Example of Understatement: (line from a dream last night) “Life is a bit of a gamble.”
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Well, there you go. The proverbial roll of the dice especially in personal choices and decisions. We do make (up) our own lives as we go. There are many things we can count on these daze including more and continual change as well as new conflicts and challenges. Certainly personal growth requires risk and often taking the plunge to move forward in whatever ways.
Many of Joseph Campbell’s views and quotes were based on the latter idea. A sampling:
“A shift in consciousness is all it takes.”
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“To refuse the call means stagnation.”
“When this refusal of the call happens, there is a kind of drying up, a sense of life lost.”
“The call is to leave a certain social situation, move onto your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.”
“You enter the forest at its darkest point, where there is no path.”
“Where you stumble there lies your treasure.”
“As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.”
“Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.”
“If you follow your bliss, you will always have your bliss, money or not. If you follow money, you may lose it, and you will have nothing.”
“Snake and moon both die to the old, shed their shadow to be reborn.”
“When threatened by fear and desire, let ego go.”
“The limitation comes where your judgement comes.”
“The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to new creative movement.”
(These and all other Campbell quotes are excerpted from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion)
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highly recommended reading and viewing: Campbell’s The Power of Myth