Quotes About Spirituality

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.

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.

Whether Jewish or Christian, our religions have stressed too strongly the strictly historical aspect, so that we are, so to say, in worship of the historical event, instead of being able to read through that event to the spiritual message for ourselves. People turn to Oriental religion because therein they find the real message which has been closed by excessive literalism and historicism in their own religion and which is now open to them

The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity.

The dance posture of the God may be visualized as the symbolic syllable AUM which is the verbal equivalent of the four states of consciousness and their fields of experience. (A: waking consciousness; U: dream consciousness; M: dreamless sleep; the silence around the sacred syllable is the Unmanifest Transcendent.) The God is thus within the worshiper as well as without. p109

We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being.

The Hindus, for example, don't believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that's a fundamental deist idea.

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

For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God."[33] And

The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body.

The position of the palms together- this we use when we pray, do we not? That is a greeting that says that the god that is in you recognises the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things.

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 are no longer compelled by desire or fear…When you have seen the radiance of eternity in all the forms of time…When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors…and the world will step in and help

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature.

Description of the Six Bodily Centers of the Unfolding Serpent Power (?a?-cakra-nir?pana), which has been

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (superego)* and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult.

Joseph Campbell

transcendent means to "transcend," to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual.

Joseph Campbell

What is the kingdom [of God]? it lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.