Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.

Thou Art That

Human adulthood is not achieved until the twenties: [George Bernard] Shaw put it in the seventies: not a few look ahead to Purgatory.

Flight of the Wild Gander, The

The artist . . . is the true seer and prophet of his century, the justifier of life and as such, of course, a revolutionary far more fundamental in his penetration of the social mask of his day than any fanatic idealist spilling blood over the pavement in the name simply of another unnatural mask.

Inner Reaches of Outer Space, The

In the way of nature one may experience, from time to time, glimpses of the world in this [transcendent] light – after the pelvic bioenergetic commitments have been honored and fulfilled, so that, freed from the dictatorship of the species, one is released to live as an individual (some little time, say, after the age of about thirty-five).

Inner Reaches of Outer Space, The

An initiation is a shock. Birth is a shock; rebirth is a shock. All that is transformative must be experienced as if for the first time.

On Being Human

Work begins when you don't like what you're doing.

An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (Copyright © 1989 New Dimensions Foundation), p. 107

It is inevitable that children should be taught in purely concrete terms. But then the child grows up and realizes who Santa Claus is. He is really Daddy. So, too, we must grow in the same way in learning about God, and the institutional churches must grow in presenting the message of the symbols to adults.

Thou Art That

There is one phrase in Finnegans Wake that seems to me to epitomize the whole sense of Joyce. He says, "Oh Lord, heap mysteries upon us, but entwine our work with laughter low." And this is the sense of the Buddhist bodhisattva: joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

Hero's Journey, The (book)

People feel panicky at the thought that we might all have something in common, that they are giving up some exclusive hold on the truth. It is something like discovering that you are a Frenchman and a human being at the same time. That is exactly the challenge that the great religions face in the Space Age.

Thou Art That

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Myths of Light

What, we may ask, is an authentic marriage? It is a mystery in which two bodies become one flesh; it is not a negotiation in which two bank accounts merge into one.

Thou Art That

All of the great cathedrals of Europe were built during this lunatic century between 1150 and 1250. People didn't have enough money then to buy two cows, let alone two cars. What were they living for? And you mustn't think of slave drivers; that isn't what built the cathedrals. It was a community seizure, a mythic zeal.

Pathways to Bliss