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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity


 

How To Sit Quietly
In A Room Alone

Dr. Joseph Campbell: "You must have a room,
a sacred place, a center of transformation." 

 


 

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from the book, “The Power Of Myth,”
a discussion with Dr. Joseph Campbell 

 

Moyers: You write in “The Mythic Image” about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a sacred place?

Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Moyers: The sacred place does for you what the plains did for the hunter.

Campbell: For them, the whole world was a sacred place… Where is your “bliss station”? You have to find it.