The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically , she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, and an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A . Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness...
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Furthermore, we have not even to risk the journey alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.
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Anyone who has had an experience of mystery knows that there is a dimension of the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There is a pertinent saying in one of the Upanishads: When before the beauty of a sunset or of a mountain you pause and exclaim, 'Ah,' you are participating in divinity . Such a moment of participation involves a realization of the wonder and sheer beauty of existence. People living in the world of nature experience such moments every day. They live in the recognition of something there that is much greater than the human dimension.
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Heroism is a matter of integrity--becoming more and more at each step ourselves.
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The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
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A computer is like an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy
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He said myths and mythology wasn't to give meaning to life but to give us an experience of life, an experience of vitality in being alive.
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Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
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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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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
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The warrior's approach is to say yes to life: yea to it all.
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It seems to have had an order, to have been composed by someone, and those events that were merely accidental when they happened turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot. Who composed this plot? Just as your dreams are composed, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you. Just as the people who you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been the agent in the structuring of other lives. And the whole thing gears together like one big symphony, everything influencing and structuring everything else. It's as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer in which all of the dream characters are dreaming too. And so everything links to everything else moved out of the will in nature...It is as though there were an intention behind it yet it is all by chance. None of us lives the life that he had intended.
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Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you. So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
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People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life... I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.
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It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
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Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said,
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Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience here's the place to have the experience.
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Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
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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... a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
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If you can see your path laid outin front of you step by step, you knowit's not your path. Your own path youmake with every step you take. That'swhy it's your path.
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We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
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The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
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We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
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We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
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Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls
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When you follow your bliss... doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.
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To separate oneself or one
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Follow your bliss.
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Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
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