It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance,… - Joseph Campbell

I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor. He thought he was a fact. And when he said, “I am God,” a voice was heard to say, “You are mistaken, Samael.” “Samael” means “blind god”: blind to the infinite Light of which he is a local historical manifestation. This is known as the blasphemy of Jehovah — that he thought he was God.

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: 'There, words do not reach.' Such queries fall short of the question. And yet — as the student must also understand — although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi ('Thou art that') is the ultimate word in this connection.

By contrast, in the Western sphere — in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised — God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship — and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental.