Reflections on the Art of Living by Joseph Campbell

Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion

Living in the World

• "When seeking your partner, if your intention is a virtuous one, yous will observe him or her. If not, y'all'll keep finding the incorrect person."
• "And then that'southward what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your ain organization. The energies are committed in a sure way, and that delivery out there is coming toward you."
• "Every commitment is narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a large base and take the force to agree to it."
• "Any disaster you tin can survive is an improvement to your character, your stature, and your life."
• "Goose egg tin can happen to you that is non positive."
• "The dark night of the soul comes simply earlier revelation.  When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, and so comes the new life and all that is needed."
• "The commencement half of life we serve society – engagement.  The second one-half of life we turn inward – detachment."
• "In onetime age, you lot are relaxed from the immediate occasion of the day's summons, and you're sinking downwardly into your memory arrangement, which is as live as can be."
• "V degrees of dear"
  • "The first degree of honey, that of retainer to primary, is a depression degree of honey"
  • "Degree number two, the relationship of friend to friend, is the awakening of what we would call love."
    • "Whenever there is an experience of love equally a spontaneous act, rather than the following of a command, you have moved out of stage one and into phase two."
  • "The 3rd lodge of honey is that of parent for child."
    • "This is symbolic of the awakening in your center of the realization that the divine ability is inside you."
  • "The fourth level of love is that of spouse to spouse."
    • "You lot have found the god in your eye, and now the god is found in this intimate and well-nigh indelible kind of relationship."
  • "Then we come to the highest order of dear, the fifth, and that is compulsive, uncontrollable, illicit beloved, where there is cypher but love and you are totally ripped out of yourself in relation to god."
• "Spousal relationship is non a love affair, it'due south an ordeal.  It is a religious exercise, a sacrament, the grace of participating in another life."
• "Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open up, non-programmed.  It is a gratuitous fall: how yous handle each new thing as it comes along.  Every bit a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves."
• "You have to think of significant things to do together that require both of you."
• "The idea of the gentle heart involves a sense of responsibleness to the person. If that is not at that place, you take not got dear, you've got something else. If that is there, it will last. Lust doesn't, no responsibleness there."
• "What I am maxim is, not that responsibleness constitutes love, but that love without a sense of responsibleness is not love. It's taking possession."
• "If you don't have the maturity to control your compulsive passions, it seems to me that yous are ineligible for marriage."
• "Committing yourself to anyone, turning your destiny over to a dual destiny, is a life commitment."
• "I do non think that you are married unless your relationship to your spouse is the primary consideration in your life."
• "Yous accept to develop a number of different means of relating to people, not just one."
• "If the marriage is toxic, you have to decide whether at that place is a possibility of transforming the situation. If y'all feel that there can be a transformation, and so you can go through the ordeal of effecting one."
• "On the other paw, if your life is threatened, or even your dearest of life, and the situation cannot be transformed, or you don't think it is worth the commitment, then y'all have got to clear out."
• "the way to choose a wife is to look at her female parent. If the mother is a good woman and the kind that you regard as ideal, then marry any one of her daughters, and she will shape a life for you lot."
• "The woman is the energy, the sakti, of life. The male must learn to ride on that energy and non dictate the energy."
• "He is the vehicle of the adult female'southward energy."
• "In marriage, you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person.  Yous are sacrificing yourself to the relationship."
• "Love, which is unconditional in marriage, is specific; it is focused. It is for that person and non somebody else. Unconditional love goes right through everything, and information technology's a breakthrough in spiritual life. Do not look for it outside of yourself. The merely place to look for it is inside. If information technology is going to exist unconditional honey, what'south out at that place doesn't affair."
• "The question is: 'Can I open myself to compassion?' Compassion for me is only what the discussion says: information technology is 'suffering with.' Information technology is an firsthand participation in the suffering of another to such a degree that you forget yourself and your ain rubber and spontaneously exercise what'southward necessary."
• "When you lot rescue someone from drowning, y'all never know if they'll pull you down with them."
• "Survival is the 2nd police of life.  The outset is that nosotros are all one."
• "Basically, everyone needs a father. The begetter has a vital role. The mother represents nature, just the father introduces the son and daughter to social relationships."
• "Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities."
• "My life grade is absolutely indifferent to coin. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to exercise from the within. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because y'all are giving life and life responds in the style of its counterpart in hard coin."
• "Money experienced equally life energy is indeed a meditation, and letting information technology menstruum out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others."
• "What are y'all going to do with your money? What factor in your own consciousness are you lot going to favor in the spending of the coin?"
• "If you lot're getting a caste to compensate for an inferiority complex, surrender the circuitous, considering it'due south an artificial thing."
• "Liberty involves making decisions, and each decision is a destiny conclusion. Information technology's very difficult to find in the outside world something that matches what the system inside you is yearning for."
• "if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it's your own path, and no one has ever been on information technology before, there'due south no precedent, so everything that happens in a surprise and is timely."
• "When yous wander, think of what you desire to do that solar day, not what you told yourself yous were going to want to do. And there are two things you must non worry near when you accept no responsibilities: i is beingness hungry, and the other is what people will think of yous. Wandering time is positive. Don't think of new things, don't think of achievement, don't think of annihilation of the kind. Only think, 'Where practise I feel practiced? What is giving me joy?'"
• "What counts is existence where yous feel you're in your place. What people recall is their problem."
• "What pulls you off from spiritual achievement? I know when my life is not in the center. I get desirously involved with my relation to some achievement or organization that is tangential to the real centering of my life. And I know when I'chiliad on track – that is, when everything is in a harmonious relationship to what I regard as the best I've got in me."
• "In the Grail legends, the land of people doing what they what they call back they ought to practice or have to do is the wasteland."
• "The crucial thing to alive for is the sense of life in what you are doing, and if that is not at that place, and so you are living according to other peoples' notions of how life should be lived."
• "The aim of individuation requires that one should find and so learn to live out of 1'southward own center, in control of ones for and against. And this cannot exist achieved by enacting and responding to whatsoever general masquerade of fixed roles."
•  'When the soul of a homo is born in this country there are nets flung at information technology to concur it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall attempt to wing by those nets.'
• "My feel is that I can experience that I'g in the grail castle when in living with people I honey, doing what I honey. I go that sense of being fulfilled. Only, by god, information technology doesn't take much to make me feel I've lost the castle, it'south gone."
• "Even when yous have gotten at that place, it's piece of cake to get flipped out, considering the world has things if wants y'all to do and you lot have decided not to practise what the world wants."
• "The hero's journeying always begins with the phone call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you're in Sleepy State. Wake. Come on a trip. In that location is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your existence, that's not beingness touched…'"
• "When you experience off-center, it'due south time to go."
• "The first step, disengagement or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the peace of the everlasting realm that is inside."
• "When one thinks of some reason for non going or has fear and remains in society because information technology's safe, the results are radically different from what happens when one follows the call. If y'all refuse to go, then you lot are someone else'southward retainer. When this refusal of the phone call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost. Everything in you knows that a required adventure has been refused. Anxieties build up. What yous take refused to experience in a positive way, y'all will experience in a negative way."
• "If what you are following, nevertheless, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, and so magical guides volition appear to help you."
• "Every bit you now get towards the center, there volition come up more aids, every bit well as increasingly difficult trials. You take to surrender more and more than of what you're hanging on to. The final affair is a total giving upwards, a yielding all the fashion."
• "The deeper yous go, and the closer you get to the final realization, the heavier the resistance."
• "One rendition is the Sacred Union, the coming together with the beloved which brings the nativity of your ain spiritual life, with the bride existence whatsoever the life is that your relating to: male/female, I/Thou, this/that."
• "Another rendering is Atonement with the Father. The son has been separated from the begetter, significant that he has been living a life that's inappropriate to his existent heritage."
• "The father represents the natural order from which you take been removed."
• "So there is Apotheosis, the realization that 'I am that which all these other beings are."
• "Bringing back the gift to integrate information technology into a rational life is very hard."
• "Ane answer is to say, 'To hell with them. I'yard going dorsum into the woods.'"
• "The second way is to say, 'What practise they want?' You lot have a skill. You tin can requite them what they want, the commercial manner."
• "The third possibility is to try to find some aspect of the domain into which y'all have come that can receive a picayune portion of what yous have to give."
• "Await for cracks in the wall and give only to those who are gear up for your gem."
• "You practice non take a complete adventure unless you lot do get back."
• "the final thing is knowing, loving, and serving life in a way in which y'all are eternally at residue. That point of rest has got to be in all of it. Even though you are active out at that place in the world, within you there's a point of complete composure and rest."
• "Jung speaks of the curve of a lifetime beingness divided in one-half: the first half is the time of relationships, and the second half is the fourth dimension of finding the sense of life within"
• "The kickoff quarter of life is that of a student, and the ideal there is obedience – 'comeliness of advent and sweetness of comport."
• "The second quarter is that of the householder; that is to say, you lot have moved into the responsibilities of adult life."
• "Midlife is typically the period, non of achievement, but of realization, and it should be the period of fulfillment."
• "When you come into Jung's 2nd phase, the last one-half of life, the quest is for the import of the OM that you've heard in the heart chakra, and then that information technology will become the forming and structuring energy of your life, without care for achievement, without care for prestige."
• "The prototype of pass up in erstwhile age is a bit deceptive, because even though your energies are not those of early youth – that was the time of moving into the field of making all the big drives – now y'all are in the field, and this is the time of the opening bloom, the real fulfillment, the bringing forth of what you lot have prepared yourself to bring forth."
• "All a ritual does is concentrate your heed on the implications of what yous are doing."
• "I don't think of God every bit up there. I recall of god as right here in whatever I'thousand knowing and loving and serving. 'To be happy with Him forever in heaven' means to recognize your own compassion, your own participation in that beast of the person you're with."
• "A clinging together is a terrible wright on the life of a young man."
• "…every failure to cope with a life situation must exist laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come as well late."
• "If you are at peace with eternity, the blowing up of the universe is perfectly adequate – just every bit your ain death has to be acceptable. Information technology is going with organic processes. Everything that comes… goes.
• "…the hero would exist no hero if death held for him whatever terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave."
• "An Aztec prayer to be said on the deathbed… 'Dear Kid! Thou hast passed through and survived the labors of this life. Now information technology hath pleased our lord to carry thee abroad. For we do not bask this world everlastingly, just briefly; our life is similar the warming of oneself in the sun.'"
• "Every moment is utterly unique and volition non be connected in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attending on what you are experiencing now."
• "Existence 'happy with him forever in sky' means that while you are here on world y'all should be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with the divine ability, the eternal power in all life. If you concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation disintegrates."
• "The resistance to death has to exercise with not knowing where you're going when you die."
• "We undo from various things all of our lives. Finally, nosotros identify with consciousness and disengage from our bodies."
• 'the death of one for whom you lot feel compassion shouldn't be an illness. Your zipper is the temporal aspect of the human relationship; your pity is the eternal aspect. Hence, y'all can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost: namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all things."

Coming into Awareness

• "Yoga consists in the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the heed-stuff."
• "The mind is likened, in reply, to the surface of a pond rippled by a current of air… the idea of yoga is to cause that current of air to subside and allow the waters return to residuum."
• "jiff and emotion are linked. When you are shocked, your breathing changes. When you are total of rage or passion of whatever kind, your breathing changes. When y'all are at rest, your animate changes. And so, the goal here is to make your breathing regular, to withal and at-home the heed."
• "Chakra I: the globe view is of uninspired materialism, governed by 'hard facts' …and the psychology, adequately described in behavioristic terms, is reactive, not agile. There is on this plane no zeal for life, no explicit impulse to expand."
• "Chakra II: Svadhisthana, 'Her Special Home' is at the level of the genitals. When the Kundalini is active at this level, the whole aim of life is sex activity."
• "Chakra III: Manipura, 'Urban center of the Shining Precious stone' is located at the level of the belly button. Here the energy turns to violence and its aim is to consume, to chief, to turn the world into oneself and i's ain."
• "The part of Chakra III is organizing your life, establishing a family unit, building a concern, learning how to master the world in terms advisable to your status and place."
• "All iii of these lower chakras are of the modes of man's living in the world in his naïve land, outward turned…"
• "These three chakras are of functions that we share with other animals."
• "Chakra IV: Anahata, significant 'not hit,' is at the level of the heart. It is the showtime of the religious life, the awakening where the new life begins,"
• "The centre chakra, and so, is the opening of the spiritual dimension: all is metaphoric of the mystery."
• "Chakra V: called Vishuddha, 'Purified,' is at the level of the larynx. This is the chakra of spiritual effort to hold back the animate being arrangement from which the energies come."
• "Chakra Half dozen: Ajna, the lotus of 'Command,' located between the eyebrows, is what nosotros would call the chakra of heaven, the highest chakra in the world of incarnate forms."
• "When the Kundalini has reached this point, one beholds god. Whatever god yous have been taught to revere is the god that volition exist seen here."
• "If you're going to hang onto your soul, yous tin can't become one with god. Y'all tin can't even become one with your spouse."
• "The ultimate thing is going past gods. Meister Eckhart said, 'the ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of god for god.' That ways leaving the folk thought of god – the ecclesiastical idea of god, what you lot've been taught of god – for that transcendent reference of which god is the metaphor."
• "Chakra Seven: Saharara, 'M Petalled,' is the lotus at the crown of the head. At this chakra there is no person to be witting of god. There is only undifferentiated consciousness: the silence."
• "'The best things cannot be told.' That is to say, you tin can't talk most that which lies beyond the accomplish of words."
• "The second best are misunderstood, because they are your statements about that which cannot be told."
• "The third best is conversation, political life, economics, and all that."
• "The field of time is the field of sorrow. 'All life is sorrowful.' And it is. If you try to correct sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you lot alive with that? You realize the eternal within yourself."
• "Y'all – and here'southward the beautiful formula – 'participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.'"
• "'OM…OM…OM…' OM is the audio nature makes when its pleased with itself."
• "AUM is the sound of the radiance of god. This is the about mysterious and important thing to sympathize, merely once you become the idea, it'south very simple."
• "The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same."
• "Ego-consciousness has to learn almost the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the witting mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, discipline and object are the same."
• "Dream, vision, god – god is a luminous vision. The image of god is equivalent to the dream vision. So, your god is an aspect of yourself, merely as your dream epitome is."
• "Your god is a manifestation of your own level of consciousness. All of the heavens and all of the hells are inside you."
• "Since all of our words relate either to waking or visions of dream – at that place are no words for this feel. All that can be said well-nigh information technology is silence."
• "The best things can't exist told – in that location are no words for this realization. And when you lot utter words in order to refer the listen to it, the danger is that the words volition trap you and y'all won't go through."
• "The secret to having a spiritual life every bit you move in the world is to hear the AUM is all things all the time."
• "As before long as annihilation is an Information technology, you take duality. I-1000 is not a duality. It is a nondual realization."
• "There's an implicit trend in consciousness to differentiation and movement, and it strikes me that perhaps the energy we see is consciousness."
• "I remember there are three states of being. Ane is the innocent expression of nature. Some other is when yous pause, clarify, think about information technology. When you practice, Nature is not just living; and while you lot are analyzing. Your nature isn't pushing yous. So, having analyzed, there comes a state in which y'all're able to live every bit Nature once again, only with more competence, more control, more flexibility."
• "Carl Jung, in his analysis of the structure of the psyche, has distinguished four psychological functions that link united states of america to the outer world. These are sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Sensation, he states, is the function that tells the states something exists; thinking, the function that tells united states what it is; feeling, the function that evaluates its worth to us; and intuition, the function that enables us to gauge the possibilities inherent in the object or its situation."
• "Each of us has individual capacities. The real play tricks is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel."
• "When people think that they, or their guru, have The Truth – 'This is information technology!' – they are what Nietzsche calls 'epileptics of the concept': people who accept gotten an idea that's driven them crazy."
• "A human being in action cannot represent perfection. You e'er represent one side of a duality that it itself perfection. The moment you take activity, you are imperfect: you accept decided to act that way instead of that other manner. That'south why people who call up they are perfect are and then ridiculous. They're in a bad position with respect to themselves."
• "decide to be imperfect, reconcile yourself to that, and get ahead. That'south 'joyful participation in the sorrows of the earth.'"
• "Information technology's strange: the less there is of you, the more you feel the sublime."
• "The aim of art is perfection in the object."
• "virtue in the sense of excellence, not in the sense of skilful-versus-evil."
• "[Nietzsche] distinguishes between what he calls 'slave morality' – obeying a rule, doing what yous're told, being good and not bad – and 'main morality' which is equivalent to the Greek idea of virtue, and the Renaissance idea of virtue, and has to practise with the kind of excellence achieved by i who is competent in something."
• "That'south a very of import shift in accent. In that location is something exhilarating well-nigh the idea of sheer excellence and aggressive performance: 'I arrive there and practice it!' in contrast to 'Everything's okay, and I submit."
• "When threatened past fear and desire, let ego go."
• "The Buddhist estimation of this whole thing is one of psychological transformation. The Christian interpretation is one of debt and payment."
• "In Buddhism nosotros are lost in the globe of fear and want, the field of maya, illusion. This is, in Christian iconography, the Autumn. Redemption is losing those fears and having the experience of eternal life."
• "The primal demand is to surrender our exclusivity: everything that defines us as against each other."
• "Instead of clearing his ain middle the zealot tries to clear the world."
• "If you ready on yourself and your tradition, assertive you lone accept got 'It,' yous've removed yourself from the rest of mankind."
• "Near of the world's societies are beingness ruled by post-biblical traditions, in which anybody who is annihilation else is out."
• "In Buddhism the goal of life is the repose of the nirvanic experience of life: 'joyful participation in the sorrows of the world,' and soon. In a credo religion, the goal of life tends to go formulated."
• "In most mythologies, the images of mercy and grace are rendered as vividly every bit those of justice and wealth, so that a balance is maintained, and the heart is buoyed rather than scourged along the way."
• "Hell is the concretization of your life experiences, a place where y'all're stuck, the wasteland. In hell, yous are then bound to yourself that grace cannot enter."
• "You really do non have a sacred place, a rescue land, until you tin can notice some little field of action, or identify to be, where it'southward non a wasteland, where there is a petty spring of ambrosia. It'southward a joy that comes from inside. It is not something that puts the joy in you, only a place that lets you so experience your ain will, your own intention, and your own wish that, in small-scale, the joy is there."
• "Find a place where in that location'southward joy, And the joy will burn out the pain."
• "Don't call back of what's existence said, only of what's talking. Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love?  The goal of the hero'southward journey Is yourself, finding yourself."
• "everything in your life that seems to be obstructive can be transformed by your recognizing that it is the means for your transition."
• "What is the obstruction in your life, and how do you transform it into the radiance? Ask yourself, 'What is the main obstruction to my path?'"
• "All anyone is actually trying to practise is have an expansion of consciousness, so that knowing, and loving are on greater and greater horizons."
• "The goal of the journey is to observe yourself every bit consciousness."
• "You become mature when y'all go the authorisation for your ain life."
• "The god you worship is the god you lot deserve,"
• "All the gods of the world are metaphors, not powers."
• "All imagining of god, if the word is going to mean anything likewise 'this is what mother taught me,' is supposed to refer to that which transcends all knowledge, all naming, all forming; and, consequently, the word has to point past itself."
• "you cannot judge your destiny in terms of something that was done to you by somebody."
• "if you want to see god in the world, recognize it in mankind."
• "information technology is actually the work if human that is projected in the image of an imagined being called god. And so, historically, the god image is really a mirror image of the condition of homo at a given time."
• "a mystery that is beyond subject, object, and all pairs of opposites is the mystery of the ground of which we ride."
• "Know it'south at that place, and then don't worry about it. Simply behold the radiance everywhere."
• "The idea that we will have a divine visitation by some friendly forms, benign forces from other planets who volition come to our help and save us, is a clear reflection of the outmoded understanding of the universe."
• "The kingdom of god is within u.s., but we have this idea that the gods act from 'out there.'"
• "If you desire resurrection, you must have crucifixion."
• "crucifixion is not a calamity if it leads to a new life. Though Christs crucifixion nosotros were unshelled, which enabled u.s.a. to be born to resurrection."
• "the cantankerous has dual sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the coming of the divine to us. Information technology is a truthful crossing."
• "Christ did not think that godhood was something to be held to – which is to say, neither should you – but rather, yielding, he took the form of a servant even to death on the cross. This is joyful affirmation of the sufferings of the earth. The imitation of Christ, then, is participating in the suffering and joys of the earth, all the while seeing through them the radiance of the divine presence."
• "The hero'due south expiry and resurrection is a model for the casting off of the old life and moving into the new."
• "The kingdom of god is within us. Easter and Passover remind united states of america that we have to let go in order to enter it."
• "The reality of living in infinite means that nosotros are built-in anew; not born again to an erstwhile-time faith but built-in to a new order of things: in that location are no horizons. That is the meaning of the space age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious."
• "Cocky-preservation is just the second law of life. The showtime law is that you and the other are 1."
• "if you learn to read the symbols as metaphors instead of accepting them as the facts they're purported to be – if you know, in other words, why yous are out, then it can be a source of bully strength."
• "A sacred identify is whatever infinite that is set autonomously from the usual context of life. In the secular context, one is concerned with pairs of opposites: cause and effect, gain and loss, and so on. Sacred infinite has no function in the way of earning a living or a reputation."
• In your sacred space, things are working in terms of your dynamic – and nobody else's."
• "What did you do as a child that created timelessness, that fabricated you forget time? There lies the myth to alive past."
• "As an adult, you must rediscover the moving power of your life. Tension, a lack of honesty, and a sense of unreality come from following the wrong force in your life."
• "Work begins when you don't like what you're doing."
• "Sacred space is a infinite that is transparent to transcendence, and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation."
• "'Since all is Brahman, all is the divine radiance, how can we say 'no' to ignorance or brutality or annihilation?' His respond was: 'For you and me, we say 'aye.''"
• "where are you between 2 thoughts? Do you ever have a glimpse beyond your thinking of that which transcends anything you can retrieve about yourself? That's the source field out of which all of your energies are coming."
• "an image of the Buddha is not a graven prototype to be understood concretely. It is a meditation tool, something to be seen through. Information technology is a support for meditation on the Buddhahood inside you, non a depiction of any actual Buddha 'out there.'"
• "The entire heavenly realm is within u.s.a., but to find it we have to relate to what's outside."
• "The Buddha image, then, isn't a picture of the Buddha. It is a tool to assist you meditate on the Buddhahood within yourself."
• "If y'all are to accelerate all stock-still ideas must get."
• "The word nirvana means 'blown out,' the breath Jainism, another Indian philosophy, nirvana is thought of equally death. Just in Indian there is reincarnation, then y'all cannot truly die until you accept achieved release from life."
• "The Buddha is the one who stresses the psychological attribute of this 'dying.' You tin stay alive, in activity, but be disengaged from want for, and fear of, the fruits of your actions. This psychological disengagement of your passions from the events of your life is "
• "Nosotros can't rid the globe of sorrow, merely we can choose to live in joy."
• "The rational mind stresses opposites."
• "When you are desiring things and fearing things, that's mortality. The three temptations of the Buddha – want, fear, and duty – are what concur y'all in this field."
• "Anything you do has a still bespeak. When you are in that still indicate, you can perform maximally."
• "Everything temporal is but a symbol."
• "In Buddhism, those who attain nirvana are said to accept 'achieved the yonder shore'; that is to say, they have crossed the river from the normal experience of life to the yonder shore of nirvana, beyond all pairs of opposites, beyond twoness."
• "The real self is that transcendent life and Buddha consciousness of which we are all merely visionary moments."
• "The Tantric saying 'to worship a god, yous must go a god' means you must observe in yourself the level of consciousness and love that the deity epitomizes and symbolizes. When you practise, you lot are worshiping that deity."
• What is the kingdom? Information technology lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us."
• 'Get away from your rational system and get into the wonderful feel that is moving through all things all the time.'
• "Whatsoever work whatsoever can be a meditation if you take the sense that everything is Brahman: the procedure, the doing, the affair that is existence looked at, the one matter that is looking – everything."
• "Desire for mortal gains and fearfulness of loss agree you lot back from giving yourself to life."
• "Good and evil are non absolute. They are relative to which side yous are on."
• "The limitation comes where your judgement comes."
• "Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we tin can alter our attitude toward information technology."
• "Freud speaks of the ego as 'the reality principle,' that which puts you in affect with 'reality,' reality with a small-scale 'r': pregnant, the private circumstances of your life and your human relationship to those circumstances. And in our culture, the ego, the evaluating principle, is developed."
• "In Freudian psychology, the pleasure principle, the 'id,' the zeal of life for holding onto food, comfort, sex, and life itself – the context I call 'health, wealth, and progeny' – is what most people alive for. Against the id, Freud posits the 'superego,' the social laws that discipline the individual, and then that i does, not what one wants, but what society says one should do."
• "You lot tin can live from that center, fifty-fifty while you remain in relation to the world."
• "Wisdom and foolishness are practically the aforementioned. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world."
• "Women, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what tin be known. The hero is the one who comes to know."
• "The woman brings along life in 1 way or another, either biologically or socially, and so, in the latter stage, is life-fostering and life-guiding. The man is more than inwards than the woman in that last stage."
• "if a woman engages in the man's chore of inbound the field of achievement, so her mythology volition be essentially the aforementioned as that of the male hero."
• "whether one is male or female, the stages of the inner journey, the visionary quest, are the aforementioned."
• "the objective is to have your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is non by any ways an easy thing to practise."
• "Where male power dominates you have separation. Where female power dominates

Living in the Sacred

• "The goal of life is rapture.  Fine art is the fashion we experience it."
• "By 'proper art' he means that which really belongs to art. 'Improper art,' by contrast, information technology's art that'southward in the service of something that is not art"
• "proper art is static, and thereby induces esthetic abort, whereas improper art is kinetic, filled with movement: significant, it moves you to desire or to fear and loathing."
• "Fine art that excites desire for the object every bit a tangible object he calls pornographic. Art that excites loathing or fear for the object he terms didactic."
• "the esthetic object renders three moments: integritas, 'wholeness'; consonantia, 'harmony'; and claritas, 'radiance.'"
• "Synergy is the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the behavior of their parts."
• "Synergy is to free energy as integration is to differentiation."
• "Art is a harmony parallel to nature.' There are, of grade, two natures involved: Nature, the world out there, and the earth of nature inside."
• "And so, it is the function of art to open the consumable things of the tangible, visible globe, so that the radiance – the same radiance that's within you – shines through them."
• "And the 2 kinetic movements that cake this harmonious rhythm are exactly the two temptations of the Buddha: want, which draws yous to possess the object, and loathing or fear, which turns you away from it. When you motion to possess or to plough away from an object, you are reacting to the globe of delusory appeals and terrors that Maya has projected."
• "If y'all're concerned with prospering or failing with the object, eating or non eating it, your perspective involves desire and loathing, the temptations of the Buddha, the projecting power of Maya."
• "Information technology is your mental mental attitude that determines whether you experience the projecting or the revealing power. The world is there in both modes. It is non that the world changes, it's your consciousness.
• Esthetic abort is the result of this change of focus. 'The kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth and men do not encounter it.' You run into it in esthetic arrest. Merely to develop the inwards depth experienced through this alter of focus, those who seek to achieve fully the goal of life should set aside a sacred identify."
• "The bondages from which the Buddha disengaged – desire, fright, and social duty – are temporal matters. Y'all can appoint in them voluntarily, but compulsive appointment is linked to Maya."
• "Fifty-fifty in the practical arts, the principle of perfection in piece of work is a basic expectation."
• "An artist is someone who has completed an artwork, not a person who simply intended to."
• "In action, it makes a difference whether all you are trying to do is to act or whether you are trying to act competently."
• "Whatever option you make, there is a period of learning and analyzing."
• "There is an old standard most the arts: 'you demand to learn all the rules and and then forget them.'"
• "In writing a book, you are moving forth on the wave of your inspiration and intuition, then you come up to a difficult passage, an area y'all accept to comprehend in society to get from hither to there, and your momentum stops. That's when you accept to bring in the rules."
• "In athletics, after you practice and practice, at that place is a lot you lot can so do spontaneously. But as certain points, y'all take to act according to rules for moving the body that are not however spontaneous for you."
• "If y'all are going to act on the basis of what you know, you cannot simply concur onto your cognition. You lot have to interpret it into a move."
• "Although analysis facilitates competent action, your spontaneity of activity is inhibited when you lot are constantly thinking of rules."
• "Art is the gear up of wings to conduct you out of your own entanglement."
• "'…art as ornament' and 'art equally imitation'"
• "The prime instance of fine art as decoration is architecture, where a structure is timeless once information technology is accomplished: there it sits. The reverse, art as false, would be the dance: if you do not see a particular functioning, you'll never see that trip the light fantastic once more."
• "The full difference in implication between dancing for an audience and dancing for god. When you lot are alone and in your own identify, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it."
• "Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or call back information technology is, the god you worship is the one you are capable of condign."
• "if you lot say, 'I am going to do what I desire to do' and if you stay with information technology, then something will happen. You may not have a task, but yous will be having a life, and information technology will be interesting."
• "In the wheel of fortune wisdom points to the center.  Youth points to the rim."
• "Don't have anything that piles more on you than what you lot must do to earn your base of operations income, considering you are developing, not in your job, merely in your artistic work."
• "to continue upward with your responsibilities and your fettle and still nurture your creative aspect, you must put a hermetically sealed retort, so that at that place is no intrusion, effectually a certain number of hours each day – nevertheless many you tin honestly afford – and that time must be inviolate."
• "It's similar doing your exercises: you lot ready aside a time when you're going to exercise, and that is a holy time."
• "your work – that is, your art – and your job must non contaminate each other."
• "When writing, don't criticize the words coming out.  Just let them come.  Let get of the critical factor."
• "Do not think about the negative side. There will be negatives that are going to come up down, but you have to concord the door open if y'all are going to do anything that has not been done before. You have to append all criticism to practice your work."
• "The ii things, so, that I'd say are necessary for breaking through what'due south called writer's cake are, outset, to accept a person to whom you are addressing yourself and, second, to gear up bated a couple of hours a day when, as it were, you're writing messages of love to that person."
• "You have to be reckless when writing.  Be as crazy every bit your conscience allows."
• "Recall, the Buddhas tertiary temptation was dharma, duty, doing what people expect you lot to exercise. That's the censorship fearfulness."
• "Fame is of no importance.' The calorie-free of fame comes past, and i may exist in it for three minutes, for thirty minutes, or never at all. But fame is not what the artist is working for. Information technology's the commercial artist who says, 'Any they want, I am going to give information technology to them.' The real creative person gives expression to a souvenir that has come to him, and the susception of the gift implies, 'I accept to put it out.'"
• "Imperfection is life. All forms in life are imperfect, only the function of art is to see the radiance through the imperfection."
• "…simply there is a difference betwixt fine art that intends esthetic arrest and art that intends psychic transformation. You could say the latter is non proper art. It is a religious device."
• "Schiller, a sensitive and intelligent student of psychology in relation to art, distinguished two types of artists: i, he chosen the 'sentimental' artist; the other, the 'naïve' artist."
• "He was the sentimental artist: the ane without nifty ways, who did not pay proper attending to his health, for whom art was his life, not the other way effectually. Everything went into his art. Goethe, on the other hand, was the naïve creative person: a man of ample life, an of import person in local politics, a person for whom are was but one aspect of his life."
• "The divine manifestation is ubiquitous, only our eyes are not open to information technology."
• "Awe is what moves us forward."
• "To worship a god, you must get a god.' That is to say, you must striking that level of consciousness within yourself that is equivalent to the deity to whom you are addressing your attention."
• "It seems to me you cannot have the notion of a god without having implicit the notion of a trinity: a god, the knower of the god, and the relationship between the two, a progressive knowing that brings you closer and closer to the divine,"
• "Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world."
• "Those who remember – and their proper noun is legion – that they know how the universe could accept been amend than it is, how information technology would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without fourth dimension, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think – as do many – 'Allow me first correct guild, and then get effectually to myself' are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of gods peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so, they will always be. So, if you actually desire to help this world, what y'all will have to teach is how to live in it."
• "The goal is to alive with godlike composure on the full rush of energy like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces."
• "As you get the way of life, you will come across a smashing chasm. Jump.  It is not as wide as you retrieve."

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