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Quotes about Mythology from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"The Shapeshifter There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing. mythology is like the god Proteus, "the ancient one of the sea, whose speech is sooth." The god "will make assay, and take all manner of shapes of things that creep upon the earth, of water likewise, and of fierce fire burn-ing." * The life-voyager wishing to be taught by Proteus must "grasp him steadfastly and press him yet the more," and at length he will appear in his proper shape." - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell (Get the book.)

"There are so many examples of fruits in mythology you can spend the rest of your life documenting them; in fact, that's kind of what happened to James George Frazer, author ofThe Golden Bough. He set out to explain an odd ritual involving forest-dwelling priests who attained priesthood by murdering their predecessor after plucking a certain sacred branch. This fateful branch was the eponymous Golden Bough. In his roundabout evaluation of what that ritual murder might have signified, Frazer's work ballooned to twelve volumes." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.) "According to Greek mythology, the earliest musical instrument—the lute—was invented by Apollo, who carved it out of a melon slice. Initially, many musical instruments were made out of fruits. African gourds were fashioned into string and percussion instruments. Music stores still sell items like totumo fruit gourds, lacquered fruit maracas and seed-rattler anklets. Some of the first guitars and violins in the United States were slave-made stringed gourds. Humans have been singing about fruits since at least 1000 b.c." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Our mythology repeats that; we do not have stories where anyone lives happily ever after."8 Because depression was not considered a negative condition, SSRIs have been slow to take hold in Japan. No SSRIs were sold there until 1999. In order to create a market, pharmaceutical companies had to actually invent a phrase for mild depression: kokoro no kaze, which, roughly translated, means one's soul catching cold." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"They described their experience and made Akasha an essential element of the philosophy and mythology of India. In the twentieth century Akasha was brilliantly described by Swami Vivekananda. According to Vivekananda, Akasha is omnipresent and all-penetrating in the universe. Everything evolved out of Akasha. It is Akasha that became the human body, the animal body, the plants, every form that we see, everything that exists. At the beginning of the universe there was only Akasha, and at its end there will be only Akasha again: the solids, the liquids, and the gases all melt back into it." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.)

"In other words, might the shared belief in the potential of medical science be, in large part, our cultural mythology? We tend to look upon myths with romantic condescension as the stories of primitive societies that provide shared meaning and hope and ease the prospect of suffering and death—stories that are made of "facts" that we (scientifically sophisticated as we are) know are not really true. Our belief that we are too scientifically grounded to succumb to such nonrational beliefs may, in fact, be our myth." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Interval Training for Fat Loss HOLD ON TO your seats because I'm about to burst one of the biggest bubbles in exercise mythology The "fat-burning zone" is an urban legend. Like most urban legends, slaying it is easier said than done. Treadmill manufacturers continue to insist on putting "fat-burning" programs on their machines, and legions of aerobic teachers continue to teach people that they must achieve some mythical heart rate zone during exercise to lose weight and burn fat." - Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why (Get the book.)

"An enduring image from classical mythology is the tale of the Titans, earth's first rulers, whose king, Cronos, ate his own children. Like Cronos, Earth's first life form was about to evolve its future larder. That planet that they occupied had been utterly made over by the activities of bacterial and single-celled eukaryotic life. The photosyn-thetic1' cyanobacteria—in older texts, they are called blue-green algae even though they are not algae, and are usually neither blue nor green—had unleashed on the defenseless earth one of the most corrosive substances imaginable: free oxygen." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"Indeed, they've played a prominent role in mythology and religion. The ancient Egyptians, for example, considered the ear a receptacle of life's breath. They believed that the "air of life" entered the right ear, while the "air of death" entered the left. And the Egyptians, like people in many other ancient cultures, pierced their ears, believing that metal kept evil spirits from invading the body. Centuries later, sailors pierced their ears thinking it would improve their eyesight." - Joan Liebmann-Smith, Ph. D., and Jacqueline Nardi Egan, Body Signs: From Warning Signs to False Alarms...How to Be Your Own Diagnostic Detective (Get the book.)

"Our mythology is the way we explain the world and our place in it, a mythology that forms a real and unmistakable boundary. That boundary is everything we know. Some call this boundary an island of safety. I call it "the island of the known." On this island everything is explained. Whatever happens, we can assimilate it into something we know and have an opinion about it. And if we don't know, we assume we do and frequently develop an expectation about how it should be. There are two very interesting things about the island of the known. First, it's almost invisible." - Ray Dodd, BeliefWorks: The Art of Living Your Dreams (Get the book.)

"In Norse mythology, the Goddess Frigga brought children to paradise bundled in floating strawberries. The hero of Paradise Regained is presented with fruits on the doorstep of the kingdom of heaven. This return to the field of creation is called redemption. Examples abound, from the wild fruits outside Eldorado in Voltaire's Candide to the apples shimmering like huge soap bubbles in Hans Christian Andersen's The Bell, which tells of a young boy's religious awakening." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age. 2. The Function of Myth, Cult, and Meditation In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male 2 Ibid., IV, 400-406." - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell (Get the book.)

"Physicians were itinerant craftsmen, ministering and operating in the homes of those who could pay their fee. mythology began to give way to scientific medicine thanks to Hippocrates, who was born on the island of Cos about 460 bce. On his death at the age of eighty, he left a legacy of shrewd clinical observations and ethical commentaries that have held theological and superstitious clinical theories and practices somewhat at bay ever since. Hippocrates' clinical observations were complemented by the theories of his contemporary Plato to spawn the school of medicine of the "Dogmatists." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"His broad and unique approach to psychology included the application of a rigorous scientific method but also emphasized understanding the mind through exploring the worlds of religion, philosophy, mythology, and symbolism. Jung's work focused heavily on the "unconscious," which would include the subconscious as Freud defined it, plus what Jung called "the collective unconscious," a storehouse of latent memory traces inherited from man's ancestral past, including not only the history of man as a separate species but our pre-human ancestry as well, the whole history of human evolution." - Rick Levy and Lou Aronica, Miraculous Health: How to Heal Your Body by Unleashing the Hidden Power of Your Mind (Get the book.)

"Since the Enlightenment, mythology has been regarded as the province of more primitive minds?something humanity has moved beyond in its embrace of scientific methodology. But has science been successful in purging contemporary civilization of all myths? I don't believe that it has or likely ever will. In fact, although we depend on the objectivity of science, scientifically influenced fields such as medicine are often rife with their own myths and misapprehensions." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.)

"With the energy released by this understanding comes the determination to change our lifestyle, our dietary patterns, to achieve this result. The mythology supported by the allopathic treatment approach, which has indeed not been particularly successful, is that diabetes is a one-way, downhill road to death involving multiple complications. The statistics show that diabetes as currently treated will take off 10-19 years from a person's life." - Gabriel Cousens, There Is a Cure for Diabetes: The Tree of Life 21-Day+ Program (Get the book.)

"According to Greek mythology, the goddess Athena endowed the olive tree with great healing powers. Modern medical science is now showing that she really knew her stuff! So much in fact that in 2004 the Food and Drug Administration permitted food containing olive oil to carry labels saying it may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. Although limited, the evidence suggests that eating about 2 tablespoons (2 3 grams) of olive oil daily may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease due to the monounsaturated fat content." - Stephen Sinatra, M.D. and James C., M.D. Roberts, Reverse Heart Disease Now: Stop Deadly Cardiovascular Plaque Before It's Too Late (Get the book.)

"Even though the product tastes great and is made primarily with sugar, the mythology says it's going to have these biological effects on my body. That's the effect that I want, therefore I will believe in the mythology and purchase and consume this product. That's why Slim Fast has been such a hugely successful product. It's sold in convenience stores like Wal-Mart, and it has achieved prominent positioning in those stores, even though no person in their right mind would describe this product as being an effective weight loss product." - Mike Adams, Spam Filters for Your Brain (Get the book.) "The mythology is that if I use these cosmetics, then I will be younger. If I put this makeup on my face or put this skin cream on my skin, then I will appear youthful, people will like me more and I will be accepted. As I mentioned earlier, what's most interesting about this mythology is that it's partially true. Thus, it's not entirely a myth, but the myth component is that it will alter you internally and make you into a different person based on your outward appearance." - Mike Adams, Spam Filters for Your Brain (Get the book.)

"In the same way, we all have a personal mythology that now guides us through our life that contains every belief, rule, and agreement we've assembled. We each have a worldview supported by a body of personal myths associated with every event, every person we've ever met, and every situation we've experienced. Our mythology is the stories we tell ourselves and anyone who will listen about our personal history, our ideals, our opinions, our family, our friends, and even our enemies." - Ray Dodd, BeliefWorks: The Art of Living Your Dreams (Get the book.)

"Colin Campbell says, "The story of protein is part science, part culture and a good dose of mythology" (The China Study). In the late 1800s, the dairy and meat industries in Europe popularized the idea that we needed lots of protein. The average American eats about 60-120 grams of protein per day. It has been proven that we need only 25-45 grams a day and maybe even as little as 15 grams. Certainly dietary protein is essential, but that does not mean we need excessive amounts of it." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"Greek mythology reveals Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) CHEW ON THIS! that fennel was favored by Dionysus, the Greek god of food and wine, and that knowledge of the gods was passed on to man via a fennel stalk. Where Is Fennel Grown? Wild fennel is the form mainly cultivated in central and eastern Europe, while sweet fennel is grown mainly in France, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Much of the seed of European commerce comes from India. In the U.S., California and Arizona are the top producers. Why Should I Eat Fennel? Fennel is a source of fiber, folate, and potassium." - David W. Grotto, RD, LDN, 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life! (Get the book.)

"In Greek mythology, ether was thought of as the essence of space itself and described as the "air breathed by the gods." Both Pythagoras and Aristotle identified it as the mysterious fifth element of creation, following the four familiar elements of fire, air, water, and earth. In later times, alchemists continued to use the words of the Greeks to describe our world?terminology that endured until the birth of modern science." - Gregg Braden, The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief (Get the book.)

"In Chinese mythology, peaches tended by Hsi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, are said to grant eternal life. She dwells in a palace encircled by a golden wall on the mountains at the summit of the world. Her garden is full of perfumed blossoms and trees dripping with blue-green fairy jewels. Beside a lake of gems, where invisible instruments play gentle melodies, Hsi Wang Mu's beautiful daughters serve peaches that take three thousand years to ripen. These fruits render the eater immortal." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Many who have tried the raw food diet feel such a mental, physical, emotional and spiritual shift, indeed, such a radical transformation, that they find it easy to believe that the "fall from grace" referred to in the mythology of numerous cultures arose from the cooking of food. There was a time, eons ago, which most ancient storytellers spoke of, when people lived in harmony with nature and in tune with many of our untapped mental abilities, living in peace with all other creatures." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"The pomegranate appears in Egyptian mythology and art, and was carried by Egyptians in the desert because of its thirst-quenching juice. The ancient city of Granada in Spain was renamed after the fruit during the Moorish period. Spanish conquistadors brought the fruit to the Americas in the early 1500s. found in the fruit is the exact same number of commandments in the Where Are Pomegranates Grown? Pomegranates grow abundantly throughout Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean region, and the United States. California's San Joaquin Valley is home to most pomegranate orchards." - David W. Grotto, RD, LDN, 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life! (Get the book.) "Wheat gods and goddesses existed in Roman, Sumerian, and Greek mythology. Today, in parts of China, wheat is still considered sacred. It was introduced to the Western Wheat (Triticum spp.) TELLING THE "WHOLE" TRUTH Hemisphere in the fifteenth century when Columbus came to the New World. Wheat was not cultivated in the United States until the late nineteenth century. About one-third of the world's population is dependent on wheat for nourishment. Along with modern technology, refinement of whole wheat blossomed. White bread became a status symbol among the Greeks and Romans. By 50 a.d." - David W. Grotto, RD, LDN, 101 Foods That Could Save Your Life! (Get the book.)

"Whether your viewpoint is informed by premodern mythology, early modern dualism, late modern materialism, postmodern subjectivism, or integral philosophy's recognition of objective, subjective, and intersubjective realms, it is framed by assumptions that are essentially metaphysical. However, the idea of the objective, subjective, and intersubjective domains of evolution seems far less metaphysical when we see how these categories are simply descriptions of the different types of evolution." - Steve McIntosh, Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution (Get the book.)

"I knew that the coastal Polynesians had an involved sky mythology, but these were Melanesians here. Back at the fire, nobody knew any sky stories. I figured that since the land was so heavily forested, maybe they didn't integrate the night sky into their culture. Leo asked one of the oldest men about it. "If you see pictures in the sky, the devil put them there to confuse you!" "He's an Evangelical," Leo informed me. We spent another three days walking and talking to villagers about organizing co-ops and working together for their common benefit." - Dean Cycon, Javatrekker: Dispatches From the World of Fair Trade Coffee (Get the book.)

"But it's enough to fool many in the scientific community: doctors, journalists, and even so-called "skeptics" who fall for the mythology of sound science as the foundation of modern medicine. In another time, they would have made fine members of the Flat Earth Society, and would have accused anyone of quackery who dared say the Earth was a sphere. Let's take a closer look at some of the scientific fraud that typifies the behavior of drug companies and conventional medicine." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

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