It’s important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.

Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3

When a superior man hears of the Tao,

he immediately begins to embody it.

When an average man hears of the Tao,

he half believes it, half doubts it.

When a foolish man hears of the Tao,

it wouldn’t be the Tao.

THE SHORT VERSION:

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; the passages from dream to vision to the Gods, and they are you.

THE LONG STORY:

Dreams are self luminous, they shine on themselves, as Gods do.

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; the passages from dream to vision to the Gods, and they are you.

All the Gods, all the Hells, all the Heavens are within you.
The God is in you, it is not something that happened somewhere else a long time ago, it’s in you. This is the truth of truths, this is what the Gods and myths are all about, so find them in yourself, and take them into yourself, and you will be awaken in your mythology and in your life. In deep dreamless sleep, the consciousness is still there, but it is covered over by darkness.

But suppose you could find that consciousness, supposed you could go into deep sleep awake, to go awake into that sphere where there’s consciousness, but consciousness of no specific thing.

Waking consciousness deals only with what has happened, deep sleep holds all that is future, because the future can come from nowhere else but the energy of the psyche.

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There is an old Zen saying that you can try to explain to someone how an orange tastes, but how can you describe it, really? Until you’ve tasted an orange, you have no way of truly knowing. And once you’ve tasted one, what is there to say?

- Ed Brickell, “Genesis Run” (Winter 2008)

The fashioning of tools beautifully symmetrical beyond the requirements of mere use marks the beginning of the history of art already in the period of Homo erectus. The pebble tools of Homo habilis and choppers found at Choukoutien can be explained – like the occasional tools of apes – in economic terms. Such an implement as the Acheulean hand axe, however, gives evidence of a grade of consciousness equal to satisfaction beyond the economic. Its size and the undamaged surface suggest an application to a symbolic function. Such an object of “divinely superfluous beauty” (Robinson Jeffers’ phrase) may have served a ceremonial function. If so, the beginnings of ritual, as well as of art, must together be assigned (in Europe, at least) to the era of Homo erectus.

- Joseph Campbell

- From the documentary film: Objectified

Understanding is like water flowing in a stream. Wisdom and knowledge are solid and can block our understanding.
Knowledge can be an obstacle for understanding.
If we take something to be the truth, we may cling to it so much that even if the truth comes and knocks at our door, we won’t want to let it in. We have to be able to transcend our previous knowledge the way we climb up a ladder.
If we are on the fifth rung and think that we are very high, there is no hope for us to step up to the sixth. We must learn to transcend our own views. Understanding, like water, can flow, can penetrate. Views, knowledge, and even wisdom are solid, and can block the way of understanding.

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

The killer is the category called ‘neither’. If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success.
Avoiding the thing that’s easy to survive keeps you from encountering the very thing you’re after.And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us

- Seth Godin