I am beginning to realize how much of my life I have lived in a world of myth when reality is as close to me as my skin. Like many of my fellow humans, I have relied on myth to make sense of something I could just as well have observed. Stories, imagination and fantasy are such a weak mythological substitution for observation and awareness, but it is a substitution I so readily have made.
I agree with Joseph Campbell that Myth has great and amazing power. It is often an entry point to make sense of a world that would otherwise be difficult to figure out. It is a lesson our ancestors learned and taught. It is a practice that is woven into the fabric of our culture and experience.
At Easter, I received an email that started with the declaration “He is Risen,” a slogan that has for ages attempted to summarize and underscore a supposed reality of a christian teaching. It is a story told for centuries to point to a reality experienced by my ancestors. As much as I love a story, the myth can also obscure, make the reality distant from my awareness. Rather than rise to the understanding of the reality, I get lost in the story and never get beyond. I choose to be a dreamer, not an observer.
Some of the Greeks figured this out over 2500 years ago when they put the world of Gods aside and celebrated the power of observation. Fortunately, some people in India picked up this realization while the western world pushed it aside and went back to the mythological world of human-like Gods for many centuries.
I am now learning that as a human, I am an intellectual creature. I can rely on my perception and observation to live in a meaningful way. What I once considered an act of intellect was actually my imagination doing its best imitation of intellect. I know I can be free of imagination and mythology to observe things as they actually are, not as I imagine them to be. I do this every day.
Stories, even stories from my own experience, can shape my imagination and how I see the world. However, I now know that I can go beyond, deeper than my imagination. I do it but it is often not easy.
I think that, as a species, we are struggling to evolve out of the realm of myth. None of us can ever do it unless we recognize that we actually are living in a world shaped by myth. As a member of the human species, I am trying to move into a world of observation, out of imagination, something my species has been slowly doing for about 2500 years. In evolutionary terms this is but a blink in time.
Perhaps I have to remain partially in the realm of myth, like my ancestors, until I am ready and able to see things as they actually are. But I don’t intend to stay there very long. I still want to be able to merge with the intelligence of the Universe, which I can only do with observation, not imagination. Before I can do that, I have to shed my mythological culture and all its wiles. I must strip down to my own skin, shed all the appurtenances of my imagination if I am to enter the world that exists inside, behind and beyond appearances.
First I want to learn to observe with an open and unimpeded mind. I want to learn to perceive without any preconceptions of what I am seeing. Some of the Greeks tried to explain how to do it. Some of the great thinkers of India tried. They all said something like “Pay attention” “Be awake” “open your mind and senses to what is around you”.
I am trying to put aside the stories I have been told of the past and the ones I am told in my daily media encounters. It is better for me if I allow my imagination to rest and relax.