Masters of the Human Spirit
“The poets, prophets, and visionaries of untold millenniums – Dante, Aquinas, and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mohammed, Zarathustra, Shankaracharya, Nagarjuna, and T’ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of death and life. And the thesaurus of the myth-motifs was their vocabulary. They brooded on the state and way of man, and through their broodings came to wisdom; then teaching with the aid of the picture-language of myth, they worked changes on the patterns of their inherited iconographies.”
–Joseph Campbell (American Writer, Editor and Mythologist, 1904-1987)
Myth and Your Body
“Our creation myth is also the myth of our biological evolution. For me, there is another aspect to the creation and evolution myth – that is, the coming into existence of the body’s subjectivity.
Myth is about the birth and evolution of the body’s inner subjective experience.
Embryogenesis is cosmogenesis; the birth of the body is the birth of the inner emotional cosmos. And the experience of this is still ongoing, is present now.
From the moment of our conception, the organizing of past somatic images is available to us as a guide for being in the world of the present.
The different bodies of our history – personal and impersonal – are in our dreams. Myth presents us also with the body images of various ages and eons. The complex of somatic images gives our present somatic image an organization and dimension, a structure that has duration.
Mostly we are in touch with the surface body, because perception is mostly a surface phenomenon. That doesn’t mean that the other bodies aren’t there.”
–Stanley Keleman (American Chiropractor, Psychotherapist and Director of the Center for Energetic Studies in Berkeley, California, 1931-)
Myth and the Body p29:
“Myth & the Body – A colloquy with Joseph Campbell” (Stanley Keleman)
The Net of the Universe
“The universe (is) a great spread-out net with at every joint a gem, and each gem not only reflecting all the others but itself reflected in all.”
–Joseph Campbell (American Writer, Editor and Mythologist, 1904-1987)
Energy Consciousness
“A transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you.”
–Joseph Campbell (American Writer, Editor and Mythologist, 1904-1987)
