Read the right books by the right people. Read and read and read. Find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done, and then read what he has read.”

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“A constant image is the conflict of the eagle and serpent. The serpent bound to earth, the eagle in spiritual flight… when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings.”

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“A good teacher is there to watch the young person and recognize what the possibilities are—then to give advice, not commands... to talk it out, give some general clues.”

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“A myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.”

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“Civilizations are grounded on myth [and] myths are so intimately bound to the 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.”

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“Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a robot, a bureaucrat living not in terms of himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives that we all face today... How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it.”

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“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

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

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“He definitely was a hero, an innovator in perfect tune with his time who brought a new spiritual depth into popular music.”

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“If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person.”

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“If you follow your bliss, the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are, all the time, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you.”

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“In the Bible, eternity withdraws, and nature is corrupt, nature has fallen. In biblical thinking, we live in exile… But once you reject the idea of the Fall in the Garden, man is not cut off from his source.”

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“In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised… The idea of the Fall is that nature is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.”

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“In the traditional Orient and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there’s no way of breaking out from them.”

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“Just as Israel has been rendered archaic by the institution of the church, so the Church is rendered archaic by individual experience... the Holy spirit who speaks directly to the individual... the first representative of this was Saint Francis of Assisi”

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“Life lives by killing and eating itself, like the moon, casting off death and being reborn.”

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“Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.”

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“Marriage is not a love affair. Marriage is a comitment to that which you are, that person is literally your other half. A love affair is a relationship for pleasure and when it gets to be unpleasureable, it's off. Marriage is a life commitment , the prime concern of your life. If it's not the prime concern, you're not married.”

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“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 the reunion of the separated duad, the recognition of a spiritual identity”

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“Myths and dreams come from the same place… You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight.”

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“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. A great, exciting, life-nourishing subject; they teach you what’s behind literature and the arts, about your own life.

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“Napoleon is the 19th century counterpart of Hitler in the 20th. Napoleon's ravaging of Europe was horrific.”

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“Nor from the Dalai Lama himself will you ever hear a word of resentment or condemnation. These men have been the victims of a terrific upheaval, of terrible violence, and yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. Here is true religion, alive—today.”

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“One problem with Yahweh is that he forgot he was a metaphor, he thought he was a fact and said, ‘I am God.’ This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah—that he thought he was God.”

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“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life but I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking… what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, the rapture of being alive.”

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“Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most people are concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and political activities…”

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“Poor Icarus fell into the water—but Daedalus, who flew the middle way, succeeded in getting to the other shore… When you follow the path of your desire and enthusiasm and emotion; keep your mind in control and don’t let it pull you compulsively into disaster”

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“The Buddha follows a path very much like that of Christ... even to the roles and characters of their immediate disciples. There is but one archetypal mythic hero whose life has been replicated in many lands by many, many people.”

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“The closest thing I know to a planetary mythology is Buddhism, which sees all beings as Buddhas. The only task is to know what is”

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“The demon that you swallow gives you its power. The greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply… the more challenging or threatening the situation, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it.”

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“The great realization of the Upanishads in the 9th century BCE was that all the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.”

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“The great thesis of democracy is that anybody from any quarter can speak truth.”

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“The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. So woman magic and earth magic are the same... In the ancient agricultural world, the Goddess was the only visualized divinity”

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“The idea of the supernatural as being something over and above the natural is a killing idea. In the Middle Ages this was the idea that finally turned that world into something like a wasteland, a land where people were living inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted to because the supernatural laws required them to live as directed by their clergy.”

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“The second stage of marriage, the alchemical stage, is a sacrificing of the visible entity for a transcendent good, two experiencing that they are one. If still living in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when the children leave. Daddy will fall in love with a young, nubile girl and run off; Mother will be left with an empty house and heart.”

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“The world has messages and myths help us read them.”

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“The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.”

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“There is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the story of the Garden of Eden. The male-god-oriented group rejected it… in religions where the god or creator is the mother, the whole world is her body. There is nowhere else”

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“There is a major difference between a shaman and a priest. A priest is a functionary of a social order but the shaman's powers come out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.”

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“These bits of information from ancient times which have to do with the themes that have supported human life, built civilizations, and informed religions over the millennia, have to do with deep inner problems, inner mysteries, inner thresholds of passage… information of a deep, rich, life-vivifying sort that you don’t want to give up.”

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“To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what a myth does for you.”

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“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.”

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“We find a shamanic aspect in practically all the hunting cultures because they’re individual… hunters are trained in individual skills that require very special talents and abilities. When the big emphasis became settled village life, the shaman lost power… The shamans were reduce to a kind of clown society. They are magicians of a special power, but their power is now subordinate to a larger society.”

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“We need myths that identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet”

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“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 word ‘God’ properly refers to what transcends all thinking, but the word ‘God’ itself is something thought about.”

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“What T. S. Elliot meant in his poem, The Waste Land... a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you're told, with not courage for your own life. That is the wasteland.”

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“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… if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married.”

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“When the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, it’s like an old car—there goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another and gradually the whole things drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness.”

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“When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to , and you turn to the inner life—if you don’t know where it is or why it is, you’ll be sorry.”

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“When you see the earth from the moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This is the symbol for the new mythology to come, the country we are going to be celebrating, the people we are one with.”

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“You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances… When the world changes, the religion has to be transformed.”

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