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Follow your bliss …

• ‘What will they think of me?’ must be put aside for bliss. 
• Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure.
• Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.
• How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.
• I always tell my students follow your bliss. When you have that feeling then stay with it and don’t let anyone throw you off.
• 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.
• There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.
• I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave.

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… by doing what you love and what makes you happy

• There’s a wise saying: make your hobby your source of income. Then there’s no such thing as work, and there’s no such thing as getting tired. That’s been my own experience. I did just what I wanted to do. It takes a little courage at first, because who the hell wants you to do just what you want to do; they’ve all got lots of plans for you. But you can make it happen.
• The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.

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Following your bliss brings great benefits

• If you follow your bliss…the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
• 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.
• When you see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. 
• Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
• Your bliss can guide you to that transcendent mystery, because bliss is the welling up of the energy of the transcendent wisdom within you. So when the bliss cuts off, you know that you’ve cut off the welling up; try to find it again. 

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Make your own path

• If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.
• If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else’s; the whole point is to find your own way.
• If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
• 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.
• If you see your path laid out in front of you – Step one, Step two, Step three – you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else’s path. That is why you see it so clearly.
• Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.
• You may have success in life, but then just think of it – what kind of life was it? What good was it – you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.
• You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.
• There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path.

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Live an authentic life

• What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that’s a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.

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Be courageous

• A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: ‘As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It’s not as wide as you think.’ 
• The cave you most fear to enter contains the greatest treasure.
• Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
• It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you… Follow your bliss.
• The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger’s lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
• The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.

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Think new thoughts

• Revolution doesn’t have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.
• The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
• The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
• You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.
• You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

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Serve others

• The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

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Be truly yourself

• The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
• Heroism is a matter of integrity–becoming more and more at each step ourselves.

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Do what is right

• Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.

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Think about others

• When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self- preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

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Make time to be

• This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers this morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
• Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

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Recognise your own depth

• You have to learn to recognise your own depth.
• You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.

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Save the world by being alive

• We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.
• The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

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Say yes to life

• The warrior’s approach is to say “yes” to life: “yes” to it all.”
• Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment-not discouragement-you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.  
• Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not.
• We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
• Whatever the hell happens, say, “This is what I need.”
• You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.

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Embrace the rapture of being alive

• I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.  
• 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.
• 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.
• Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.
• The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.
• You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.
• You don’t ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean. You enjoy it.

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Embrace adventure by going on a hero’s journey

• The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.
• The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
• The good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure. You are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then, if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.   
• A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.
• A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won.
• Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
• There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.
• Questing is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.
• The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it’s really a manifestation of his character. It’s amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets.
• The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.
• The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.
• The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.
• The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.
• The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.
• The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.
• The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, ‘Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.
• Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It’s the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
• What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.
• The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It’s usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.

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Embrace the experience of living

• I don’t have to have faith, I have experience. 
• I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.  
• 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.  

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Embrace the power within

• Seek to know the power that is within you.
• The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what’s outside.
• The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.
• The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self.
• The place to find is within yourself.
• You’ve got to find the force inside you.

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Embrace the potential in you

• What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. 
• You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.
• So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.

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Embrace joy

• Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
• Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

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Embrace play

• Don’t do anything that isn’t play.
• Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy. What you have to do, you do with play. I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere.
• What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.

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Embrace responsibility

• Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.  
• Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.

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Embrace your uniqueness

• No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.
• It’s a shame to waste the uniqueness that is you, by doing what someone else has done.
• 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.  

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Embrace quality

• Quality isn’t something that can be argued into an article or promised into it. It must be put there. If it isn’t put there, the finest sales talk in the world won’t act as a substitute.

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Embrace compassion

• I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
• The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to – as well as to demand of – the world.
• The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.
• You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

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Embrace passion

• Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures.  
• Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.

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Embrace oneness

• At such moments, you realise that you and the other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
• Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.
• When you see the earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. 
• We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.

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Embrace stillness

• Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.
• When I was in India I met and conversed briefly with Shri Atmananda Guru of Trivandrum, and the question he gave me to ponder was this: ‘Where are you between two thoughts?’

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Embrace love

• Love is a friendship set to music.
• Love is exactly as strong as life.
• Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.

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Embrace your shadow

• Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.
• It’s only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.

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Embrace your imperfection

• The perfect human being is uninteresting – the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable. 
• Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
• Perfection isn’t human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love–and I mean love, not lust–is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, ‘This is a challenge to my compassion.’ Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.
• Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.

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Embrace your humanity

• One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
• Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

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Embrace your dreams

• A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.

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There can be treasure even in misfortune and suffering

• It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
• Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
• Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
• Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life.
• Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul’s destination.
• The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
• Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.
• Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. 
• The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come.  At the darkest moment comes the light. 
• When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
• The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

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Welcome whatever comes

• The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.
• Whatever the hell happens, say, ‘This is what I need.’

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Experience mystery

• 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 realisation 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.
• I think it’s important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.
• Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.
• We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being … that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth – the Virgin Birth – in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.
• The experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes.  

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Experience now

• Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now…that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.

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Experience eternity

• The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.  Joseph Campbell
• Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. 
• Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.
• Eternity is not the hereafter…this is it. If you don’t get it here you won’t get it anywhere.
• Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
• The concept of time shuts off eternity.

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Myths contain great power and aliveness

• Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.
• Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.
• Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.
• Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.
• Mythology is the womb of man’s initiation to life and death.
• Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
• This is all I ever wanted – to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

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Far from being lies, myths are part of our search for truth

• Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.
• Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
• The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.
• Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
• A myth doesn’t have to be real to be true.
• Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
• What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

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Myths are public dreams

• Myths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.
• The realms of the gods and demons – heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.
• 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.  
• Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.
• Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
• Myths are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.

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Religion as metaphor and myth

• Religion is misunderstood mythology.
• 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. 
• There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call “atheists,” and those who think they are facts are “religious.” Which group really gets the message? 
• A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else’s religion.
• With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens.  
• Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
• When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual’s own spiritual experience is lost.
• Myth is what we call other people’s religion.
• It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
• 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.

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Religion is a signpost

• The interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that’s where you have the conflict.
• All religions are true but none are literal.

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More thoughts on myths and metaphors

• Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
• Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.
• There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.
• When you look at that nature world it becomes an icon, it becomes a holy picture that speaks of the origins of the world. Almost every mythology sees the origins of life coming out of water. And, curiously, that’s true. It’s amusing that the origin of life out of water is in myths and then again, finally, in science, we find the same thing. It’s exactly so.
• Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.
• If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.
• It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.

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What is God?

• What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.
• God is an intelligible sphere—a sphere known to mind, not to the senses—whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. 
• God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, “Ah!” 
• It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.

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God is a metaphor

• God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that. 

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God is a mystery

• We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.
• We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea. To say that divinity informs the world and all things is condemned as pantheism. But pantheism is a misleading word. It suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an indefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.

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God is within

• God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.
• This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God … Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things.
• In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say ‘Aha,’ that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say ‘Aha’ to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.
• It is within you that the divine lives.

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More thoughts on God

• It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.
• Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn’t matter what his name is.
• All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
• Could God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. The god you worship is the god you deserve.
• Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
• In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.
• The god you worship is the one you’re capable of becoming.
• What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination?

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Poetry

• How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. 
• I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.  
• I think what we lack isn’t science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.
• Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.

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Writing

• Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is writing in your mind now. But that takes a lot of … waiting for the right word to come.
• Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

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Reading

• For myself, well, Alan Watts once asked me what spiritual practice I followed. I told him, ‘I underline books.’ It’s all in how you approach it. 
• Sit in a room and read—and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. 
• What did I do? I read. I followed the path from one book to another, from one thinker to another. I followed my bliss, though I didn’t know that was what I was doing.
• When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvellous.

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Music

• Music has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organisation of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it’s an awakener of life.

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Death

• 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.
• Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’
• The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure – fearlessness and achievement.
• The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.
• The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance.

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Truth

• The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.

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The ego

• 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.
• The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you’ve never even thought of. And you’re stuck with you’re past when you’re stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.
• The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.
• 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?’

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Education

• What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. There’s a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.  
• The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere–to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. 
• The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.

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Art

• Art is the clothing of a revelation.
• Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
• Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.
• It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.
• What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.
• Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist.
• Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that’s what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.
• The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
• The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.
• Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

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Money

• Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities … Money experienced as life energy is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the life of others.

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Marriage

• When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
• When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
• If marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married.
• In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.
• Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.
• Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That’s why it’s a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you’re giving, you’re not giving to the other person; you’re giving to the relationship.
• Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.

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Meaning

• I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.  
• Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. 
• 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.  
• People say that what we are all seeking is 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 innnermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.  
• A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. 

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Wisdom

• Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world.

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Duality

• The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.  
• Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

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Rules

• If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them….You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted…. You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

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Attitude

• Life will always be sorrowful. We can’t change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

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• If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth. 
• Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.
• Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.   
• The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.   
• The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.        
• The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.  
• All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.
• Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man…. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
• All babies are Buddha babies.
• Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is so screwy.
• Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.
• ..enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact…
• Every story you tell is your own story.
• He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.
• I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.
• I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will.
• It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
• The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

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• Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.  
• You can’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs.
• Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

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