A Quote by James Taylor
Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way.
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Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.
The more real things get, the more like myths they become. There have always been myths, but the myths of earlier times were, Im convinced, bad ones, because they made people sick. So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well.
Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.
Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is.
I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.
Read myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people's myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts -- but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message.
There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought, and he therefore cannot carry his own reflection to any logical conclusion.
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.
Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices.
Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.
Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.
The difference between deafness and any other disability is that there is no way to put yourself in a position of knowing what it would be like because you can't stop yourself from hearing your own breath or your own heartbeat. You can not remove sound entirely from your life. You can get a sense of what being blind is like by closing and covering your eyes which provides a source of empathy because we can all project ourselves to that. But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't.
The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.
Your being alone is important and has validity beyond any philosophy. That is the message that you are trying to give to yourself. You are each trying to rediscover for yourselves, in your terms now - after centuries of myths and distortions - the validity of your own beings.
All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.
Throughout life, people will try to shake your faith in yourself. When this happens, remind yourself that the only way they can succeed is if you allow it. When you walk down the street of life, always hold your head high and keep walking. Don't ever let anyone shake your faith in yourself, because that's really all that you have.
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