
“Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.”
Lean Logic, (2016), p. 152, entry on Expectations https://leanlogic.online/expectations/
Foreword, Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices — A New Version (1979)
“Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.”
Lean Logic, (2016), p. 152, entry on Expectations https://leanlogic.online/expectations/
Myth and Reality (1963)
Context: In one way or another one "lives" the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.
"Living" a myth, then, implies a genuinely "religious" experience, since it differs from the ordinary experience of everyday life. The "religiousness" of this experience is due to the fact that one re-enacts fabulous, exalting, significant events, one again witnesses the creative deeds of the Supernaturals; one ceases to exist in the everyday world and enters a transfigured, auroral world impregnated with the Supernaturals' presence. What is involved is not a commemoration of mythical events but a reiteration of them. The protagonists of the myth are made present; one becomes their contemporary. This also implies that one is no longer living in chronological time, but in the primordial Time, the Time when the event first took place. This is why we can use the term the "strong time" of myth; it is the prodigious, "sacred" time when something new, strong, and significant was manifested. To re-experience that time, to re-enact it as often as possible, to witness again the spectacle of the divine works, to meet with the Supernaturals and relearn their creative lesson is the desire that runs like a pattern through all the ritual reiterations of myths. In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Saturday Review (22 March 1958)
Prof. Michael N. Nagler in his foreword to Gandhi the Man (1978) by Eknath Easwaran, p. 8 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=v_hpUlMRjWsC&pg=PA8&dq=%22As+human+beings,+our+greatness+lies%22
Misattributed
Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.”
“We all need to give our lives a sense of significance, of a meaning that lives on after our deaths”
2010s, Interview with Joshua Stanton (August 2017)
Context: If Kim Jong Un is Chosun, as the slogan goes, then his decline in popularity must be the state’s too? But it doesn’t work that way. We all need to give our lives a sense of significance, of a meaning that lives on after our deaths. The North Koreans get that from their nationalism, which is one with their patriotism. If they lose that, what do they have?