No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.

The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

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

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that's waiting to be yours. Move, move, move.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.

The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, 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, and 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.

If you are falling....dive.

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.

All religions are true but none are literal.

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.