Archive for the 'myth' Category

Misunderstanding Myth

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Ken
on April 20, 2008
in carl jung, christianity and myth
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It’s all the rage these days. Misunderstanding myth, that is. In the Was Jesus Wrong post at Chrisendom, the comment string contained a lot of misunderstanding of myth. Many believe that if the creation story in Genesis is wrong, then Christianity falls apart. And by wrong, they mean factually, scientifically wrong. If there was not a single, original man and woman (aka Adam and Eve) created some 6000 years ago — and most scientific evidence says there wasn’t — then how can Christianity be taken seriously? My answer is that these people totally misunderstand myth.

Here are some thoughts from Richard Heinberg’s Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age …

In most conversation, the word myth is interchangeable with lie. We speak of exposing myths, dispelling them, and laying them to rest. This equation of myth with fiction is not particularly new; indeed, it can be traced back at least as far as the sixth century B.C., when the earliest Greek philosophers undertook a critical evaluation of Homeric mythology.

Indeed, the early Greeks faced a dilemma not unlike our own. “[T]heir culture was suffused with rituals and stories of great antiquity, but the meaning behind those traditions had largely evaporated. How to make sens of them?” Sound familiar? It sounds like modern Christianity to me. Ritual and stories that hold no pertinent meaning for modern man and are clung to in desperation to retain the “true meaning” (whatever that means). Indeed, Heinberg says

Mythology is inseparable from religion, and so Western civilization’s changing attitudes toward the mysterious and universal sense of the sacred have also deeply affected both popular and scholarly ideas about the nature of myth.

There has been a long history of condescending attitudes towards myth and tribal peoples which culminated in the idea that all religion must be approached with a skeptical attitude and that trying to understand the philosophical meaning of a culture’s myths was useless. But “they had ignored or eliminated the vivifying principle in the object of their study—a principle that would be defined by the next generation of mythologists as the sense of the sacred.”

Recently, a new appreciation of myth has developed which sees them as “ways of conveying universal truths” and are, therefore, “profoundly meaningful.” The work of Carl Jung is especially relevant in this context. “For Jung, the characters and actions of myth are simply expressions of universal archetypes.”

The French philosopher René Guénon considered all traditions as “paths for the practical realization of innate spiritual principles in the lives of human beings” and warned that excessive materialism threatens to “destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not consider seriously a ‘return to the source.’” Mircea Eliade took this thought even farther and “emphasized the primacy of the experience of the sacred in all traditions.” Jung, Guénon, Eliade and others have reacquainted us with the ancient idea that “every event was meaningful” and that “even the most mundane activities had an overarching significance and were performed … as part of a cosmic drama.”

Sacred is, I think, also misunderstood today. “To say that a thing or an act is sacred is to imply that it has relevance in a universal plane of values and ideals, and that it is therefore a point of contact between two worlds.” The ancients considered matter itself to be sacred and, to them, the sacred dimension was experienced reality and not just speculation.

As long as researchers denied its importance and based their explanations entirely in earthly terms, we were effectively denied the possibility of fully understanding or benefiting from myth. Worse, by discounting the sense of the sacred we disassociated ourselves from a universal, timeless dimension of significance whose point of access lies deep within the human psyche, where the individual and the collective, the ancient and the modern, merge indistinguishably.

So, back to myth … Jung and Joseph Campbell, in particular, tended to see myth “as allegories for inner processes of spiritual transformation—that is, as stories that are symbolically but never factually ‘true.’” Myths, then, serve to “connect two realities—the visible and the invisible, Earth and Heaven.” Others, such as Immanuel Velikovsky, argue that “myths may contain more than metaphorical content” and originated as descriptions of factual events but have been metamorphosed into mythical events and heroes.

In any case, the great problem with which we must deal is the “worldwide similarity of mythic themes.”

As Campbell and Eliade have shown, there is really only one story, translated in the traditions and circumstances of myriad peoples. It is the myth of a lost idyllic Time of Beginnings, and of a hero’s journey to restore the world to its pristine condition of paradisal splendor.”

How could this have happened? Heinberg says there are only two possibilities. Either the fundamental themes were distributed among the world’s peoples before they had migrated to their present location or “similar motifs … occurred independently to people already living far apart.”

Jung, I think, would agree with the latter and reason that it was due to the archetypal content of the myths which is, essentially, hardwired in our brains because of our humanity. And this is one of the primary reasons myth should be important to us, modern, people. If basically all cultures have the myth of a Paradise, or “Garden of Eden,” then it is part of our humanity and denying or excluding this part of ourselves—our human heritage—is dangerous. We lose touch with an important aspect that unites the physical with the spiritual.

So, whether or not Adam and Eve existed is not the correct question. The correct question is: what do we do with the myth? How do we integrate it—incorporate it—into our lives today? Those who say the Garden of Eden is useless child’s play and those who say it is only a factual, historical place are both missing the point and totally misunderstanding the purpose and power of myth. It is an essential and undeniable part of our psyche and so requires that it be recognized for what it is—a way to understand and convey universal truths.

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Definition of MYTH

Published
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Ken
on April 19, 2008
in myth
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Whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it you can see that it is true.

Black Elk

The Creation of Consiousness: II

Published
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Ken
on January 11, 2008
in The Creation of Consciousness, carl jung, edward edinger, god, myth and religion
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Jung states the new myth more succinctly in Psychology and Religion: West and East where he says:

Existence is only real when it is conscious to somebody. That is why the Creator needs conscious man even though, from sheer unconsciousness, he would like to prevent him from becoming conscious.

and

Whoever knows God has an effect on him.

Edinger states the basic idea as “the purpose of human life is the creation of consciousness” and then acknowledges that talking about consciousness is a difficult task. In the next chapter, Edinger clarifies that his approach to consciousness (and the inevitable tie-in with epistemology) is “not philosophical but psychological-empirical” and this should be kept in mind throughout.

Edinger calls consciousness a “psychic material” and this must be understood in light of Jung’s conception of the psyche. As Jacobi explains in An Introduction to the Psychology of C.G. Jung, the psyche is something “not less real than the body” and “[t]hough it cannot be touched, it can be directly and fully experienced and observed. It is a world of its own, governed by laws, structured, and endowed with its own means of expression.”

So, our purpose is to create consciousness and this creation is the process of individuation — the process whereby psychic contents (complexes and archetypal images) “become actualized and substantial” … “when they enter an individual’s conscious awareness and become an accepted item of that individual’s personal responsibility.” This process involves the “encounter of opposites” such as subject and object or myself and the “other.”

The encounter of opposites is a big part of Jung’s psychology and he points to a long history of mythical ideas and to alchemy (which was not really about turning literal lead into literal gold just as Moby Dick was not really about a literal whale and its literal pursuer) as evidence of how pervasive this idea is in human history. Psychologically, the creation of consciousness — the process of individuation — involves being confronted by the unconscious with the contrary when the ego identifies with one of a pair of opposites. This confrontation happens over and over and over again and we find ourselves tossed “back and forth between opposing moods and attitudes.” But, the one who deliberately seeks out these encounters — who deliberately tries to resolve inner and outer conflict by coming to terms with the opposite and experience both, opposing, viewpoints simultaneously — is creating a new increment of consciousness.

The key, as the alchemical myth tells us, is the union of opposites, the coniunctio.

Contrary to the implications of the erotic imagery, the coniunctio of opposites is not generally a pleasant process. More often it is felt as a crucification. The cross represents the union of horizontal and vertical, two contrary directional movements. To be nailed to such a conflict can be a scarcely endurable agony.

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The Creation of Consciousness

Published
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Ken
on December 28, 2007
in The Creation of Consciousness, carl jung, edward edinger, god, myth and religion
. 0 Comments

I am reading Edward F. Edinger’s The Creation of Consciousness (1984) and my goal is to blog all the way through this short but very deep book. (Wish me luck!) The subtitle is “Jung’s Myth for Modern Man.”

Chapter 1, “The New Myth,” begins with a description of the problem:

History and anthropology teach us that a human society cannot long survive unless its members are psychologically contained within a central living myth. Such a myth provides the individual with a reason for being. To the ultimate questions of human existence it provides answers which satisfy the most developed and discriminating members of the society. And if the creative, intellectual minority is in harmony with the prevailing myth, the other layers of society will follow its lead and may even be spared a direct encounter with the fateful question of the meaning of life.

It is evident to thoughtful people that Western society no longer has a viable, functioning myth. … Meaning is lost. In its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated. Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure, or else the individual is exposed to emptiness and despair. With the loss of awareness of a transpersonal reality (God), the inner and outer anarchies of competing personal desires take over.

The loss of a central myth brings about a truly apocalyptic condition and this is the state of modern man.

Edinger says “[I]t is the loss of our containing myth that is the root cause of our current individual and social distress” and that the only solution is to discover a new one. Edinger’s claim is that the work of Carl Jung — particularly his discovery of his own individual myth — is the first emergence of our new collective myth.

An example of a functioning central myth was found by Jung among the Pueblo Indians in 1925. He was able to gain the confidence of a chief of the Taos Pueblos, Mountain Lake, who related the following:

“[W]e are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.”

Jung realized that the Mountain Lake — and the other Taos Pueblos — saw life as “cosmologically meaningful” and therefore had “dignity” and “tranquil composure.”

Now, of course, this sounds like a bunch of poppycock to us “intelligent” folks. And I am in no way trying to suggest that we should take over this sun-god myth — that would be totally ridiculous. The point is that they had a myth and the myth worked for them. It gave them a reason to get up in the morning and made their lives peaceful and meaningful. This is exactly what we are lacking today.

Another important point is that the Pueblos practiced their religion “for the whole world” and this is crucial. Arguments that I’ve heard against religious pluralism, and something that I struggle with myself, is “where do we draw the line?” How can Nazism co-exist with Judaism? How can Fundamentalist Christianity co-exist with Fundamentalist Islam? If we allow religious tolerance, then how can we say that Nazism is wrong? Doesn’t our defense of tolerance mean we need to defend the Nazi’s belief system? Well, the acid test is: is that religion practiced “for the whole world”? Obviously, Nazism is not — it is in direct conflict with and seeks to destroy a part of the world and so it does not have to be lumped in with “valid” beliefs. Of course, I realize that it’s not always so easy. In the case of Fundamentalist Christianity/Islam, for example, I’m not sure either side is practicing “for the whole world.”

Later, Jung started crystallizing the formation of the myth while traveling in Africa and visiting a great game preserve:

From a low hill in this broad savanna a magnificent prospect opened out to us. To the very brink of the horizon we saw gigantic herds of animals … There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. …

Now I know what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence … Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.

I’ll leave you to ponder this until next time …

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Anais Nin and Carl Jung

Published
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Ken
on December 22, 2007
in carl jung, myth and quotes
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As I paused in my computer programming to take a break after finally getting the regression test to give me the right answer, I spotted one of Anais Nin’s diaries on the floor of my office. It was volume 4: 1944-1947.

I picked it up and opened to a random page and read:

There is an analogy between the bombardment of the atom and the bombardment of the personality by the method of analysis, the dismemberment, separation of the elements of the psyche which may release new energies. I believe scientific principles can be applied to the life of the psyche. . . . The time has come to give the psyche a concrete symbolism.

Another random page led me to:

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualize. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive instruments of discovery. . . . The primitive and the poet never parted company. . . . Intellectual knowledge is not enough. Music, the dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our blood stream. Ideas do not. . . . There is a prejudice against subjectivity, because it is believed subjectivity is a narrowing of the vision. But this is no more true than to say objectivity leads to a larger form of life. Nothing leads to a vaster form of life but the capacity to move deeply inward as well as outward. . . . The most important problem for the novelist is that each generation must create its own reality and its own language, its own images. Each one of us must re-create the world.

Wow, I thought, this sounds a lot like Carl Jung! So, I did a quick search and found out that Nin actually underwent therapy with Jung! Talk about synchronicity!

The second quote is very meaningful today. In this age of science, many people think that “intellectual knowledge” is enough but it’s not. Objectivity is sought in everything and expected everywhere and it’s thought that this leads to a more complete picture of our reality but it doesn’t.

I would emphasis the “its own images” part of the second to last sentence. Symbols and images are extremely important as they are the mediators between us and the archetypes or collective unconscious. They are how we deal with our “inner world” which is there whether we believe in it or not. We need symbols and myths for our age of science and science itself is not giving them to us. Trying to use the symbols from yesteryear is not working either — simply look at the rejection of all the “old time religions” that is going on. This is not to say that religion is wrong or bad; on the contrary religion is exactly what supplies the symbols and images we need. But we need symbols that are meaningful to us today in this age of science and not the symbols from earlier generations.

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Jesus for the modern man

Published
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Ken
on November 24, 2007
in bible, jesus, myth and rudolf bultmann
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Rudolf Bultmann in Jesus Christ and Mythology writes:

This raises in an acute form the question: what is the importance of the preaching of Jesus and of the preaching of the New Testament as a whole for modern man?

For modern man the mythological conception of the world, the conceptions of eschatology, of redeemer and of redemption, are over and done with. Is it possible to expect that we shall make a sacrifice of understanding, sacrificium intellectus, in order to accept what we cannot sincerely consider true—merely because such conceptions are suggested by the Bible?

Or ought we to pass over those sayings of the New Testament which contain such mythological conceptions and to select other sayings which are not such stumbling-blocks to modern man? In fact, the preaching of Jesus is not confined to eschatological sayings. He proclaimed also the will of God, which is God’s demand, the demand for the good. Jesus demands truthfulness and purity, readiness to sacrifice and to love. He demands that the whole man be obedient to God, and he protests against the delusion that one’s duty to God can be fulfilled by obeying certain external commandments. If the ethical demands of Jesus are stumbling-blocks to modern man, then it is to his selfish will, not to his understanding, that they are stumbling-blocks.

What follows from all this? Shall we retain the ethical preaching of Jesus and abandon his eschatological preaching? Shall we reduce his preaching of the Kingdom of God to the so-called social gospel? Or is there a third possibility? We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so, let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing—an unsatisfactory word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.

. . .

To de-mythologize is to reject not Scripture or the Christian message as a whole, but the world-view of Scripture, which is the world-view of a past epoch, which all too often is retained in Christian dogmatics and in the preaching of the Church. To de-mythologize is to deny that the message of Scripture and of the Church is bound to an ancient world-view which is obsolete.

This is something about which I’ve been thinking lately: if the Bible is the timeless, eternal Word of a timeless and eternal God then how can it depend on a particular time or world view or world philosophy? It absolutely must be able to speak to me, right now, right here and to you, right then, right there. This is only common sense. Therefore, while figuring out the exact intent of each word based on the writer’s time, place, and current mindset may provide some insight into what the passage meant for the writer and the writer’s contemporary audience, it really has precious little insight for me because I, in my time and place and mindset, am so completely different than the target audience. And forcing me to think of the text as if I were living in the time of the author only causes un-rational, un-defensible beliefs that must be defended at all cost because they are too fragile to be intelligently discussed.

Of course, the major problem I see with this is the four letter word myth. We have a difficult time using the word myth when talking about the Bible or Jesus or God. I’m hoping to discuss myth in more detail later but for now all I’ll quote Bultmann again:

Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favor he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and of his life, that the world within which he olives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries. … Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. … Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly power. … Myths give worldly objectivity to that which is unworldly.

So, myth does not mean false, untrue, naive, or a fairy tale—even though that is how we commonly think about myth in this age of science. Myth means that there is a deeper, esoteric meaning beyond the outer, exoteric meaning. It turns the words into symbols charged with inner meaning and gives them eternal life because the inner meaning is able to speak to all times and not just when the words were written. The problem is that we need to learn how to deal with myth again, recognize the mythological nature of the Bible, and “rework” the myth to fit our world. This does not, as Bultmann says, mean rewriting the Bible or rejecting the Bible. It means applying the symbols of the Bible to our day and age.

More later …

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The re-occurring first sin

Published
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Ken
on March 9, 2007
in christianity, evil, god and myth
. 0 Comments

Can an all-good God exist alone? Why is it that sin came into existence before Christian history — i.e. before the creation of man? And after Satan is vanquished in the end, why won’t it happen all over again? Another angelic revolt to restore the “balance”?

Is there absolute goodness without relative evil?

Is there absolute beauty? In a world where every woman looked like Uma Thurman would I find every woman as beautiful as I find Uma in this world? Hard to imagine that. Why is Michelangelo’s The David so freakin’ amazing? Because not every statue looks like it — it’s a one-of-a-kind.

But back to absolute goodness. I can imagine a community of people who treat everyone equally and don’t steal or kill or yada yada yada. But isn’t this only good because we are contrasting it with the world we know? Doesn’t the idea of Heaven seem a little bit like Mayberry? Aunt Bea bakes pies for everyone. Even the town drunk is harmless. But I think little Opie grows up and can’t wait to get out of there. Just like Lucifer wanting out of Heaven.

Haven’t you ever met anyone who was just “too good” and all you wanted to do was smash in his or her teeth with a brick? Now imagine being with millions of them for all eternity! Hell, I wouldn’t have to fall — I’d jump!

So, it seems to me that a totally good God cannot exist without the opposite also existing. Lucifer sinned before man was created because Lucifer has always sinned. And always will. There will always be the antithesis of the 100% good God. That the “event” of Lucifer’s fall is placed in the pre-human history (aka mythology) is, for me, proof that sin has always existed. And if sin has always existed, then an all-good God cannot, or more accuratley, does not exist.

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Thinking outside the box

Published
by
Ken
on February 16, 2007
in c.s. Lewis, carl jung, christianity, huston smith, j.r.r. tolkien, myth and religion
. 0 Comments

There is an alternative to the “Christianity is right” versus “Christianity is wrong” scuffle. The virgin birth, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, etc. can be other than literal realities or literal horse pucky. The alternative is that they are myth. Now, I’m not being pejorative with my use of the word “myth” which is greatly under-rated and almost entirely misunderstood in today’s world of science.

I found what C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien said about myth here:

Myths, Lewis told Tolkien, were “lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver.”

“No,” Tolkien replied. “They are not lies.” Far from being lies they were the best way — sometimes the only way — of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic “progress” leads only to the abyss and the power of evil.

In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung said:

For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

And in Why Religion Matters, Huston Smith said:

Science provides a useful analogy here. The entire scientific worldview has been spun from a relatively few crucial experiments, which can be likened to the numbered dots in children’s puzzles that (when they are connected by a line that is drawn through them sequentially) produces the outline of a giraffe or whatever. Myths are like the lines traditional peoples collectively and largely unconsciously draw to connect the “dots” of the direct disclosers that their visionaries report.

If number is the language of science, myth is the language of religion. It does not map literally onto the commonsense world — biblical literalists’ mistake is to think that is does …

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