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.
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.
There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.
But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.
One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.
For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.
The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.
If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living.
The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.
You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.
The function of artists is “the mythologization of the world.”
We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.
Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
Your ego is your embodiment and your self is your potentiality and that’s what you listen to when you listen for the voice of inspiration and the voice of ‘What am I here for? What can I possibly make of myself?’
If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.
The process of nature cannot be evil.