We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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Joseph Campbell
Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American mythologist, writer and lecturer, best known for his work in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's magnum opus is his book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in world mythologies. Since publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell's theory has been consciously applied by a wide variety of modern writers and artists. His philosophy has been summarized by his own often repeated phrase: "Follow your bliss." 2LifeEdit 3BackgroundEdit Joseph Campbell was born in White Plains, New York, the son of Josephine (née Lynch) and Charles William Campbell. He was from an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family. During his childhood, he moved with his family to nearby New Rochelle, New York. In 1919 a fire destroyed the family home in New Rochelle, killing his grandmother. In 1921 Campbell graduated from the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. While at Dartmouth College he studied biology and mathematics, but decided that he preferred the humanitie
I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you.
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
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. [...] But love bears all things. [...] Love itself is pain, you might say - the pain of being truly alive.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what…
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
I don't have to have faith, I have experience.
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
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.
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…
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining…