 |
Artist, The
|
|
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.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Dreams
|
|
|
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. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...
-Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image
|
|
|
Follow your bliss.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Duality
|
|
|
To separate oneself or one
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Economics
|
|
|
Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Ego
|
|
|
Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you. So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! 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.
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work By Joseph Campbell; Edited and with an introduction by Phil Cousineau; Foreword by Stuart L. Brown
|
|
Fate & Destiny
|
|
|
We must be willing to get rid of the life we
-Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Reader: Reflections on the Art of Living, edited by Diane K. Osbon, 1991
|
|
Heaven
|
|
|
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.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Journeys
|
|
|
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey 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.
-Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces
|
|
Life
|
|
|
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
|
It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It's as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature...It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.
-Joseph Campbell, source uncertain: apparently in an interview with Bill Moyers,
|
|
|
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life... I think that what we're really 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 can actually feel the rapture of being alive.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Myths, Mythology
|
|
|
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
|
He said myths and mythology wasn't to give meaning to life but to give us an experience of life, an experience of vitality in being alive.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
|
Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Nature
|
|
|
An old Apache storyteller reminds us:
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
|
Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity. Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.
http://66.221.137.212/smedberg/cauldron/p50.html
-Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
|
|
Passion
|
|
|
If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Peace
|
|
|
Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or highroad to the soul's destination.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Potential
|
|
|
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.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Progress
|
|
|
There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Risk
|
|
|
But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall.
If you have the guts to follow the risk, however, life opens, opens, opens up all along the line. I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in spiritual magic, you might say. I feel that if one follows what I call one's bliss -- the thing that really gets you deep in your gut and that you feel is your life -- doors will open up. They do! They have in my life and they have in many lives that I know of.
http://www.michaelherman.com/openspacetechnology/invitingorg/08campbell.html
-Joseph Campbell, From An Open Life by Michael Toms., Interview
|
|
Self-love
|
|
|
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Universe, The
|
|
|
Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said,
-Joseph Campbell
|
|
Value
|
|
|
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.
-Joseph Campbell
|
Books by and about Joseph Campbell