1. Myth and the modern world

• “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.”
• “When the story is in your mind, then you see its relevance to something happening in your own life.”
• “The only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.”
• “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”
• “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.”
• “I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow.”
• “All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.”
• “There is something magical about films. The person you are looking at is also somewhere else at the same time. That is the condition of the 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.”
• “Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.”
• Four functions of myth: mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical
• Pantheism “suggests that a personal god is supposed to inhabit the world, but that is not the idea at all. The idea is trans-theological. It is of an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being.”
• “Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.”

2. The journey inward

• “A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream.”
• “[Mankind’s one great story is] that we have come forth from the one ground of being as manifestations in the field of time. The field of time is a kind of shadow play over a timeless ground.”
• “Poetry gets to the unseen reality.”
• “The folk tale is for entertainment. The myth is for spiritual instruction.”

3. The first storytellers

• “The Indians addressed all of life as a “thou”—the trees, the stones, everything. You can address anything as a “thou,” and if you do it, you can feel the change in your own psychology. The ego that sees a “thou” is not the same ego that sees an “it.”
• “A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.”

4. Sacrifice and bliss

• “The sanctification of the local landscape is a fundamental function of mythology. … The landscape, the dwelling place, becomes an icon, a holy picture. Wherever you are, you are related to the cosmic order.”
• “Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. … In your sacred place you get the “thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived.”
• “I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time—namely, that 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 the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

5. The hero’s adventure

• “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”
• “Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose.”
• “The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things.”
• “The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.”
• “Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he had to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it.”
• Mythology as the penultimate truth
• “It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor. Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

7. Masks of eternity

• “Prayer is relating to and meditating on a mystery.”
• “The tick-tick-tick of time shuts out eternity. We live in this field of time. But what is reflected in this field is an eternal principle made manifest.”
• “Becoming is always fractional. And being is total.”
• Moyers: “Beauty is an expression of that rapture of being alive.”