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Enchantment and Natural Mysticism
What we face is a challenge to recognize one community on this earth, and what we find in the face of this challenge is everybody pulling back into his own in-group. I don’t want to name the in-groups, but we all know pretty well what they are. In our country we call them pressure groups. They are racial groups, class groups, religious groups, economic groups, and they are all tangling with each other.
For any people to say, ‘We are it and the others are other’ — these are dangerous people. And there are religions still doing this. The new thing that is very difficult for people to realize is our society is the human race. And our little suburb is the globe…
- Joseph Campbell, Myth and Meaning
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Natural mysticism is the environment of childhood; it is what nurtures us. The child is exposed to the cosmic revelation from birth and infancy. This is the child’s world, a world that has a fresh, magical, numinous quality…They approach the divine, and are approached and enveloped by the divine reality, through the natural world. It is the medium through which they experience and process their religious experiences…They see all of life through this timeless mother before everything is interpreted for them in the categories of others.
