Salzburg, Austria - 2007
1. "A myth is as good as a smile."
2. “A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.”
3. “Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here's the place to have the experience.”
4. “Follow your bliss.”
5. “For not all of us are philosophers. Many require an atmosphere of incense, music, vestments and processions, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries, to be carried away beyond themselves.”
6. “For the marvel of the Asian golden age was that everywhere reality, fierce and difficult though it was for all (as the records of history show), was translated, not only in fable but also in belief and experience, into wonder - which, of course, as our own physicists now show, is exactly what reality is. The chief lost art of antiquity might be said, therefore, to have been the art of living in realization of the sheer wonder of the world: passing readily back and forth between the plane of experience of its hard crust and the omnipresent depth of inexhaustible wonder within.”
7. “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. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the 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.”
8. “If you realize what the real problem is - losing yourself - you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.”
9. “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 resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
10. “Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”
11. “I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, (just) for the money - has turned himself into a slave.”
12. “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.”
13. “Myth is the public dream, and dream is the private myth.”
14. “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”
15. “No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first building of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.”
16. “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.”
17. “Our demons are out own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit...each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.”
18. ”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 resonances without own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
19. "Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts - but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. Myth tells you what the experience is."
20. “Thales, we have seen, believed that “water” was the ultimate ground (…) of all perceptible things; Anaximander, the “unlimited”; Anaximenes, “air”; the Pythagoreans, “number”; and we have now entered a world of thought, a century or so later, where love – of and as beauty – has become the (…) prime substance of things.”
21. “The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural interchange.”
22. “The myth is the public domain 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 a long adventure in the dark “forest ahead of you.”
23. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
24. "This first stage of the mythological journey--which we have designated the "call to adventure" --signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown."
25. “The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.”
26. “The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.”
27. “Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.”
28. "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."
29. “We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
30. "What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else."
31. "What did you do as a child
that created timelessness
that made you forget time?
There lies the myth to live by."
32. “What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not made from man's imagination?”
33. "What you have to do, you do with play."
34. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
35. “When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.”
36. “When you see the Earth from space, you don't see any divisions of nation-states there. This may be the symbol of the new mythology to come; this is the country we will celebrate, and these are the people we are one with.”
37. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
38. “… where the old patterns of morality are retained they no longer match the actualities even of the local, let alone the world, scene. 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 fixed horizon, as there is no more fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line.”
39. “Whether small or great, and no matter what the stage or grade of life, the Call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration- a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete,amounts to a dying and a birth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer.”
40. “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... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”
41. “You've got to find the force within you.”
Campbell´s ten steps for reading myths
(from http://freenet.msp.mn.us/org/mythos/mythos.www/TENCOM.HTML):
1. Read myths with the eyes of wonder:
the myths transparent to their universal meaning,
their meaning transparent to its mysterious source.
2. Read myths in the present tense: Eternity is now.
3. Read myths in the first person plural: the Gods and Goddesses
of ancient mythology still live within you.
4. Any myth worth its salt exerts a powerful magnetism. Notice
the images and stories that you are drawn to and repelled by.
Investigate the field of associated images and stories.
5. Look for patterns; don't get lost in the details. What is
needed is not more specialized scholarship, but more
interdisciplinary vision. Make connections; break old patterns of parochial thought.
6. Resacralize the secular: even a dollar bill reveals the imprint of Eternity.
7. If God is everywhere, then myths can be generated anywhere,
anytime, by anything. Don't let your Romantic aversion to
science blind you to the Buddha in the computer chip.
8. Know your tribe! Myths never arise in a vacuum; they are the
connective tissue of the social body which enjoys synergistic
relations with dreams (private myths) and rituals (the enactment of myth).
9. Expand your horizons! Any mythology worth remembering
will be global in scope. The earth is our home
and humankind is our family.
10. Read between the lines! Literalism kills;
Imagination quickens.
