The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. - Joseph Campbell

...an ameliorative mythology [that through] prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life... This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her — it is not a marriage.

MOYERS: Is this a chief motif of mythological stories through time? CAMPBELL: No, the idea of life as an ordeal through which you become released from the bondage of life belongs to the higher religions. I don’t think I see anything like that in aboriginal mythology. MOYERS: What is the source of it? CAMPBELL: I don’t know. It would probably come from people of spiritual power and depth who experienced their lives as being inadequate to the spiritual aspect or dimension of their being.

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).