Daily Reflection
You see, these are experiences that go past ethical judgments. Ethics is wiped out. Our religions, with the accent on the human…also stress the ethical. God is good. God is horrific the end of the world?
Now, in the Buddhist systems, particularly as we get them from Tibet, the Buddhas appear in two aspects; there is the peaceful aspect and there is the wrathful aspect of the deity. Now, if you’re clinging to your ego and its little world and hanging on, and the deity wants to open you, the wrathful aspect comes. It seems to you terrible. But if you are open, and open enough, then that same deity would be experienced as bliss.
—Joseph Campbell in conversation with Bill Moyers, 1988
(*It might be helpful to read “deities” above as itself a representation/myth of the path to liberation)
Myth is expressed in thousands of forms throughout history, but its common themes of self-discovery, fear-facing, and rebirth is an ethical framework all …
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