"You may have a success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to d… - Joseph Campbell

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!

CAMPBELL: Well, the mother’s right there. You’re born from your mother, and she’s the one who nurses you and instructs you and brings you up to the age when you must find your father. Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding your own character and destiny. There’s a notion that the character is inherited from the father, and the body and very often the mind from the mother. But it’s your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the

Many a tale of inguldgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. When the child outgrows the popular idyle of the mother breast and turns to face the world of specialized adult action, it passes, spiritually, into the sphere of the father-who becomes for his son, the sign of the future task, and for his daughter, the future husband. Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the good and evil, so does now the father, but with this complication - that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world.
The traditional idea of initiation combines an introduction of the candidate into the techniques, duties, and prerogatives of his vocation with a radical readjustment of his emotional relationship to the parental images. The mystagogue is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all inappropriate infantile cathexes-for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious motives of self-aggrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent consequently now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from infantile illusions of good and evil to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in understanding the revelation of being.