Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
Seek to know the power that is within you.
The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.
Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive
There is no security in following the call to adventure.
All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be.
Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.
The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.
You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.
Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.
How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.
There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.
The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.
I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.
Regrets are illuminations come too late.
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.
The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.
The concept of time shuts off eternity.
If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?
The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.
At the darkest moment comes the light.
I should have said, 'Follow your blisters.'
The influence of a vital being vitalizes.
Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
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.
The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.
I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.
The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.
You've got to find the force inside you.
An old Apache storyteller reminds us
You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off.
If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.
Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.
Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life
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.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
Love is a friendship set to music.
Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
The process of nature cannot be evil.
There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
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.
Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.
If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.
The big problem of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, 'Man is the sick animal.' Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?
