Quotes About Experience

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.

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 image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.

A constant image [in myths] is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight – isn't that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings.

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)

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.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.

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 recongnize your own depth.

Deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive.

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.

I have attended a number of psychological conferences dealing with this whole problem of the difference between the mystical experience and the psychological crack-up. The difference is that the one who cracks up is drowning in the water in which the mystic swims.

I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

Time explodes, so again, eternity is not something everlasting. You can have it right here, now, in your experience of your earthly relationships. I've lost a lot of friends,...that moment when I was with them has an everlasting quality about it that is now still with me. What it gave me then is still with me, and there's a kind of intimation of immortality in that.

anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life.

It's important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.

CAMPBELL: All poets. Poetry is a metaphorical language. MOYERS: A metaphor suggests potential. CAMPBELL: Yes, but it also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.

Moyers: Then what does love have to do with morality? Campbell: Violates it....Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage....Love was a divine visitation, and that's why it was superior to marriage.

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.

Such an image of one's god becomes a final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you're doing in the temporal experience—this is the mythological experience. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City?

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.

All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.