The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity.
The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.
Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. “To hell with it,” he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.
The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.
The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are essentially everywhere the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit.
Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.
So perhaps the hero lurks in each one of us when we don’t know it? CAMPBELL: Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. “Lead us not into temptation.
Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.
The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.
We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being.
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.
You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.
Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.
If a being from another world were to ask you, “How can I learn what it’s like to be human?” a good answer would be, “Study mythology.
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.
The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.
Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.
All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.
It is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue.