# Myths of Light  ## Metadata - Author: [[Joseph Campbell]] - Full Title: Myths of Light - Category: #books ## Highlights - The goal of religions in the East is to get you to shift your focus from the phenomenal to the transcendent. So that you identify yourself not with the bulb, the head, the body, but with the consciousness, and when you have identified yourself with the consciousness, you have identified yourself with solar existence, what Kant called the noumenal world, and you were never born and you will never die. ([Location 668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=668)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The two consumptions — of flame feeding on the sacrifice, or of life feeding on life — are just the same. And then you die, and you are thrown to the flames, either the flames of the funeral pyre or the flames in the bellies of the worms, the vultures, or the hyenas. And you who were Agni now become soma. Agni, the fire, is of course also a god. Now we come to this Dionysian realization: the whole universe is an ever-burning sacrifice, unquenchable, inexhaustible, going on and on. Once one has had this realization, there are two directions one can take: one can either say yes to the horror of this world or say no to it. If you’re going to say yes, you affirm the world as it is. If you choose to say no, you turn your back on it. ([Location 794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=794)) - Tags: [[pink]] - This is absolute affirmation of the world as it is. And the problem is to put yourself into accord with the world not as it ought to be but as it is. ([Location 818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=818)) - Now, this is a balance; one reason that athletics and things like music performance and dance performance are so helpful as disciplines is that to do these things well you have to be both doing them and not doing them; there has to be a kind of relaxation and turning the activity over to the body, to the performing power, so that your consciousness rides along with it. That is very much like the saintly attitude. The still point rests in the middle and the activity swirls round about, and you are both the nirvanic point and the activity. The point where the Buddha sat is called the immovable point, but it is the world just as the hub is part of the wheel, and that’s because of the non-dual realization we get on the other side. ([Location 1251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=1251)) - We have evidence of a recognizable civilization at Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia going back as far as 8000 b.c. — at least five millennia prior to Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. ([Location 1468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=1468)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The goal of the various forms of yoga is to go into that realm of undifferentiated consciousness while remaining awake. We don’t have a counterpart to this concept in our Western vocabularies. It doesn’t even have a name in India; it is called simply the fourth state, and that is the fourth letter of the syllable, the level of silence. Because all the words that we speak refer either to waking images and logic, dream images and logic, or ignorance. We do not have words for this, and so it is the ultimate silence, but it is that which we are. The whole aim of Oriental religions, in contrast to ours, is to bring about in us an experience of our identity with that void which is no void, what the Buddhists call śūnyatā. ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=1733)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, is the sin of missing the moment of life, and the whole art of nonaction-in-action is the art of perpetual alertness. So that you are experiencing life all the time; you don’t have to do anything: it lives in you, it moves in you, it speaks itself. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2021)) - Tags: [[orange]] - The word zen, as you may realize, is a Japanese way of amazoncing a Chinese word, ćh’an. And this Chinese word, ćh’an, is a Chinese way of amazoncing a Sanskrit word, which is dhyāna, and dhyāna means “contemplation.” Contemplation of what? Contemplation of what one ought to be contemplating, namely the divine presence that inhabits all things. In India this contemplation is represented usually by the Buddha sitting, contemplating, bringing the kuṇḍalinī up, and so forth. This is the way of the monk who leaves the world, and turns inward, and contemplates inwardly. But there is another way of contemplating and this is the way of the landscape art, and the Chinese art, and the way of Tao; namely, seeing the thing through all things. This is known as walking contemplation, you walk around. When Buddhism went from India to China, it was gradually assimilated to the Chinese attitude toward life, and in the eighth century this turn was given, dhyāna, or ćh’an, meant rather walking than sitting. One was to undertake contemplation while walking, while being in the midst of life. ([Location 2087](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2087)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The grossest, roughest activity stains the soul black. Next comes the color dark blue. Then comes the color of smoke, then comes the color of fire, then yellow colors, and then white. The soul itself, in its pure state, is, remember, translucent. It isn’t even white. ([Location 2127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2127)) - There are two ways. One is through one’s own strength. This is called in Japanese jiriki, “self power.” The other is through what the Japanese call the Way of the Kitten: tariki, or “outside help.” Just as a kitten requires its mother to pick it up by the scruff of the neck and carry it to safe ground, so some souls require the action of an outside agent to carry them beyond themselves. ([Location 2155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2155)) - The fundamental notion is that once you have abandoned the world of desire and the world of fear, you undergo a psychological shift: your ego is dropped and you act simply as the world acts, in what is called spontaneity. You become, as it were, a tree. You become a plant. You live right out of yourself. ([Location 2248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2248)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Think of a pop bottle: when you take the top off, the bubbles come up. Where do they come from? Where do they go? Who knows — the void — but there they are coming up just the same. Just so the souls bubble up, from mineral form through the vegetables, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on . . . The whole world is an educational institution and every creature in it is trying to learn a lesson. ([Location 2397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2397)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Just so, a Jew who wishes to explore the mystical aspects of his religion is supposed to wait until he is forty, married, and steeped in the study of scripture and law before undertaking to study the Cabala. ([Location 2550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2550)) - Tags: [[pink]] - And that is the first doctrine of Buddhism: it cannot be taught. No experience can be taught. All that can be taught is the way to an experience. ([Location 2713](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07D4QPPM5&location=2713)) - Tags: [[pink]]