Frasi di Joseph Campbell

Origine: Citato in Will Tuttle, Cibo per la pace, traduzione di Marta Mariotto, Sonda, Casale Monferrato, 2014, p. 173. ISBN 978-88-7106-742-1

Variante: You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

Variante: Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.
Origine: The Power of Myth

Origine: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Origine: The Power of Myth

Episode 2, Chapter 13-14
The Power of Myth (1988)
Contesto: Campbell: Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. There's a wonderful formula that the Buddhists have for the Bodhisattva, the one whose being (sattva) is illumination (bodhi), who realizes his identity with eternity and at the same time his participation in time. And the attitude is not to withdraw from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but to realize that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder and to come back and participate in it. "All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved which is sorrow. Loss, loss, loss.
Moyers: That's a pessimistic note.
Campbell: Well, you have to say yes to it, you have to say it's great this way. It's the way God intended it.

Origine: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2
Contesto: The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.... Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

Origine: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1
Contesto: Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

Variante: Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

Origine: Creative Mythology

Variante: The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Origine: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Origine: The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Origine: Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research

Origine: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Origine: The Power of Myth

Origine: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Origine: The Power of Myth

Origine: The Power of Myth (book), p. 120
Contesto: Moyers: Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?
Campbell: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a 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 your field of bliss, and they open 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.

Lecture 1A, 13:45
Mythology and the Individual (1997)
Contesto: The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. Doubt comes in, and so forth. You must remember: all of the great traditions, and little traditions, in their own time were scientifically correct. That is to say, they were correct in terms of the scientific image of that age. So there must be a scientifically validated image. Now you know what has happened: our scientific field has separated itself from the religious field, or vice-versa. … This divorce this is a fatal thing, and a very unfortunate thing, and a totally unnecessary thing.

Origine: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2, page 87 (New World Library, 2008)
Contesto: (...) we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best, with only tentative, impromptu, an not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern 'enlightened' individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.