Myth & Exponential Modern Life
11/10/2009 09:31 AM Filed in: myth
Thanks again to Leila for this wonderful inspiration for the blog post:
This exponential factor in modern life is difficult for us to get our heads around- too many choices overwhelm us, and those choices become more full fleshed out each day. In such a situation, we often can become committed Luddites (against technology) or embrace technology as something we are likely to have for a long time in our lives, and that technology will look very different than it does today.
What I observe is that technology is becoming more human, and humans have accepted the role of machines in the cogs that surround their lives. I have also observed that not very many of us are happy about it, and even those who throw themselves whole-heartedly into their proscribed path modern division of labor lifestyles choose for them often have a crisis afterwards.
Almost all my lifecoaching clients come from a post-work world situation, where their lives are changing, and they fail to understand or come to peace with how they were taught the world was supposed to be. The older they are, the more difficult this seems to be.
Our lives are all pre-packaged- even though we have more choices proliferating than ever before- those choices are narrower and narrower in their ability to satisfy us in ways that account for the "poorna" (fullness, effulgence) part of our Self.
Robert Svoboda said it best, in in an excerpt from the 'Purvakarma' (preface) of "The Greatness of Saturn" (I HIGHLY recommend this book):
"The Decay of Western Myth
Most people nowadays exist in the eternal "now," where they are innudated with dead knowledge: piles and piles of disjointed facts, speculations, opinions, and distortions. Knowledge has become just one more commodity of commerce, the fuel we burn on the information superhighway. The symbols that live in your internal reality do not simply stand for external things, they are internal manifestations of those outer things. If you have no living symbols within you, you are dead inside even if you seem active from without, like a pithed frog, or a tooth with a root canal. Today the whole of the modern world is deep in the throes of what has been called "the pathology of the symbol." The concept of the "sacred" has been effectively extirpated from our world view, a paradigm in which all is more or less equally profane. Any talk "internal reality" invites ridicule and peremptory dismissal from the majority of our fellow citizens who dwell exclusively in the external world of the mundane. All our central mythic symbols are dying or dead, and can longer nourish, inspire, and protect us. Some people compensate by revering with near-religious sanctity their birthplace, homes, sports teams, countries' flags, and social institutions- some even become devotees of the cult of Elvis- but these ersatz symbols are so removed from the world of natural reality that very few of them ever succeed in come to life. Our innate need for living symbols imels us to generate these fantasy reflections of living mythical realitys that are these transient myths. But such shadows rarely reveal anything of how we came to be, nor do they effectively elucidate any path toward any superior reality. Because they cannot translate themselves from mundane time and space into the "paradigmatic" time and space of muth, sunthetic legends can only temporarily replace the central mythic symbols that we are losing, in the same way that drugs and other addictions only temporarily provide us with feelings of well-being.
Though modern myths enjoy nothing more than the temporary illusory life that disease posesses, they sufficiently hardy to make their believers believe that they are sufficient. Worse, the vast majority of modern people uncritically open themselves day after day to deliterious patho-myths, images which take on a perverted life within us and pursue their own agendas, unconcerned for our well-being. Legions of well-funded, well-engineered death-dealing psuedomyths in our popular culture surround us like vultures waiting patiently to feed on the weak and impressionable. Many are the young women who turn anorexic or bulimic after imbibing the "thinness is beauty" path-myth, and the young men who stalk and kill one another because they buy into the "violence is masculinity" patho-myth. Day after day, around the world, groups of young soldiers who have been tutored by their various elders in the "tribe is in danger" fantasy slaughter one another bravely and pitilessly, alternately instigated and mourned by their fellow citizens who genuflect before the monolith of jingoistic honor. Billions today live for nothing more noble in life than their own indulgence, spurred into ever-increasing self-gratification by the "consumption is happiness" fiction.
Perhaps the most pernicious modern mythical non-myth is the falsehood, perpetuated principally by materialist scientists and "rationalists," that our society has now gone beyond myth. To deny that you are affected by any sorts of myths, pathological or wholesome, increases the likelihood that you will be wholly ruled by them. [emphasis mine- Ed.] Though anthropologists like Joseph Campbell were concerned that parents should not imprint on their kids outdayed or dead "affect images" (images which affect us directly, not through thought), we are now raising a generation who has no affect images whatsoever, except those of sex and violence; children who know no world other than the virtual world of television, technopop, video games, and the Internet. People have begun to enthusiastically jum out of their flesh and into the Net, sacrficing a humanness they have never been taught to explore for the opportunity to dorwn in the electronic artifice of alt.reality. Campbell presciently warned of the dangers of taking the existence of of supporting social order for granted. The rush to establish individual rights and rewards as preeminent, to the neglect of social values and responsibilities, has already begun to have very serious consequences for the continuance of our very civilization.
Living, multivalent myth remains the most effective protection and treatment we have when our affect images slip and fall, providing us with wholesome conceptual nutrition, and inoculating us effectively against the ideo-pathogens which are everpresent in today's evironment. Wise us of the traditions we have inherited from our forebears could provide us with these images, but the current Western world view is too rigid, our iconoclasm too institutionalized, to admit of such possibilities. Even in those realms where myths are still admitted, they are often welcomed only after they have been objectified into powerlessness. Gone from our world view is myth's ability to penetrate into the real, indescribable nature of things; missing is that state of myth-induced being which is living wisdom. In opening ourselves to the modern, we have closed ourselves to the ancient, and until a hole is cut in this wall we will remain immured outside ourselves, sequestered away from the durable continuity of that vision of Reality that those who came before us toiled so seduously to bequeath to us intact.
Sincere prayer could save us, but most of us in these days have come to doubt that prayer can change things, for we no longer think of Nature as a living being who can be requested to show us Her compassion. This concept went out of fashion in the culture of the West on the day when the Greek philosophers of old openly declared that they no longer knew how to interpret their most ancient writings, rites, and symbols. Instead of turning inward to finding those fleeing significations, these savants turned their minds outwards, in one-pointed contemplation of the universe of manifestation, and decided to accept as real only that part of nature that we can hear, touch, see, taste, and smell. This made it easy to reject as illogical even the possibility that there might be such a thing as live mythology, and to conclude that all gods are simply inflated memories of illustrious men and women. Once the essence of these Greek myths had been lost they decayed from living wisdom into lifelike allegories, and then into fables about which everyone could believe what they pleased: nerveless myths which appear to live even after their deaths.
The demythicization and desacralization of our society have been accelerated by the liberal application of that peculiarly-modern fancy that progress must be linear. This posture, which assume the new to be always superior to the old, gorws logically out of Western preference for linear thought. The doctrine of linear progress forbids ancient wisdom to enter into modernity, mandating that new and different reality forms must inevitably supplant and replace all older models. From the superficial standpoint this is often true, for myths continually evolve new ways of to express their messages, ways which are fit for the new conditions in which these myths are continually finding themselves. But myths do not jettison their old messages in order to load new ones (as for instance "liberation theologians" have been trying to bend Christian myth into doing); instead, living myths develop new ways of transmitting the same, eternal message."
This exponential factor in modern life is difficult for us to get our heads around- too many choices overwhelm us, and those choices become more full fleshed out each day. In such a situation, we often can become committed Luddites (against technology) or embrace technology as something we are likely to have for a long time in our lives, and that technology will look very different than it does today.
What I observe is that technology is becoming more human, and humans have accepted the role of machines in the cogs that surround their lives. I have also observed that not very many of us are happy about it, and even those who throw themselves whole-heartedly into their proscribed path modern division of labor lifestyles choose for them often have a crisis afterwards.
Almost all my lifecoaching clients come from a post-work world situation, where their lives are changing, and they fail to understand or come to peace with how they were taught the world was supposed to be. The older they are, the more difficult this seems to be.
Our lives are all pre-packaged- even though we have more choices proliferating than ever before- those choices are narrower and narrower in their ability to satisfy us in ways that account for the "poorna" (fullness, effulgence) part of our Self.
Robert Svoboda said it best, in in an excerpt from the 'Purvakarma' (preface) of "The Greatness of Saturn" (I HIGHLY recommend this book):
"The Decay of Western Myth
Most people nowadays exist in the eternal "now," where they are innudated with dead knowledge: piles and piles of disjointed facts, speculations, opinions, and distortions. Knowledge has become just one more commodity of commerce, the fuel we burn on the information superhighway. The symbols that live in your internal reality do not simply stand for external things, they are internal manifestations of those outer things. If you have no living symbols within you, you are dead inside even if you seem active from without, like a pithed frog, or a tooth with a root canal. Today the whole of the modern world is deep in the throes of what has been called "the pathology of the symbol." The concept of the "sacred" has been effectively extirpated from our world view, a paradigm in which all is more or less equally profane. Any talk "internal reality" invites ridicule and peremptory dismissal from the majority of our fellow citizens who dwell exclusively in the external world of the mundane. All our central mythic symbols are dying or dead, and can longer nourish, inspire, and protect us. Some people compensate by revering with near-religious sanctity their birthplace, homes, sports teams, countries' flags, and social institutions- some even become devotees of the cult of Elvis- but these ersatz symbols are so removed from the world of natural reality that very few of them ever succeed in come to life. Our innate need for living symbols imels us to generate these fantasy reflections of living mythical realitys that are these transient myths. But such shadows rarely reveal anything of how we came to be, nor do they effectively elucidate any path toward any superior reality. Because they cannot translate themselves from mundane time and space into the "paradigmatic" time and space of muth, sunthetic legends can only temporarily replace the central mythic symbols that we are losing, in the same way that drugs and other addictions only temporarily provide us with feelings of well-being.
Though modern myths enjoy nothing more than the temporary illusory life that disease posesses, they sufficiently hardy to make their believers believe that they are sufficient. Worse, the vast majority of modern people uncritically open themselves day after day to deliterious patho-myths, images which take on a perverted life within us and pursue their own agendas, unconcerned for our well-being. Legions of well-funded, well-engineered death-dealing psuedomyths in our popular culture surround us like vultures waiting patiently to feed on the weak and impressionable. Many are the young women who turn anorexic or bulimic after imbibing the "thinness is beauty" path-myth, and the young men who stalk and kill one another because they buy into the "violence is masculinity" patho-myth. Day after day, around the world, groups of young soldiers who have been tutored by their various elders in the "tribe is in danger" fantasy slaughter one another bravely and pitilessly, alternately instigated and mourned by their fellow citizens who genuflect before the monolith of jingoistic honor. Billions today live for nothing more noble in life than their own indulgence, spurred into ever-increasing self-gratification by the "consumption is happiness" fiction.
Perhaps the most pernicious modern mythical non-myth is the falsehood, perpetuated principally by materialist scientists and "rationalists," that our society has now gone beyond myth. To deny that you are affected by any sorts of myths, pathological or wholesome, increases the likelihood that you will be wholly ruled by them. [emphasis mine- Ed.] Though anthropologists like Joseph Campbell were concerned that parents should not imprint on their kids outdayed or dead "affect images" (images which affect us directly, not through thought), we are now raising a generation who has no affect images whatsoever, except those of sex and violence; children who know no world other than the virtual world of television, technopop, video games, and the Internet. People have begun to enthusiastically jum out of their flesh and into the Net, sacrficing a humanness they have never been taught to explore for the opportunity to dorwn in the electronic artifice of alt.reality. Campbell presciently warned of the dangers of taking the existence of of supporting social order for granted. The rush to establish individual rights and rewards as preeminent, to the neglect of social values and responsibilities, has already begun to have very serious consequences for the continuance of our very civilization.
Living, multivalent myth remains the most effective protection and treatment we have when our affect images slip and fall, providing us with wholesome conceptual nutrition, and inoculating us effectively against the ideo-pathogens which are everpresent in today's evironment. Wise us of the traditions we have inherited from our forebears could provide us with these images, but the current Western world view is too rigid, our iconoclasm too institutionalized, to admit of such possibilities. Even in those realms where myths are still admitted, they are often welcomed only after they have been objectified into powerlessness. Gone from our world view is myth's ability to penetrate into the real, indescribable nature of things; missing is that state of myth-induced being which is living wisdom. In opening ourselves to the modern, we have closed ourselves to the ancient, and until a hole is cut in this wall we will remain immured outside ourselves, sequestered away from the durable continuity of that vision of Reality that those who came before us toiled so seduously to bequeath to us intact.
Sincere prayer could save us, but most of us in these days have come to doubt that prayer can change things, for we no longer think of Nature as a living being who can be requested to show us Her compassion. This concept went out of fashion in the culture of the West on the day when the Greek philosophers of old openly declared that they no longer knew how to interpret their most ancient writings, rites, and symbols. Instead of turning inward to finding those fleeing significations, these savants turned their minds outwards, in one-pointed contemplation of the universe of manifestation, and decided to accept as real only that part of nature that we can hear, touch, see, taste, and smell. This made it easy to reject as illogical even the possibility that there might be such a thing as live mythology, and to conclude that all gods are simply inflated memories of illustrious men and women. Once the essence of these Greek myths had been lost they decayed from living wisdom into lifelike allegories, and then into fables about which everyone could believe what they pleased: nerveless myths which appear to live even after their deaths.
The demythicization and desacralization of our society have been accelerated by the liberal application of that peculiarly-modern fancy that progress must be linear. This posture, which assume the new to be always superior to the old, gorws logically out of Western preference for linear thought. The doctrine of linear progress forbids ancient wisdom to enter into modernity, mandating that new and different reality forms must inevitably supplant and replace all older models. From the superficial standpoint this is often true, for myths continually evolve new ways of to express their messages, ways which are fit for the new conditions in which these myths are continually finding themselves. But myths do not jettison their old messages in order to load new ones (as for instance "liberation theologians" have been trying to bend Christian myth into doing); instead, living myths develop new ways of transmitting the same, eternal message."
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