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1 " Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. "
― Joseph Campbell , The Power of Myth
2 " Master Palaemon's hand, dry and wrinkled as a mummy's, groped until it found mine. " Among the initiates of religion it is said, 'You are an epopt always.' The reference is not only to knowledge but to their chrism, whose mark, being invisible, is ineradicable. You know our chrism." I nodded again." Less even than theirs can it be washed away. Should you leave now, men will only say, 'He was nurtured by the torturers.' But when you have been anointed they will say, 'He is a torturer.' You may follow the plow or the drum, but still you will hear, 'He is a torturer.' Do you understand that? "
3 " Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms. "
4 " Try to notice-in all your thoughts, sensations, and direct encounters-the objects and 'outside-standers' that make appearance meaningful. For each object encountered or referred to, note it and embrace it in its immediate givenness as being part of 'you'. You can do this both by saying to yourself, " That too is 'I'," and by extending your sense of located awareness to embrace the apparently separate and distant object.This exercise helps to counteract the tendency to polarize experience, which creates a self that is cut off from the rest of reality. It might at first seem to set up a monomaniacal selfishness, but actually, if practiced carefully, it will undermine the idea of a solid and continuous 'self'. The exercise might also seem to cultivate confusion between things themselves and thoughts about these things and about the world. But this is not the case. By initially forcing the subject and object together in this way, we can soon progress to the perception of a 'time' which naturally gives the subject and object as together. This process also shows the felt difference between the thought about a thing and the 'thing itself'-between the reference and its referent-in a new light. We can progress from an artificial intimacy to an uncontrived one, and further, to an intimacy which simply is and which involves neither a self nor an object. This intimacy does not reach out to things elsewhere, nor does it assimilate them all in an ordinary location 'here'. "
