Quotes by Mythologists

Healing is a revolutionary act and we are here to awaken to the true nature of our own souls and the gifts we have to give to the world.

Michael Meade

The thread that ties us to the center is the hidden cord of the heart, it is the thread of genius that can connect the mind with the heart, that allows the mind to feel and reveals the thought set within the heart.

Michael Meade

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.

Joseph Campbell

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

Joseph Campbell

A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.

Michael Meade

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

Joseph Campbell

One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

Joseph Campbell

When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)

Joseph Campbell

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.

Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

Joseph Campbell

Sometimes, the greatest safety can be found in taking the right risk. Whether it be an individual, a community or a country, when faced with tragedy or fearful uncertainty, we either become bigger and enter life more fully, or else we accept a diminished life and resign ourselves to a smaller way of being.

Michael Meade

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.

Joseph Campbell

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?

Joseph Campbell

What is most lacking in the modern world of duplications and facsimiles, of endless information and intentional misinformation, is the authenticity that makes life truly meaningful and spiritually rewarding.

Michael Meade

In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine.

Michael Meade

Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it's called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that's the economy of the soul.

Michael Meade

Living myth is about the experience of the waters parting again in the here and now. As a critical moment opens before us the spirit of life and genius of the soul speaks to us and through us. What was about to crush us suddenly parts before us and we shoot forward with the sudden vitality of life, fueled by the living imagination needed to survive.

Michael Meade

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.

Joseph Campbell

[T]he 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. (16)

Joseph Campbell

They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.

Joseph Campbell

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.

Joseph Campbell

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

Joseph Campbell

Each life involves an essential errand; not simply the task of survival, but a life-mission embedded in the soul from the beginning.

Michael Meade

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. (89)

Joseph Campbell

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Michael Meade

Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.

Michael Meade

When the Buddha declares there is escape from sorrow, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place, like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are are released from desire and fear. And your life becomes harmonious, centered and affirmative. Even with suffering. The Buddhists speak of the bodhisattva - the one who knows immortality, yet voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

Joseph Campbell

Amidst the rush and confusion of modern life something old and wise is trying to catch up with us. Whereas simple knowledge tends to divide things, genuine wisdom tends to make meaningful unity possible.

Michael Meade

To become nobody but your true self and to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in is a fight worth having. To become oneself by contributing one’s native gifts and talents to this troubled world: that is the job to keep applying for and a work worth spending an entire life doing.

Michael Meade

Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many-colored fabric that continually weaves human culture.

Michael Meade

What good is a path that doesn’t carry us to the edge of our capacity and then beyond that place? A true calling involves a great exposure before it can become a genuine refuge.

Michael Meade

The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence.

Michael Meade

There is a myth at the heart of things and some element of genius in the heart of each person.

Michael Meade

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.

Joseph Campbell

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.

Joseph Campbell

The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.

Michael Meade