Quote

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia one was a man, and he drank water and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.

Joseph Campbell

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Joseph Campbell
Age: 83 †
Born: 1904
Born: March 26
Died: 1987
Died: October 30
Academic
Anthropologist
Essayist
Ethnologist
Historian
Historian Of Religion
Lecturer
Mythologist
Orator
Researcher
Short Story Writer
White Plains
New York
Joseph John Campbell
Joseph Cambell
Fables
Consciousness
Water
Drank
Three
Demon
Men
River
Indian
Ambrosia
Rivers
Fable
Function
Filth
Beings

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Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
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If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
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Myth is what we call other people's religion.
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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
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There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.
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The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.
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Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a
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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.
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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.
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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?'
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The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.
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The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
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Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.
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The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
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I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
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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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You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.
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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.
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