Thursday, November 20, 2008

Quote from Joseph Campbell – ‘An Open Life’

What the Eastern teachers are telling us is that the important thing is not what happened thousands of years ago when the Buddha was born or when Jesus was crucified: what’s important is what’s happening in you now. And what’s important is not your membership in a religious community: it’s what that membership is doing to your psyche.

The divine lives within you. Our Western religions tend to put the divine outside the earthly world and in God, in heaven. But the whole sense of the Oriental is that the kingdom of heaven is within you. Who is in heaven? God is. Where’s God? God’s within you. And what is God? God is a personification of that world-creative energy and mystery which is beyond thinking and beyond naming.

We think not only that our God has been named and known, but that he’s given us a whole set of rules. But this system of rules is not from God, it’s from man, and the rules are man’s clues as to how to get to the realization of God. …

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like what Joseph Campbell says. I do believe there is something about God that transcends our individual lives. It may be a spirit, a power, a presence, which may or may not be personal, on which we depend.