Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation
Joseph Campbell
If you lost everything, what would keep you going?
Maslow's five values (survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self development) are the values for which people live when they have nothing [greater] to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them. They are bores.
"A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship." -- Ortega y Gasset.
Two things pull people together: Aspiration and terror.
A ritual is the dramatic or visual representation of a myth. You engage in the myth by participating, provided that you are caught up in the image.
Images don't "mean" anything, they just are. They talk to some kernel in you that just is.
On the Nagasaki memorial: That which you think happened to you, you brought about. That which you did to others, happened to you.