“Now, all these myths that you have heard and that resonate with you, those are the elements from round about that you are building into a form in your life. The thing worth considering is how they relate to each other in your context, not how they relate to something out there - how they were relevant on the North American prairies or in the Asian jungles hundreds of years ago, but how they are relevant now - unless by contemplating their former meaning you can begin to amplify your own understanding of the role they play in your life.”

— Joseph Campbell, “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation “

“When we accept this final point — surely the most heterodox, from the point of view of most philosophers — we are for the first time in a position to study and to teach Indian, Chinese, European, and Arabic philosophy alongside one another in a serious and adequate way. When we accept, for example, that all of the great Axial Age civilizations, to use Karl Jaspers’s helpful label, are the product of a single suite of broad historical changes that swept the Eurasian continent, and thus that Chinese, Indian, and Greek thought-worlds are not aboriginal in any meaningful sense (neither are Cree or Huron or Inuit, for that matter, but this can be dealt with another time), then all of a sudden it becomes possible to study, say, the Buddha and his followers not as an expression of some absolutely other Eastern ‘wisdom’, but instead as a local expression of global developments, or as a node in a web. (…)

There are, so to speak, tunnels in the basement between India and Greece, but we’re afraid to go down there. And so the result is that we are not so much liberating philosophy from culture, as we are making each culture’s philosophy irreducibly and incomparably its own, just as if it were a matter of displaying folk costumes in some Soviet ethnographic museum, or in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This is unscientific, unrigorous, and unacceptable in any other academic discipline.”

— Justin E. H. Smith, “What Is ‘Non-Western’ Philosophy?”

“When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

— Umberto Eco

“In the ancient cultural places of the world there was a temple, a church or a cathedral in its center. From there came the order of life. In every modern big city there is a bank building in its center. In my ‘Pied Piper’ I have tried to depict this as a kind of demon cult, where money is something to be prayed to like something sacred. It’s even being expressed there in words that it is ‘God’.”

— Michael Ende, “Michael Ende’s Last Words to the Japanese”

“The transformations of culture do not take place in history, they take place in myth. A model, a hypothesis, or a myth is a way of rendering the invisible. Because the unconscious is outside time, it can perceive transformations beyond the limits of the ego. These unconscious perceptions are expressed in art or mythologies. We ourselves are living in an age of cultural transformation, but if you went to the experts to ask for a description, they would tell you nothing. You have to go to those who are at home in the unconscious and in the subconscious, the artists and prophets: through myth and symbol in art, science fiction or religion, they will describe the present by speaking about the future.”

— William I. Thompson

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”

— Alan Watts

— xkcd, “Honor Societies”

“So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. In other words, look at the number of people we know who are terrified of silence, and who have to have something going all the time, some noise streaming into their ears. They’re doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness. And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to escape from it. Or people who just want to get together. As we say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more time running away from themselves. Isn’t that wretched? What a definition. What an experience of self if it’s something you’ve always got to be running away from and forgetting. Say you read a mystery story. Why? So you forget yourself. You join a religion. Why? To forget yourself. You get absorbed in a political movement. Why? To forget yourself. Well it must be a pretty miserable kind of self if you have to forget it like that. Now for a person who doesn’t have an isolated sense of self, he has no need to run away from it, because he knows.”

— Alan Watts

“This is very important — to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re gonna lose everything… just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That’s why they’re all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful.”

— Charles Bukowski