"The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

[fiefoe]

A hero's progress:

• The "Wall of Paradise", .. is described by Nicholas of Cusa as constituted of the "coincidence of opposites," its gate being guarded by "the highest spirit of reason".. The pairs of opposites (being and not being...) are the clashing rocks that crush the traveler, but between which the heroes always pass.
• Time sealed (the 'good' mother) away, yet she is dwelling still, like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless sea.
  
• Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know... The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.
• a certain  baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence.
• How teach again, 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.
• each bounded in the tenuous, tight circle of itself-lashing, killing, hating, and desiring peace beyond victory
• The problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.
• Not everyone has a destiny: only the hero who has plunged to touch it, and has come up again - with a ring.
• The sword edge of the warrior flashes with the energy of the creative Source: before it fall the shells of the Outworn... the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo: Holdfast, the keeper of the past.
• From the point of view of the present there is such a recklessness in this deliverance of the future that it appears to be nihilistic.
  

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