The life of the spirit may be fairly
represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment. At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944)


Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987)


The World Navel, then, is ubiquitous. And since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plenitude of both good and evil. Ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, pleasure and pain, are equally its production. “To God all things are fair and good and right,” declares Heraclitus; “but men hold some things wrong and right." Hence the figures worshiped in the temples of the world are not always beautiful, always benign, or even necessarily virtuous. Like the deity of the book of Job, they far transcend the scales of human value. And likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man. Virtue is but the pedagogigal prelude to the culminating insight, which goes beyond the pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centred ego and makes the transpersonal centeredness possible; but when that has been achieved, what then of pain or pleasure, vice and virtue, either of our own ego or any other? Through all, the transcendent force is then perceived which lives in all, in all is wonderful, and is worthy, in all, of our profound obeisance.
From "The hero with a thousand faces"

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