Myth Accounts for Our Being Here Why does being here count for so much? The feelings that arise from and attach to our life’s experiences suggest there’s a meaning. Our various philosophies may provide a rationale for our existence. But when the going gets rough, do these intellectual devices serve us where it counts—in the heart, in our felt sense of connection with God? To experience that divine spark of meaning within our hearts that gives us a glimpse of our soul’s birthright, we need myth. In our rational age, we need to hear it explained, time and again, just why it is that we respond so instinctively to story, and how it is that story can illuminate and connect us with truth where explanations fail to serve. In our emerging renewed appreciation for myth, explorers of archetypal psychology, originally students of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, have led the way. A recent proponent of the value of myth is James Hollis, who in his new book, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life (Inner City Books), helps us taste in these stories the psychedelic substance of sacred meaning. Our psyche is a part of the natural world. It has an inherent or instinctive tendency to find meaning. The meaning-seeking, connection-making dimension of the human psyche is a given fact. The prime symptom of this fact the myth. Myths come from creation itself, or God, mediated through the human psyche. While our bodies are made of earth, the symbols that the psyche uses to express myths are alive with divine spirit or energy. When a symbol no longer speaks to us, it means that the divine spirit is gone from that symbol. Idolatry is to worship a symbol as a literal reality. It is to respond to a myth as a factual history. Fundamentalism is the sin of literalism. It worships the shell, the vessel, and ignores the mystery, the living spirit that dwells, for the moment, in that vessel. As above, so below: We can commit the same idolatrous sin by clinging to a static image of ourselves, rather than allowing the spirit to unfold within us. The mid-life crisis is often the story of a person resisting letting go of an old self-image so that the spirit can express in a new form. Our culture, maybe our entire world, is going through a mid-life crisis, certainly a pre-transformational crisis, a spiritual emergence (or emergency!). The myth of modernism, the scientific worldview that has gone to the extreme of fundamentalist scientistic materialism, no longer serves us. God is not dead, but the old vessel no longer holds the vital spirit that enlivens our soul. A new myth is forming. To properly value it requires us to sharpen our myth-appreciation skills made dull by the powerful hypnotic spell of scientistic literalism. In this newly emerging myth, we ourselves participate actively in its creation. We are its co-creators. For some, the literalists, the creation of meaning is less savory than its discovery, for the latter suggests a God external to us, providing us with a fixed objective, a secure format within which to live. We may be tempted to avoid the responsibility of individualized myth-making, either through infantilism (an attitude of whining and avoiding personal responsibility), chemical dependency (experiencing oneness by obliterating our sense of personal burden), or ideological dependence (borrowing someone else’s myth). If we do not relish worshiping a husk, then to connect with the living spirit requires that we assume some responsibility for our individual role in myth. Accept that responsibility and God becomes alive once again, within. It is not narcissism, but knowing that one is an individual and yet one with the whole. One prays, "Not my will, but Thine," and looks within oneself for the expression of "Thy will." |