Follow Your Bliss

I always return to Joseph Campbell. I can't say I always follow his logic as well as I want, but he helps give me a peek of insight every time I read him. It is a shame that he is sometimes classified as mystical or self-help. I can see how some could see him as "mystical," but the questions primitive humans were asking were mystical in nature. How humans across the board deal with mystery is a large part of his research. Anyway. Here are some self-help quotes for you!



“Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is Whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.”

“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

“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.”

“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

“God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.”

“A one sentence definition of mythology? "Mythology" is what we call someone else's religion”

"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."

Campbell: "A myth is a mask of god, a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world . . . the realization of wonder and also the experience of tremendous power which people living in the world of nature are experiencing all the time. The way in most Oriental thinking, and I think what we call primitive thinking, is that God is the manifestation of the energy--not the source."

Moyers: "But is divinity just what we think?"

Campbell: "Yes."

Moyers: "What does that do to faith?"

Campbell: "I don't have to have faith. I have experience."