Joseph Campbell Quotes About Consciousness

Quotes about: Consciousness

• This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God.

  Joseph Campbell

  Essentials, Realization, Body

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.134, Anchor

• The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

• In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part.

  Joseph Campbell

  Past, Space, Brain

• Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

  Joseph Campbell

  Communication, Artist, Space

• When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.

  Joseph Campbell

  Cutting, Yield, Energy

• In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.

  Joseph Campbell

  Art, Sunset, Divinity

• There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.

  Joseph Campbell

  Men, Rivers, Water

  Joseph Campbell, David Kudler (2003). “Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal”, p.46, New World Library

• A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Depth, Consciousness, Myth

• When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

  Joseph Campbell

  Hero, Thinking, Self

  Joseph Campbell, Bill D. Moyers (1988). “The Power of Myth”, Harmony

• If you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Eye, Thinking, Somewhere Else

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.40, Anchor

• You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Thinking, Giving, Dimensions

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.70, Anchor

• We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Eye, Voice, Earth

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.40, Anchor

• The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.

  Joseph Campbell

  Yoga, Eye, Ideas

• Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Circles, Generations, Tails

• The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Dwelling, Insanity

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.5, New World Library

• When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Track, Waiting

• I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.

  Joseph Campbell

  Feelings, Students, Consciousness

  "The Power of Myth".

• Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Doors, Doe

  Joseph Campbell, M. J. Abadie (1981). “The Mythic Image”, p.11, Princeton University Press

• Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

  Joseph Campbell

  Hero, Focus, Monsters

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.156, Anchor

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