In the words of Joseph Campbell:
The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.
You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that's waiting to be yours. Move, move, move.
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.
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 it.
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and door will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.
You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.
Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's. Each of us has to find his own way.
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.
Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out.
When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.
Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.
The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.
The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.
We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.
You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.
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.
Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.
Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.
Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.
If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.
In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.
The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.
How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.
People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.
If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.
God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.
The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
It's only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.
The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.
We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.
When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.
Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.
There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.
I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.
Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.
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