drunks, or writing books. Any work whatsoever can be a meditation if you have the sense that everything is “brahman”: the process, the doing, the thing that is being looked at, the one that is looking—everything.

The goddess is red with the fire of life; the earth, the solar system, the galaxies of far-extending space all swell within her womb. For she is the world creatrix, ever mother, ever virgin. She encompasses the encompassing, nourishes the nourishing, and is the life of everything that lives.

She is also the death of everything that dies. The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the “good” and the “bad,” exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity.

Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. 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 with that god up there.

I have read somewhere of an old Chinese curse: “May you be born in an interesting time!” This is a VERY interesting time: there are no models for ANYTHING that is going on. It is a period of free fall into the future, and each has to make his or her own way. The old models are not working; the new have not yet appeared. In fact, it is we who are even now shaping the new in the shaping of our interesting lives. And that is the whole sense (in mythological terms) of the present challenge: we are the ‘ancestors’ of an age to come, the unwitting generators of its supporting myths,the mythic models that will inspire its lives.”

Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now

What the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to each other might be, in technical terms, is not half as important as you, the celebrant, feeling the virgin birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life.”

All we really want to do is dance.

I regard The Odyssey as a book of initiations, and the first initiation is that of Odysseus himself into a proper relationship to the female power, which was put down at the time the Judgment of Paris when the male principle was dominant in an excessive way. Now the female power must be recognized to make possible a proper relationship—what I call an androgynous relationship—in which the male and female meet as co-equals. They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.

I don’t see any conflict between religion and science. Religion has to accept the science of the day and penetrate it to the mystery. The conflict is between the science of 2000 B.C. and 2000 A.D.

And this then is one of the problems with our tradition, where our inherited mythology, let’s say the Judeo-Christian tradition, relates to the first millennium B.C., and has nothing to do with life here. Everything has to be ‘explained’––and a mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

People ask, “Did Jesus go to India?” He didn’t have to—India had already come to the Near East. One wonders how this idea of the inward Christ came to this young Jewish prophet, because it’s not in the Jewish tradition at all. This I think is what knocked St. Paul off his horse—when he realized that the actuality of Christ’s death and alleged resurrection was an actual historical enactment of the sense of the mystery religions.

I think that the movie is the perfect medium for mythological messages. The medium is so plastic and pliable and magic things can happen. And then the combination, you know, of fantastic landscape and possible modes of action and voyaging that we can hardly conceive of in good solid terms … That’s a mythological realm, and movies could handle this kind of thing.

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.

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.

The adventure of the Grail––the quest within for those creative values by which the Waste Land is redeemed––has become today for each the unavoidable task; for, as there is no more any fixed horizon, there is no more any fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicholas Cusanus: whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line.

If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we lose the symbol’s immediate reference to ourselves. Jesus left his mortal body on the cross, the sign of earth, to go to the Father, with whom he was one. We, similarly, are to identify with the eternal life within us. The symbol also tells us of God’s willing acceptance of the cross, that is to say, of his participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in the world, so that he is here within us, not by way of a fall or mistake, but with rapture and joy. Thus the cross has dual sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the coming of the divine to us. It is a true crossing

One characteristic of Buddhism, in contrast to Christianity, is that Buddhism does not eliminate deities. Rather, they are seen as manifestations of Buddha-consciousness in the mode of a given culture and are kept.

When the MacArthur people took a census of religious beliefs in Japan, they found that there were more religious believers than there were people, because everyone was both a Shinto and a Buddhist.

The ego is the center of your consciousness. The energies that are the source of your life, the inward light you speak of, is below the level of your mental consciousness. For example, we will soon eat lunch, and then we will be digesting the lunch; but I don’t think there is anyone here who knows consciously just HOW to digest a lunch, although we are all going to do it. There’s more to you than your mental consciousness knows about. The vocabulary that relates and links our mental consciousness to the energies that inform our body and move our lives and give us our sentiments of love and hate and despair is the vocabulary of myth.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.

The “monstrous, irrational, and unnatural” motifs in folklore and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and profounded by poets, prophets, and visionaries, they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm. They are thus phrases from an image-language, expressive of a metaphysical, psychological, and sociological truth.

I didn’t write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them––well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That’s the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what’s outside

Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether. 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 yourself; or at least, so you do when you are up to snuff.

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 yourself.

But to enjoy the world requires something more than mere good health and good spirits; for this world, as we all now surely know, is horrendous. “All life,” said the Buddha, “is sorrowful”; and so, indeed, it is. Life consuming life: that is the essence of its being, which is forever a becoming. “The world,” said the Buddha, “is an ever-burning fire.” And so it is. And that is what one has to affirm, with a yea! a dance! a knowing, solemn, stately dance of the mystic bliss beyond pain that is at the heart of every mythic rite.

Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster-hero of some kind. … And there’s a very special property in the trickster: he always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation. He’s both a fool and someone who’s beyond the system. And the trickster represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn’t decided it wants to deal with. The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities. He doesn’t respect the values that you’ve set up for yourself, and smashes them.

The fool is the breakthrough of the absolute into the field of controlled social orders.

God and Buddhas in the Orient are not final terms like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in experience (not simply as an act of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows

There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism––the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity––are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center for himself. in Cusanus’ circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze.

Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

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 individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unresolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life

There is a definition of God which has been repeated by many philosophers. God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to the mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And the center . . . is right where you’re sitting. And the other one is right where I’m sitting. And each of us is a manifestation of that mystery. That’s a nice mythological realization that sort of gives you a sense of who and what you are.

Going back at least nine thousand years to the early agriculture of the Near East and Old Europe, we have a tradition of the power of the Goddess and of her child who dies and is resurrected—namely, it is we who come from her, go back to her, and rest well in her. This tradition was carried through the cults of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and down into the Classical world, before finally delivering the message into Christian teaching

Life throws up around us these temptations, these distractions, and the problem is to find the immovable center within. Then you can survive anything. Myth will help you do that. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go out on picket lines about atomic research. Go ahead, but do it playfully. The universe is God’s play.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I’ve heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I’m writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can’t write unless that happens … I don’t write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

When I wrote about the Call forty years ago, I was writing out of what I had read. Now that I’ve lived it, I know it’s correct. And that’s how it turned out. I mean, it’s valid. These mythic clues work.

In what we think we know of the interior of the atom, as well as of the exploding stars in millions of spinning galaxies throughout an expanding space that is no longer, as in Newton’s view, ‘always similar and immovable,’ the old notion of a once-upon-a-time First Cause has given way to something more like an immanent ground of being, transcendent of conceptualization, which is in a continuous act of creation now.

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religion, philosphies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth

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.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure. The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life.

Deities have to become, as one great German scholar said, “transparent to the transcendent.” The transcendent must show and shine through those deities. But it must shine through us, too, and through the spiritual things we are talking about.

Of what profit to the young man going off to war to have chanted over him, five long days and nights, the hymns and prayers of such a rite? What can be the meaning of this solemn sitting or standing or walking on a picture, this wearing of feathers and string? To anyone familiar with the pictorial language of myth and cult the answer is clear and simple: the one sung over becomes identified, inwardly and outwardly, with the divine hero, and thus imbibes his power and the harmony of his perfection.

The beauty of the rite … is the beauty of one’s essential nature. By participation in the rite, by uniting the mind with that beauty, by walking the way of the god, one becomes profoundly composed. The landscape of the myth is the landscape of the human spirit.

The landscape of the myth is the landscape of the human spirit.

If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.

The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest.

Now, all these myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there – how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years ago, but how they are relevant now – unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life

The spirit is the bouquet of nature.

Once you understand symbolic things, you, too, will see symbols everywhere.

In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your ‘play’ in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come

To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure, really. One of the problems today is that with the enormous transformations in the forms of our lives, the models for life don’t exist for us. In a traditional society––the agriculturally based city––there were relatively few life roles, and the models were there; there was a hero for each life role. But look at the past twenty years and what has come along in the way of new life possibilities and requirements. The hero-as-model is one thing we lack, so each one has to be his own hero and follow the path that’s no-path.

Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.

My definition of a devil is a god who has not been recognized. That is to say, it is a power in you to which you have not given expression, and you push it back. And then, like all repressed energy, it builds up and becomes completely dangerous to the position you’re trying to hold.

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.

My general formula for my students is “Follow your bliss.” Find where it is, and don’t be afraid to follow it. . . . If the work you are doing is the work that you chose to do because you are enjoying it, that’s it. But if you think, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that!” that’s the dragon locking you in. “No, no, I couldn’t be a writer,” or “No, no, I couldn’t possibly be doing what So-and-so is doing.”

A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

The mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those “out there.” But to this end communicative signs must be employed: words, images, motions, colors, and perfumes, sensations of all kinds, which, however, come to the creative artist from without and inevitably bear associations not only colored by the past but also relevant to the commerce of the day.

The mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those “out there.”

As a drop of oil on the sea,

you must float,

using intellect and compassion

to ride the waves.

You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dream come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that’s going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it.

Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. . . . the pain of being truly alive.

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Awe is what moves us forward.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

One part of the hero’s journey is acquiescence. For instance, I am moving toward death, as we all are. That’s also yielding. And the hero is the one who knows when to surrender and what to surrender to. The main theme is to yield your position to the dynamic. And the dynamic of life is now this form eats that form. Yield.

The Grail becomes that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.

The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale—as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea.

The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale—as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source

We are now observing throughout our cultural world a resurgence of the cult of the immanence of the occult, within ourselves and within nature. The old Bronze Age realization of a micro-macrocosmic unity is returning, and everywhere all the old arts that were banished are coming back.

I myself have been traveling around quite a bit, these years, from one college campus to another, and everywhere the first question asked me is, “Under what sign were you born?” The mysteries of the Tarot pack, the I Ching, and Transcendental Meditation . . . Well, all this is just the beginning, the first signaling of a dawning realization of the immanence of the occult, and of this as something important for our living.

First among the features of the great [paleolithic] caves that are of paramount importance to our study is the fact that these deep, labyrinthine grottos were not dwellings but sanctuaries . . . The enigmatic figures painted into the crypts and deepest recesses of the caves almost certainly hold in their silence the myths of the ultimate source of the magical efficacy of these magnificent shrines.

Life is joyful just as it is. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ And the way to wake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all … I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

The stress on the sexual character of the deity—whether male or female— is secondary and, in certain contexts, baffling. It was originally oriented toward the masculine to establish the superiority of the patriarchal societies over the matriarchal.

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world––where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again––each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, ‘Know thyself,’ is the motto.

The key to the Grail is compassion,
suffering with, feeling another’s
sorrow
as if it were your own.

The one who finds
the dynamo of compassion
is the one who’s found the Grail.

Whenever a knight of the Grail tried to follow a path made by someone else, he went altogether astray. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s footsteps. Each of us has to find his own way, and this is what gives our Occidental world its initiative and creative quality. 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.

Survival is the second law of life.
The first is that we are all one.

The great German philosopher Schopenhauer, in a magnificent essay on ‘The Foundation of Morality,’ treats of this transcendental spiritual experience. How is it, he asks, that an individual can so forget himself and his own safety that he will put himself and his life in jeopardy to save another from death or pain—as though that other’s life were his own, that other’s danger his own? Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being. Schopenhauer’s name for this motivation is ‘compassion,’ Mitleid, and he identifies it as the one and only inspiration of inherently moral action. It is founded, in his view, in a metaphysically valid insight. For a moment one is selfless, boundless, without ego.

For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.

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 evoke in the individual a sense of grateful affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

The fundamental thought in the Oriental philosophical world is that the mysterious, ultimate truth, that which you seek to know, is absolutely beyond all definition. All categories of thought, all modes of imaging fall short of it. When we ask, “Is God merciful, just, loving? Does he love me, does he love my people more than those? Are these not chosen, are those not rejected?”––this from the Oriental standpoint is sheer kindergarten stuff.

Myths – that is to say, religious recitations – [are] conceived as symbolic of the play of eternity in time.  These are rehearsed not for diversion, but for the spiritual welfare of the individual or community.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.

“There’s a word being used here this evening that I don’t understand.”

He said, “What’s the word?”

I said, “God.”

“You don’t understand what God means?” he replied.

I said, “I don’t know what you mean by God. You’ve told us that God has hidden his face, that we are in exile. I’ve just come from India, where people are experiencing God all the time.”

And do you know what (Martin) Buber said? “Do you mean to compare?”

There you have revealed two sides of looking at the idea of God.

My magnificent master and great friend of many years ago, Heinrich Zimmer (1890-1943), had a saying: “The best things can’t be told: the second best are misunderstood.” The second best are misunderstood because, as metaphors poetically of what cannot be told, they are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts.

Now let us ask: What about the symbolism of the Bible? Based on the Old Sumerian  astronomical observations of five to six thousand years ago and an anthropology no longer  credible, it is hardly fit today to turn anybody on. In fact, the famous conflict of science and  religion has actually nothing to do with religion, but is simply of two sciences: that of  4000 B.C. and that of A.D. 2000.

The modern Western concept of a legal code  is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of  statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and  therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know — whether we dare to say so or not — that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science.

In the West, you have the liberty and the obligation of finding out what your destiny is. You can discover it for yourself. But do you?

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be blessed with the accident of money, and a certain amount of support, and a margin of free time. But let me say this: people without money very often have the courage to risk a life of their own, and they can do it. Money doesn’t count, it’s not that important in our culture; it really isn’t.

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.

Furthermore, the old in many societies spend a considerable part of their time playing with and taking care of the youngsters, while the parents delve and spin: so that the old are returned to the sphere of eternal things not only within but without. And we may take it also, I should think, that the considerable mutual attraction of the very young and the very old may derive something from their common, secret knowledge that it is they, and not the busy generation between, who are concerned with a poetic play that is eternal and truly wise.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group (tribe, church, nation, class, or what not) while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, “native,” or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor.

The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands: totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations— which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer—are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord…

What the virgin birth represents is the birth of the spiritual life in the human animal. It has nothing to do mythologically with a biological anomaly. In the Indian kuṇḍalinī system the first three cakras are our animal zeal to life, animal erotics, and animal aggression. Then at the level of the heart there is the birth of a purely human intention, a purely human realization of a possible spiritual life which then puts the others in secondary place. The symbol in the kuṇḍalinī system for this cakra is a male and female organ in conjunction—an upward facing and a downward-facing triangle. At this level the spiritual life is generated, and that is the meaning of the virgin birth.

The hero-deed is a continuous shattering of the crystallization of the moment. The cycle rolls: mythology focuses on the growing-point.

What is the “meaning” of a tree? of a butterfly? of the birth of a child? or of the universe? What is the “meaning” of the song of a rushing stream? Such wonders simply are. They are antecedent to meaning, though “meaning” may be read into them.

Living myths are not mistaken notions, and they do not spring from books. They are not to be judged as true or false but as effective or ineffective, maturative or pathogenic.

The Loathly Damsel or Ugly Bride is a well-known figure, moreover, in Celtic fairytale and legend. . . The transformation of the fairy bride and the sovereignty she bestows are, finally, of one’s own heart in fulfillment.

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and power to serve others.

The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same… The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every  hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment,  which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable  impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence  is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his  mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then—more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.

It once was possible for the ancients to say, ‘We are the chosen of God!’ and to save all love and respect for themselves, projecting their malice ‘out there.’ We have now to learn somehow to quench our hate and disdain through the operation of an actual love . . . and with that fructify, simultaneously, both our neighbor’s life and our own.

On the simplest level, then, the Goddess is the Earth. On the next, archaic level, She is the surrounding sky. On the philosophic level, She is Maya, the forms of sensibility, the limitations of the senses that enclose us so that all of our thinking takes place within her bounds—She is IT. The Goddess is the ultimate boundary of consciousness in the world of time and space.

One of the biggest problems in mythology is this one of putting the individual in accord with nature. The world in which the primitive people are living becomes mythologized. One of the problems in our tradition is that the land –- the Holy Land — is somewhere else. So we’ve lost the whole sense of accord with nature. And if it’s not here, it’s nowhere.

In Martin Buber’s book I and Thou, he says, “The I that is related to thou is different from the I that is related to an it.” Think about it. Think of yourself: do you have a thou relationship to an animal or an it relationship? There is a real difference.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn’t continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

The divine lives within you.

Affirmation is difficult. We always affirm with conditions. I affirm the world on condition that it gets to be the way Santa Claus told me it ought to be. But affirming it the way it is — that’s the hard thing, and that is what rituals are about.

There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your guidance and instruction from others, but you must find your own path.

So there is no rule. An individual has to find what electrifies and enlivens his own heart, and wakes him.

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.

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.

For although, as Schopenhauer maintains, this impulse of compassion is the basis of all morality, it is equally a basis of what must appear to the world to be immorality, since, like God, it makes no distinction between good and evil. According to the Gospel: the Father makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, sends rain on the just and on the unjust: judge not that ye may not be judged. Normally we think of ethics as a function of the principle of judgment, supporting right against wrong, good against evil, truth against falsehood, fair against foul, whereas here is a teaching that would know morality rather as a function of the principle of mercy.

The goal of life is rapture. Art is how we experience it.

The world is a match for us. We are a match for the world.

Mythology is poetry.

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.

The Promised Land is a corner in the heart.

Find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

Nothing you can do is more important than being fulfilled.

Participate in the game of Life. It’s a wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

Once you understand symbolic things, you will see symbols everywhere.

All the gods are within you, within the world.

Be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

We can no longer speak of “outsiders.” It was once possible for the ancients to say, ‘We are the chosen of God!’ and to save all love and respect for themselves, projecting their malice ‘out there.’ We have now to learn somehow to quench our hate and disdain through the operation of an actual love… and with that fructify, simultaneously, both our neighbor’s life and our own.

Two things pull people together: aspiration and terror. These are what glue a society together.

It may well be that a good deal of what has been advertised as representing the will of “Old Man” actually is but the heritage of a lot of old men, and that the main idea has been not so much to honor God as to simplify life by keeping woman in the kitchen.

Mythology — and therefore civilization — is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see in it the local scenery; the deepest, the foreground of the void; and between are all the stages of the Way from the ethnic to the elementary idea, the local to the universal being, which is Everyman, as he both knows and is afraid to know. For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone — the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods.

In every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor––whether particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principal of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today: it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms.

The journey of the hero … I consider the pivotal myth that unites the spiritual adventure of ancient heroes with the modern search for meaning. As always, the hero must venture forth from the world of common-sense consciousness into a realm of supernatural wonder. There he encounters fabulous forces – demons and angels, dragons and helping spirits. After a fierce battle he wins a decisive victory over the powers of darkness. Then he returns from his mysterious adventure with the gift of knowledge or of fire, which he bestows on his fellow man.

Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums.

Just as people influenced you and played an important role in your life, so you are influencing others and playing an important role in their lives. There is a reciprocal influence, a network of interlocked novels. Who wrote all of these? Schopenhauer says, “It’s as though the world were a dream dreamed by a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dreamed you.”

Our eyes are the eyes of the earth. Our knowledge is the earth’s knowledge.

You are a wave on the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone?

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

Art carries us beyond speech to experience.

Enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.

Your life evokes your character. You find out more about yourself as you go on.

Learn to recognize your own depths.

What we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.

Be willing to get rid of the life you’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for you.

The landscape of myth is the human spirit.

To live the heroic life is to live the individual adventure.

Find what electrifies and enlivens your heart.

The job of the artist is to create the new myths.

Take guidance and instruction from others, but find your own path.

You’ve got one life to live. Don’t live it for other people. Pay attention to it.

Experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere.

Living with these things all the time, I can see how there are certain universal patterns for these manifestations. A shaman among the Navajo or in the Congo will be saying things which sound so much like, say, Nicholas Cusanus or Thomas Aquinas, or C. G. Jung, that one just has to realize that these ranges of experiences are common to the human race.

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 as without, and thereby finally at one with itself.

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 as without, and thereby finally at one with itself. Moreover, the sentiments of this nature within are indeed innate: of love, for example, hate, fear, and disdain, wonder, terror, and joy. They are not ‘developed in the individual,’ as the anthropologist states, ‘by the action of society upon him,’ but evoked by these means and directed to social ends. Nature is prime: it is there at birth; Society is next: it is only a shaper of Nature, and a function, moreover, of what it shapes; whereas Nature is deep and, finally, as inscrutable as Being itself.

The priest presents for consideration a compound of inherited forms with the expectation (or, at times, even requirement) that one should interpret and experience them in a certain authorized way, whereas the artist first has an experience of his own, which he then seeks to interpret and communicate through effective forms. Not the forms first and then the experience, but the experience first and then the forms.

Who, however, will be touched by these forms and be moved by them to an experience of his own? By what magic can a personal experience be communicated to another? And who is going to listen?

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 and a new appreciation of the value of being human. Without this, they remain the toys of some political elite enforcing its own will for its own self-satisfaction and profit

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 poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive.

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 of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton’s words: ‘to another point on the circumference’) and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche (‘the center’): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself

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.

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; vagrant desert horde; or militaristic empire), which, in turn, is linked to a landscape.

The common ground, or element, of all mythology is consequently the biology of Homo sapiens sapiens, whereas the differentiating factors are (1) geography and (2) the cultural stage horizon. For it is a fact that every mythological system has taken shape within a given geographical horizon, conditioned not only by the landscape from which its imagery is derived, but also by the limits of the body of information according to which all appearances in that only known world are interpreted.

“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 that place not to be found, perhaps, in any part of the map at all?”

If questions of this kind occur to us and we take them seriously enough to begin to look for answers, the quest may take us not only into every part of the world and century of the past, into oriental temples, painted paleolithic caves, and the deepest jungle sanctuaries, but also, in some way or other, inward, upward, and downward, following shamans on their visionary journeys and witches to their sabbaths.

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 artist goes past that. Strindberg once said, “All politicians are one-eyed cats. Some see with the right eye, some see with the left eye, but the artist sees with two eyes at once.”

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.

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 immense expanse of space is sublime. . . you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.

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.

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.”

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 is in these mythologies a recognition of that kind of universal identity.

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.

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.”

Historical events are given spiritual meaning by being interpreted mythologically.

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 are one with each other.

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

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.^⁠

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 as without, and thereby finally at one with itself.

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 evoke in the individual a sense of grateful affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

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.’

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.

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 with that god up there.

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 level of mythic inspiration. From there I know about three words ahead what I’m going to say. When the writing’s going like that I know I am in the groove … it feels like riding a wonderful wave.

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 have had a plot, as though composed by a novelist. Events that seemed entirely accidental and incidental turn out to have been central to the composition.

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”), which are the years we live in now. He said, ‘As for America, it’s a congeries of dollar trappers, no past, no future.’ When I read that back in the thirties, I took it as an insult. But what is anybody interested in? . . . It’s a terrible lack of anything but economic concerns that we’re facing, and that is old age and death, and that is the end. That’s as I see it. I have nothing but negative judgments in respect to that.

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 there must be a new quest.

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?’ Instead, it keeps growing.

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 is a machine. There is no humanity in the state. What runs the world is economics and politics, and they have nothing to do with the spiritual life.

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 its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, ‘We are the chosen group, and we have God.’

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 individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls.

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 individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.

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

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 gained, for the founding of a city, religion, dynasty, or whatnot; or, on the other hand, his failure and destruction.

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 so linked to the time-space aspect of the experience that you never realize the depth of it. But it’s possible also to experience the depth.

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.

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 must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.”

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 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 must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.

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 his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience.

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

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 pouch and say, “Me, voilà: I’m it.”

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

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 well as demand of –– the world.

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 every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.

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 to the mystery of the total energy of life.

Since divinity is the essence of every being, we must not let our moral judgments obscure from us the fact that God is shining through all things, even those of which we cannot approve

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit –– which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time and throughout the whole length of your days.

A mythologically grounded culture presents you with symbols that immediately evoke your participation; they are all vital, living connections, and so they link you both to the underlying mystery and to the culture itself. Yet when the culture uses symbols that are no longer alive, that are no longer effective, it cuts you off.

Marriage is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. If you think of it as that, you will be able to go through with it. The ordeal consists specifically in sacrificing ego to the relationship.

Myth is dreamlike and, like dream, a spontaneous product of the psyche; like dream, revelatory of the psyche and hence of the whole nature and destiny of man; like dream –– like life –– enigmatic to the uninitiated ego; and, like dream, protective of that ego.

Whenever a knight of the Grail tried to follow a path made by someone else, he went altogether astray. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s footsteps. Each of us has to find his own way

[Paul Gaugin] was a perfectly prosperous businessman with a family and a house; then he became fascinated by what began to open up for him in painting. You start doodling with things like painting and they might doodle you out of your life – that’s what happened to Gaugin.

“The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience.”

A myth has to work the way a picture works: either you say, “Aha!” or somebody has to explain it to you. And if it has to be explained to you, it’s not working.

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.

How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ that’s what it means. So what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. . . .And you know what my answer would be –– where your enthusiasm is. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.

If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Change the story.

To find your own way is to follow your own bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where the real deep bliss is––not the quick little excitement, but the real, deep, life-filling bliss

My word for young people now who ask me is, follow your bliss. It’ll come. Nobody’s ever been on that road before, and so, where you didn’t know there were doors, there are not only doors but palaces

Eternity is not a continuation of time. Eternity is a dimension of here and now. And we have eternal life now. This is what is meant by “The kingdom of the Father is spread over the earth and men do not see it.”

You can’t ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be.

People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life––there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

Throughout the ranges, not only of the early planting cultures, but also of all those high archaic civilizations . . . two complementary themes are outstanding. One is of death as the generator of life; the other, of self-offering as the way to self-validation. In the symbolism of the sacrifice, both are comprehended.

It’s one thing to get the old structure of the hero myth, but now they are pitching it out into the void, into space, where it’s possible to let the imagination go. You’re not bound to historical fact. You get bound to history, and then you lose the spirit. That’s the problem with the Bible; everything gets to be historical instead of spiritually activated.

The dream is a private myth, and the myth is a public dream^⁠.

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 of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.

Mythology, in other words, is not an outmoded quaintness of the past, but a living complex of archetypal, dynamic images, native to, and eloquent of, some constant, fundamental stratum of the human psyche. And that stratum is the source of the vital energies of our being. Out of it proceed all the fate-creating drives and fears of our lives. While our educated, modern waking-consciousness has been going forward on the wheels and wings of progress, this recalcitrant, dream-creating, wish-creating, under-consciousness has been holding to its primeval companions all the time, the demons and the gods.

In the hunting cultures, when a sacrifice is made, it is, as it were, a gift or bribe to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. But when a figure is sacrificed in the planting cultures, the figure itself is the god. The person who dies is buried and becomes the food.

Look up at the lights on the ceiling. Each bulb carries the light. We can think of this totality as many bulbs. On the other hand, we can focus on the one light that emanates from all the bulbs. What are we focusing on, the light or the lights?

My favorite definition of mythology: other people’s religion. My favorite definition of religion: misunderstanding of mythology. The misunderstanding consists in the reading of the spiritual mythological symbols as though they were primarily references to historical events.

Artists . . . provide the contemporary metaphors that allow us to realize the transcendent, infinite, and abundant nature of being as it is.

Mythology is a system of images that endows the mind and the sentiments with a sense of participation in a field of meaning.

The new mythology is already implicit among us as knowledge a priori, native to the mind. Its images will be derived from contemporary life, thought, and experience, anywhere and everywhere, and the moral order to the support of which they are brought shall be of the unifying culture of mankind.

The amazing thing about Indian mythology is that it could absorb the universe we talk about now, with the great cycles of stellar lives, the galaxies beyond galaxies, and the comings and goings of universes. What this does is diminish the force of the present moment.

The energies that move the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies, then, are the source of mythological imagery: in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life.

What is the Siren’s song? It is the song of the mystery of the universe that makes it impossible to go on with mere phenomenal work.

The fairy world is just one small dimension deeper than the visible world; it’s everywhere. The fairies are the inhabiting nature powers, and the reason they are so fascinating and enchanting is that their nature and your unconscious nature, your deep nature, are the same. The fairies are representatives of that permanent energy consciousness that underlies all the phenomenal forms of life. This is Mother Goddess stuff.

When mythology is properly understood, the object that is revered and venerated is not a final term; the object venerated is a personification of an energy that dwells within the individual, and the reference of mythology has two modes—that of consciousness and that of the spiritual potentials within the individual.

Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose

Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things. The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.

Myths do not come from a concept system; they come out of a life system; they come out of a deeper center. We must not confuse mythology with ideology. Myths come from where the heart is, and where the experience is, even as the mind may wonder why people believe these things.

When the world seems to be falling apart, stick to your own trajectory; hang onto your own ideals and find kindred spirits. That’s the rule of life.

When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield up its bounty . . . and every sacred place is the place where eternity shines through time.

The Grail romance is that of the God in your own heart. And the Christ becomes a metaphor. A symbol for that transcendent power which is the support and being of your own life.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times, throughout the millennia of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of “yes” and “no” revelations that shatter into meaninglessness every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void?

The whole idea is that you’ve got to bring out again that which you went to recover, the unrealized, unutilized potential in yourself.

No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular abilities and possibilities. It’s a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done.