Joseph Campbell - God Quotes

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Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Joseph Campbell
Is the god the source, or is the god a human manner of conceiving of the force and energy that supports the world? In our tradition God is a male. This male and female differentiation is made, however, within the field of time and space, the field of duality. If God is beyond duality, you cannot say that God is a "He." You cannot say God is a "She." You cannot say God is an "It."

Joseph Campbell
The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Joseph Campbell
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
The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.

Joseph Campbell
I am Shiva-this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Hea ven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other.

Joseph Campbell
The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.

Joseph Campbell
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.

Joseph Campbell
The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

Joseph Campbell
Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.

Joseph Campbell
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

Joseph Campbell
In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.

Joseph Campbell
Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure 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; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

Joseph Campbell
Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

Joseph Campbell
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

Joseph Campbell
And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?

Joseph Campbell
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites—man and woman, good and evil—are as holy as that of a god.

Joseph Campbell
Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.

Joseph Campbell
It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.

Joseph Campbell
Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is.

Joseph Campbell
It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

Joseph Campbell
I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine—it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Joseph Campbell