The Return of the Spirit

The Return of the Spirit

by

Will Groenewegen

COPYRIGHT © 2020 by Will Groenewegen

All rights reserved.

Printed by Asquith Press, Toronto

This’s and that’s

fragment the mind

We’re caught in this Way

It astounds

this quest

for the Name

that remains

impossibly named

to the very last day.

A Beginning

In the face of the uncertain, who among us has the will? Who dares question the assumptions we make about life, and how to best live it? How many of us set sail from safe lands of custom and forge ahead into the unknown?

Out of its depths, the unfamiliar washes at the shores of our beliefs, its mystery felt with each approaching wave. If we venture in, where will it take us, other than away from what we have come to know? But what is the alternative? With how much resolve can we believe our convictions without first putting them aside and testing uncharted water?

We’ve all examined the explanations and stories of our mothers and fathers with a skeptical eye, haven’t we? Surely we’ve at least considered speeding from their truths and gods on that untamed wind, with all its vigour and courage.

But it is a fierce force, of course, the wind that drives our desire to understand - the ‘why’ that leaves our certainties ungrounded, whipping them about in the air. It plays havoc with the things we think we know. It topples our structures and discards our so-called truths. Long before we disappear into its horizon, it tears at the core of our beliefs, ripping their fabric. Our tattered ships force a decision: rebuild or retreat.

Neighbours and friends call from the departed shore, their voices still recognizable across the water: ‘You’ll go insane in the shadows of those giant waves! Look at the state of your sails! Can you not be satisfied with the water you already know? How can it not suffice? Come back to safety!’

But the boat-folk are resolute: ‘How safe is this safety when it rests on such unthoughtful and stormy ground? Are we really to find our solace there?’ Too many do, and go back to familiar life, their sails (as of yet) too thin for the wind of ‘why’, their ships no match for its force. They about-face and hastily throw their ropes upon the docks and tie them securely there, returning to their ways.

Despite this lack of muster, there remains a part unsatisfied, buried but not forgotten, ignored but not unfelt, that continues its quest in dark corners of the mind. Locked away and far from free it’s haunted by doubts, troubled by questions, and burdened by ‘why.’

And meanwhile, the brave sail off, out of sight, riding the chaos and order of the winds, eager to explore the uncertain, the unconscious, and the unknown, their faces leaning into its spray. ‘Damned fools,’ say the people of the land. Their jealousy covered by righteousness and judgment, they mutter with wild egos, ‘the gods will be angry.’

And yet there is always hope, even for the land-walkers, for in between the shadows of their unimaginative beings the children stare with longing at the departing adventurers on the sea, for they too are obsessed with ‘why,’ and have not yet learned to fear and detest it. They look with confusion and pity at the olden people that tower above them, and vow to never become one; to never be jaded by age or ill-conceived custom, and to one day themselves sail into matters unknown.

*

According to the books, there was a time before the one we live in now, an age before science and the empirical mind. In that place, they say, much of human experience was animated by myth and ritual. Life was given motion by metaphor, it wasn’t simply understood formally and rationally. It knew that some aspects of the Way could not be accurately talked about. Two worlds, physical anddivine, made up the lens and fueled the movements of the people, and for this, the minds of the people allowed for the idea of an unexplainable unknown. For them, truth was revealed through stories, not laboratories, purpose revealed through action, not fact.

That way of understanding life is all but gone here in our secular scientific modern world, at least on the surface; the mythological view has been replaced by a newer one, grounded on matter and fact, not morals and meaning. In many respects this newer Way does indeed offer clarity, and we are grateful for it. Without doubt, the method is a supreme one, and one we should never let go.

But in the shadows of our categories and classifications, this new material worldview has stunted our sense of what life means, and we struggle to find purpose. We laugh at people who believe in gods, though ours have just changed form. We think of myth as stories for infants, and forget that our reality is still informed by interpretation, by ancient meaning-making apparatus that whisper to us from the deepest parts of our beings.

Granted, for most of what we think about and experience, reason and science are our go-to systems of interpretation, and for good reason: they hold great insight, and improve our lives profoundly. But are there not matters of interest and necessity that lie beyond reason’s grasp? Are we not more than a rationalist’s account of existence?

For insights into the idea of ‘the eternal,’ the material worldview comes up short. When confronting our mortality, or thinking about ‘how to act in the world,’ it doesn’t have much to say. By and large, this worldview sees the human as a being influenced solely by deterministic forces, and in doing so it can’t help but leave us feeling helpless and alienated, like we have no will of our own, no act that offers us catharsis.

The mythological worldview, on the other hand, affords the space to consider and embody those parts of human experience and understanding, a space outside the realm of language, financial markets, and even rational comprehension. It makes use of other powerful tools, like ritual, symbols and ceremony, using them to penetrate the depths of human experience and understanding in ways the material worldview alone cannot.

In this place, nature is animated and mysterious. In this place, metaphysical ideas, paradoxical problems, and unconscious elements of our beings are not stifled, repressed, or shunned as irrational and infantile. In fact they are revered, for they hold clues to the transcendent potential of our lives. The truth, meaning and reality of such a situation is poorly accounted for in the scientific material worldview - when pressed, it is forced to admit that it can’t go it alone.

That ancient lens, rusting away within us, is needed again, not to replace our current rational one, but to join it. So far, some argue, we have lived in only one or the other of these two Ways of being. And admittedly, we were once superstitious to a fault, but now we’re empirical to a dangerous degree. These two pillars of understanding and experience, mistakenly pitted against each other for the last hundreds of years, have left our equilibrium off, and our potential unmet. But as the great pendulum of human history swings between them, now we know, for we have been to both.

It has, to us, become apparent, that ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ and where we make meaning come from both sources, equally vital. We understand truth not just as physical matter, but also as moral spirit. We understand that reality comes to us from physical andmetaphysical realms, from consciousness and unconsciousness, from fact and action, from thought and experience. The best path forward makes use of both modes of seeing and both Ways of being.

John Returns to the Sea

All the signs pointed in the same direction. All the voices spoke in harmony. The timing was perfect. It was destined to be.

Or at least, this was a reading of the situation. It was an interpretation of the events. Could it be he was meant to do it? Was he intended to arrive? He came here at the last minute and on a whim, as if it wasn’t his decision at all, as if other and greater forces had it planned from the start. Or at least, this was how one could see it, this is how it might seem to be.

Having been here last year, John Ryder already knew about the little stone house sitting on the warm coast of the Pacific. It was the kind of place he had always favoured: out of the way and out of doors, with sand instead of pavement and fishing boats instead of cars. He thought about it constantly throughout the previous year – about taking time off the daily grind to write and surf in the waves of the early morning sea. Thinking about it helped get him through irritating commutes in the exhaust-thickened streets where he was from. It brought relief at the grocery store, waiting with the other annoyed and unhappy looking people buying processed products under the buzzing of fluorescent lights. ‘Why don’t we at least speak to each other in these god-forsaken line-ups?,’ John would ask himself as they all shuffled quietly to the front of the queue. But he was one of them too, standing there, silently staring at other people’s purchases.

In those moments, John could sometimes make himself remember - he’d close his eyes and see the house, resting slightly crooked next to the moving sea beside the quiet village. It was a coping strategy, undoubtedly, and it helped; his breathing slowed and his jaw would unclench. He conjured up the image whenever he got caught in wind tunnels downtown, making a kite out of his clothes, the angry sour polluting air pushing him back to work. Or when he missed the bus, or when he locked himself out of his truck, or when he dropped his phone and cracked the screen into a thousand pieces on the sidewalk; there it would be, easily accessible in that file in his mind, under ‘how life makes more sense.’

The place can’t be found online. There isn’t even a phone number to call. All you can do is get on a plane, get yourself to the village, and hope to find the old lady who owns it (Sophia is her name). For this fact alone John kept his hopes down, but he crossed his fingers and made his way there anyway. And, as luck or fate or meaningless randomness would have it, an Australian surfer just so happened to be reluctantly packing up after a six-month stay. John quickly found Sophia, and paid her on the spot. It was a very good beginning indeed.

*

His new home stands alone, anywhere from three to ten metres back from the ocean (depending on the tide), resting about half way between the small village and a massive cliff made of sun-bleached rock. Next to it the little house is tiny and easy to miss. In fact, if you were to walk by it there’s a good chance you wouldn’t see it at all; sun-drenched into its surroundings, the hideaway somehow disappears into the rock and sand that cover the coastline.

Inside is all that is needed for a good writing stint: a bed, a shelf, a plug, a chair, and a desk under a little open-air window that looks out to the water. Beside is a half-outdoor kitchen with a warm sand-packed floor. Next to that a simple shower-room with the sky for a roof and a hole in the wall, so you can see the sea when you’re getting clean.

And what a sea! Warm and endless, rising and falling, coming and going, day after day. For all its motion, it pencils in a horizon so straight, like an iron bar - so wide, you can see the sun rise out of it and drop back into it later in the day - so vast, it can't be fully absorbed with an unmoving eye. The majesty of the nature, the power of the ocean, it made John’s body feelincredible, somehow. And his mind too, in awe at the general wonders of life.

‘It’s so diverse in all of its manifestations, but it’s so whole and united in how it all acts together - like it has a mind of its own...’ It blew John’s mind, to consider this force of life, to consider that great Will that wills its parts into action, that unfragmented sum that transcends its parts, that condition for the possibility of life to occur.

As delightful and annoying as this way of considering was, the ocean was always like this for John - it compelled him to think and experience his life in this way. It connected him to something greater than just himself. It made him feel as if he was a part of something bigger than his subjectivity allowed for on its own. In doing so, it made him feel less alone.

And yet, ironically, and at the same time, the vastness of the sea reminded him of his limitations and finitude, of his little place in the great expanding universe, and how alone he really was. It was quite the catch-22.

On the night in question he sat in the shallows of the surf, appreciating that the ocean and the air were the same warm inviting temperature. There was no one else around, just he, the breeze, the water, and the stars. ‘It’s amazing that self-consciousness has somehow emerged from the darkness of the universe and the force of the sea,’ he said out loud to the water. 'Even just to consider it; it's such a remarkable activity, thinking is… it’s astounding that we can do it at all!’

How unlikely the odds, we think; chances so infinitesimally small - it could not have been by chance at all: there of course must be a creator and a plan. Or at least, this is how it could be perceived; indeed, this is what many choose to believe.

*

John grew up in a northern land. He’s tall, in his late thirties, with a thin strong build. He wears light-brown hair, a relatively unkempt beard, and a simple and classic choice of cloth - usually without any visible brands. He’s one of these people who is occupied with the human condition, drawn to the philosophical – and in this age of existential crisis, there was a lot to consider.

Compared to his urban steel home where the sun struggles to shine its light through the tightly planted skyscrapers, the pace and style of life here at the stone house runs on a different sort of clock: it’s slower, and rises and falls with the sun and the tide. Since it's a tiny village, everyone knows each other. John was happy to be a part of it, but it also saddened him. This way of life was too unfamiliar, and he hated that it was. But at the very same time, he somehow felt more at home in this place, as if the trials and tribulations of a life made a little more sense. Romanticizing aside, the whole experience just felt more ‘right.’

Here, miles from the maddening crowds, time passes largely hidden from the world, and days go by with a natural consistency: in the early hours, the sun quietly pulls itself out of the ocean, the surfers and pelicans wake up and share morning waves as they sport and hunt in the early light. Locals perform the outdoor duties that only the morning sun will allow. As the day progresses they take to the shade and trade the stories and strategies of the day while the surfers and pelicans nap in their nests.

Usually some other small event happens too, like a passing vegetable truck getting stuck in the sand on its way through town. Towns-folk rush to aid the truck driver and soon the vegetables are off to the next village. Then low tide comes around, and the local boys perform their chores as they (usually very successfully) hunt crabs and clams in the now-exposed sun-drying rock. They give their findings to their mothers to cook up for dinner. Soon after all this, the sea begins to rise and the sun begins to set, the sky erupts in colour once again, and the surfers and pelicans return to the water. And just as the sun and its light slide up the trunks of the palms and the sides of the stone houses dotted along the beach, the smell of seafood cooking on the fire takes over and satiates the sandy streets, still warm from the day's rays.

John came to learn that such a style and story of life, necessarily set by the sun and the water, renders “what time is it?” a completely different sort of question. Back at home in the city, if you were to ask someone what time it was, often they’ll tell you down to the minute. ‘It’s 9:27.’ The urban experience demands it: if you miss the bus to work too many times you’ll lose your job. In a place like this, if you were to ask someone 'what time is it?' the answer would often not involve numbers at all. Instead, a reply that has something to do with the state of affairs in nature, or a derivative thereof: ‘It’s high tide’ or ‘it’s time to catch tuna.’

‘How nice it would be,’ thought John, ‘if in my life, meaning and value were overtly made in this nature-based way. If the position of the sun and the sea mattered amidst the towers and high-rises in that manufactured forest I call home. It’s hard to conceive in the shadows of the towering bank-castles of our current corporatocracy, yet so obvious its crucial nature in this place. Here, it’s far more often far more important to know where the tide is then where the time is. '9:27' is just not as meaningful and pertinent to daily life as is a shifting sea or a current of tuna.’

Case in point: it is only when the tide is low that John can walk east on the beach and access a set of rock stairs cut into the side of the cliff (there is another way there but it takes forever). You climb up about a hundred steps that are carved into the stone, and at the top lives a man named Gara.

Gara waters his Garden

Gara was born in the country but raised in France. He’s an old, very tall (if not a little stooped), mustached man who returned to his homeland about ten years prior, to retire, and enjoy the rest of his days at the edge of his cliff. His mother was from the village below; his father was a Frenchman.

Gara's accent is thick like the air where he lives, his English is superb, his mind sharp. His half-foreign genes make him stand out in a local crowd, skin more olive than brown, his height and large nose arousing suspicion from the locals as to the origins and trust-worthiness of this potential outsider.

John had met him when he was out exploring one day the year before, and took such a strong liking to him that he visited almost every day thereafter. Over their morning coffees and stiff afternoon coconut vodkas, the two men quickly developed a relationship ‘existencial’ in nature, as Gara would say.

This day was like all the others: after the hugs and handshakes subsided, they found themselves deep in their familiar banter. John told Gara that he had returned to write a book.

Gara was preparing to water his garden, something he did every morning when the sun was at this angle. ‘What’s the book about, my friend?’ he asked.

‘What's it about?’, considered John. Surprisingly, it kind of took him off guard. It was an obvious question, but one, he realized, that wasn’t easy to answer. He thought about it for a second: humans, as he understood it, are meaning-making machines. Sure, objectively speaking, perhaps there’s no meaning to life – that is, the universe might not care one way or another - but subjectively, we can’t help but do it, make it, see value - even if it’s declaring that there isn’t any: the irony of nihilism is that proclaiming that there’s no meaning is a profoundly meaningful thing to do.

It was thus not so much if, but howwe make meaning that was most interesting to John. For him, the current secular story and guide on how to live isn’t great at helping us find and make sense of meaning. He was convinced that it was too materialistic, rational, and economic to offer a sound road map of the hero’s journey. Our traditional spaces, our religious places, that we have always used to develop and experience this epic - are disintegrating, and hard to find. And so the practice of reflecting on the metaphysical, of thinking about our place in the world, and of acting it out through ritual, well, it has all but disappeared. It was no wonder to him that we have found ourselves in such a deep existential crisis. When it comes to understanding meaning, when it comes to experiencing life for ourselves and with each other, we’re rusty, without mentorship, and charged to figure it out on our own.

John felt confident enough to start, although he spoke slowly at first: ‘Well, essentially, it’s about how the ideas we have, and the behaviours we act out, shape our reality… so we should be thoughtful about them.’

Gara nodded and looked over. ‘Good, yes; we can’t just go around believing what we’re told to believe, that’s dangerous. Dangerous indeed. One needs to be an active agent, yes? in the stories they take to be true.’

He pulled his garden hose out from the side of his house, started unraveling it, and pointed it towards John. ‘After all, the way that governments, priests, and capitalists tell us to live our lives is loco.’

John agreed. ‘Yah you’re right, like: ‘it’s okay to treat our planet like garbage.’

Gara shook his head and muttered ‘out of sight, out of mind’. John let out a short sad sigh and added, ‘or how capitalist society rewards us for taking advantage of others, reinforcing the idea that we should only be concerned with ourselves.’

John looked around while he spoke, reacquainting himself with Gara’s outdoor space, noticing the small changes in the set-up since his visit the year before – a new painting on the outside wall over there, a new television by Gara’s little pool on the cliff. In that moment, even while considering the dismal subject matter they were unfolding, he found himself content, mesmerized by the beauty, and the weather, and the words of an interesting friend.

Gara had much to say on the subject at hand. He closed his eyes and focused on giving John book-worthy words: ‘we’re lonely, purpose is hard to find, yet we’re told this modern way of living is better, and more advanced, than all the others. We think that our scientific mind is the only correct way to understand life. That it’s the evolved and civilized way, not like the ‘primitive’ (Gara air quoting) that existed before…’ Gara shook his head, ‘how righteous! How stupid! How short-sighted!’ Gara opened his eyes and looked at his friend expectantly. John smiled and nodded approvingly, enjoying the rant and agreeing with the sentiment.

Gara breathed a few long breaths of warm tropical air, filtered by miles of ocean. Then he dragged the garden hose over to his aloe vera plants and mango trees. He looked over at John: ‘Social norms are sneaky like that, wouldn’t you say?’

John nodded, ‘That’s exactly it, they’re insidious. That’s why we must approach with skepticism and think carefully about what we believe, or unhelpful ideas will take root...’ He looked at Gara watering his herb garden ‘…then they become automatic, right? Our brains wire to believe them, and the crazy becomes the normal. Before you know it, we’re brainwashed, controlled, repressed, mentally beaten down, emotionally fraught.’

It seemed too dangerous to John, the consequences too great. Especially since our current narrative strips the mythological view away, and in doing so does away with our rituals, deadens our spirits, and leaves us with anxious psychologies. But before he worried himself more about it, he glanced towards the gardening Gara, and smiled as the mist from his hose caught a rainbow in the sun. He really appreciated friends like this, that don’t simply believe the way their parents, priests and presidents tell them to. He wanted to meet as many of these kinds of people as he possibly could.

*

Why didn’t they stress it when we were young? Why weren’t we told when we were kids? Why weren’t they shouting it to us from the rooftops, urging us to step back and question our ideas? Why didn’t they say: ‘don’t just listen to us – think for yourself!’

Far too often it’s the opposite that happens: we’re shunned for being rebels, punished for questioning authority, banned for pointing out the mythological nature of our belief systems, coerced into taking on the script of our time. The slyness of these cultural norms brings with it real challenges: for even if we do resist, it can be a full-time job just to be sure we don’t get duped again.

What didn’t sit well with John was how many people seem to prefer it in that unthoughtful land of mindless living, unwilling to risk the uncertainty and upheaval that dismantling their belief system would surely bring. It is better, they convince themselves, to do as you’re told. It’s safer, they argue, to believe in stories that attempt to resolve the anxieties of life, that promise us certainty, and even ‘everlasting happiness’. But these are just avoidant strategies that keep us from being fully human, are they not? John thought so: ‘Weshouldbe rebels. We shouldthink twice about following the herd, as lonely as it might be on the path.’

At this point in the gardening Gara spoke up, with more ideas for the book: ‘How about this,’ he said and paused for a moment before: ‘…the powers that be can tryto put their spells on us, but in the end, they can’t force us to believe’, you know? We the people have the final say!’ Gara looked inspired by his own words.

John responded, ‘it’s true. But it’s up to us to use our power…’ John trailed off and gazed across the water. Gara was moving the hose over to the vegetable section of his garden. John turned and watched him for a moment. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flock of pelicans flying across the waves in the distance, looking for unsuspecting fish surfing in the crest. ‘…let’s say a bird craps on your head,’ he began.

‘I’d prefer for that not to happen,’ Gara said.

‘And yet for some it’s considered good luck,’ said John. ‘So they wouldn’t be upset about it. Others, say, a super religious person, might get the post-head-crap idea that their God is punishing them for some transgression or another, and the bird-crap event could lead them to terrible thoughts and feelings of guilt and shame. So in the end, it’s not necessarily a negative orpositive experience; it could be interpreted as a sign of good things to come, the harsh judgment brought down by an omnipotent presence, it could mean countless other things, or maybe not much at all. How we think about it, how we perceive it, will determine how we feel about it, and how we act on it.’

Gara was examining the leaves of his avocado trees. ‘Ideas become the pathways in our brains, and the chemistry in our bodies.’ John agreed: it’s not so much that external reality itselfholds power, giving us value and meaning and emotion, but instead the way we interpret it. Deep in our neural pathways, ideas hard wire themselves into existence. It was somehow both a ridiculously obvious and wonderfully profound idea. They glanced at each other for a moment, happy to be in each other’s company again.

Gara had turned off the hose. He was sitting down across from John, rolling a cigarette with some tobacco he had gotten from the market in town. John watched and said: ‘the counter-argument, of course, is a deterministic one: reality is not so much based on our ideas, but instead by our genes. It’s nature, not nurture. That we are essentially material beings, driven by a genetic code, not by unknown creative forces, not by free-will.’ Gara nodded and John continued. ‘In that kind of genetic-based deterministic view, something like ‘violence’ is explained through biology: since we’re programmed, there’s nothing we can do about it; we’re predisposed. And if that’s the case, it’s not really up to us, and with that idea, the urgency to consider our values wanes.’

Gara took a long drag of his smoke and looked at John. ‘Right, right,’ he said, exhaling. ‘And there’s probably some truth to it. But if you ask the experts, they say that’s not the way genes work, or at least it’s not that black and white.’ He raised his index finger and closed his eyes for effect: ‘having a genetic predisposition doesn’t an alcoholic make… it’s the environment, it’s experience, it’s behaviour, it’s self-determination - those are, at least in part, the deciding factors for how and why we do the things we do.’

*

Today, the task of reviewing our beliefs is as paramount as ever. We’re encouraged to obsess over certainty, and to detest anything that can’t be known for sure. As a consequence, existential concerns are hard to fit into the story of our lives. We’re persuaded to search for someone, or some group, to think on our behalf, and give us the assurances we have learned to crave. We gladly pay for it, we even pray for it. We’re (at the least implicitly) told to repress sadness and pathologize stress, even though they’re natural experiences we are sure to face. Our current script has us running towards antidotes and distractions, and we’re offered little guidance when life inevitably gives us uncertainty and despair.

Before we know it, we find ourselves on the bandwagon of belief. ‘How did we get here?’ one might ask the others, as they bounce along the road of life. ‘Well, what else are we to do?’ the others respond, and suspiciously label the questioner an undesirable.

Upon even a cursory reflection, our current Way of living does not show itself to be as developed and advanced as we may have first thought. Whereas we once saw the physical world and the divine or mythological world as cohabitating, we have at present been reduced to beings that are understood primarily in terms of the material and the economy. Now we look around, more and more in danger of forgetting what it is to be fully alive, and think, ‘what the hell is the point of it all?’

Ours has become an oversimplified and unsustainable story, and one need not look far to see it: we prioritize making weapons over feeding the hungry, we don’t share power with those in need, we’d often rather kill someone for their idea of God then question our own. We murder each other over differing ideas, over profits, over greed. We drive species to extinction, we clear cut forests, we pollute land, water and air to disgusting excess. We focus on what we can know and control in the external environment, and dismiss all that we can’t as less important, even irrelevant. We have all kinds of knowledge, sure, but is this what we’re supposed to do with it? The current narrative doesn’t ask the question, in fact it actively kicks the can down the road, leaving the mess for the next fiscal quarter.

What infuriated John the most is that this state of affairs, based simply on bad ideas, doesn’t have to be. And yet even with all the signs laid out before us, we still tell ourselves that our ‘evolved’ lens is the best way to understand and experience life, and that because of this, our aforementioned priorities are justified.

John said so to Gara, as he watched him cut some aloe from a plant in the garden, squeeze out the juice, and rub it into his hair. (He swore that it was helping it grow back fuller than ever.) ‘There’s so much vested interest in keeping things the way they are - the economy has to keep churning, right? The pill-makers have to keep making their profits. Sure, the icecaps melt because of our selfish warped perspective, but that is of little concern.’ Garalookedpained to say it. They sat in silence for a minute, both lamenting the state of affairs.

John finally broke the silence. ‘It’s like you have to be crazy to fit in and believe it all…. It’s like you have to be insane to be sane.’

*

The modern age isolates: more and more, people feel a deep sense of emptiness and pointlessness envelop their lives. Where are our bonds? Where is our necessity? What is a meaningful life? We try to avoid these issues, but we just make it worse: repressed anxiety is forced to come out in weird, neurotic, indirect, and hard to manage ways. We are left unprepared, without incentive to deal with it in any satisfactory style. So we medicate ourselves in horror, and convince ourselves that it’s all just fine, or that it’s a lost cause.

But it isn’t fine, and it can’t be lost. The story of the nation is, in the end, just lines drawn on a map. Money, rights, God, the nation – if what we are is ideas put to action, can we not change our ways, and if not society’s, at least our own? With the Armageddon clock at a few minutes to midnight, is there even time?

John and Gara Consider the Book

It was a few hours later. The hot afternoon sun was moving quickly across the sky, and was beginning its dip into the sea. John had gone for a swim down below while Gara napped. They were sitting at Gara’s table once again. John was setting up the chessboard. They got back into their talks as if they hadn’t paused.

‘So...’ John hid a black pawn in his left hand, a white one in his right, and presented his fists to Gara. ‘…part of the book is about how ideas shape our world,’ Gara moved his head in acknowledgement and pointed at his friend’s left hand. John made the first move. ‘Another is that there are some ideas that we just can’t know about for certain, regardless of how much we consider them for ourselves.’

‘Like God?’ Gara offered. He moved a pawn, then poured John and himself glasses of water from a jug on the table.

‘Exactly,’ said John. ‘Making claims about the infinite, the divine, the eternal, objective reality - however you want to say it - is ridiculous.’

Gara nodded again without looking up. ‘Si, we can’t grasp that stuff…’ He trailed off quickly as his eyes focused even more intently on the board.

John finished the sentiment: ‘…They’re too great for our limited minds to comprehend.’

Gara looked up this time. ‘But that’s not what we think these days, right? We proclaim that our religious beliefs are factually true, and act as such.’ He moved a knight.

John frowned and studied the board. What a mistake, he thought to himself. Not Gara’s move, but humanity’s: religious metaphysical assumptions aren’t meant to be taken literally, are they? Their truths are different, deeper somehow. They speak through symbol, myth and metaphor to what lies beyond our methods of comprehension. And science makes the same mistake: convinced that it alone has the proper and objective lens in which to view all things. John moved a pawn.

Gara sighed and considered it for a second. ‘In our effort to eliminate doubt, in our fear of the great void, we cling to certainty where none can be found.’

John added, ‘And we’ll never find it...’ he paused for a moment, and then: ‘…Lacan would say that we are forced to interpret reality indirectly, in the symbolic realm. Kant would say we can’t know reality in itself, we’re bound by filters of time and space.'

Gara was making good work of the game, having just ousted one of John’s rooks from the table. John didn’t seem too concerned, though, his mind was full: ‘Jung puts it nicely too. Something like: as for the universal things we know nothing, only when we admit this will we return to equilibrium, or something like that.’

Gara made another move and then got up. He searched around for a tin box in one of his outdoor kitchen cupboards a few feet away. ‘That’s like Taoist philosophy as well: ‘the name that can be named is not the eternal name’. He opened the tin and poured some coffee beans into his grinder and pressed the button. ‘It’s a good philosophy to build on,’ he said over the noise. Gara stopped grinding and gazed somewhere over John’s shoulder. ‘The problem is, that way of believing doesn’t provide the ground that some are convinced they need - it leaves too many unanswered questions, they argue – it’s not the way they want to travel through life.'

John moved his queen into the fray, hoping to turn the course of the game. Sitting back, he looked over at his friend preparing the coffee. Gara was right: it indeed sounds appealing to believe in something so sure of itself, and understandable that in the face of the disturbing unknown we opt for stories that quiet the psyche's fear of it.

In this dogmatic act, we convince ourselves that we are spared from uncertainty, even spared from our fear of it. But it’s avoidant thinking - we’re too afraid to admit that we interpret reality through limited and finite lenses.

Gara was speaking to this matter: ‘Who can blame us for such safeguards? Life is scary and full of suffering!'

‘Life isscary, and totally absurd, really.’ John said, 'but I’d rather suffer with consideration than live in delusion. If I don’t, I’ve lost the wonder and humility that fuels a good spirit…. it’s the easy way out, don’t you think, not confronting mortality and morality on your own? Would life really be too chaotic and barbaric without the ‘certainty’ (air quotes) that these ideologies promise?’ John shook his head no.

*

'So what you're really saying is, don't be religious.' Gara was walking over to John with the fresh coffee. He stood over the chessboard and glanced at it for a few seconds before moving a piece. ‘Check,’ he said. John frowned again and assessed the damage, but only half-heartedly - his thoughts were still at the conversation at hand.

Over and over, in discussions he had had throughout the years, it would inevitably come to this, the assumption that if you don't take religion as fact, if you don’t believe in its truth literally, then you aren’t religious, and there’s no point in trying to be. But his feeling was that the opposite is true: religions are not supposed to be understood as facts, but as moral guides to life, and spaces to consider that which our faculties fail to fully grasp: religious truth and scientific truth are different things. It is only within the empirical spell of reason that this realization is so easily obscured from view.

John turned to Gara to answer. ‘If being religious means literal belief in scripture, if it means being convinced that you know the secrets and mysteries of the universe and what happens after you die, that your scripture is the right one and that all the others are not - then I'd say yah, don't be religious.’

Gara was looking intently at the game. ‘It’s like what you were saying before: today’s religious folk have forgotten that ‘God’ (air quotes) is truly un-nameable, and that language and intellect will always fall short in comprehending it.’ He reached in front of him and moved a piece.

‘Right,’ said John. ‘In a way, the trulyreligious are agnostic – they understand that God and oneness are incomprehensible. They understand that we can only explore such matters metaphorically and symbolically - and even thencan’t adequately share these experiences and understandings. This agnostic type of religiosity - one founded on the insight that we know that we can’t know, that we realize that we can’t talk about it clearly or without metaphor, but we consider it none the less - is little found in our age. But if this is what is meant by ‘religious’ then yes! Be religious, bask in the unknown, be wary of explanations put forth by the methods of religions and science.’

Both views pander that the universe makes sense. ‘Its essential nature can be known!’, they yell from both sides. But come on, who are we to make such claims? Gara looked at John while moving his rook across the board.

‘Check-mate,’ he said, and smiled.

*

How did we get to this place? How did we end up with this lens? Firstly, it is imperative to understand that until about 500 years ago, before the scientific revolution and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period, our interpretation and understanding of reality was very different. In that other place and space, it is said, the many narratives and experiences that made up cultural norms explicitlyhelped forge our morals and guide our actions, and provided a frame that helped people understand and experience their place as individuals andas members of a group. These myths and stories were comprised of metaphors and symbols and lived experiences based on a matrix not scientific and objective in nature: these truths served our lives in a meaningful yet not literal way.

Within the mythological worldview, symbols and rituals manifest themselves in the everyday, and speak to those things that are impossible to adequately talk about. They describe processes of transformation, focusing on the ‘how’ more than the ‘what’. This lens therefore allows the user to explore qualities of life that have little to do with facts and information.

Let’s of course not be too romantic about it - back in the Middle Ages we were arguably too irrational and too superstitious for our own good. Women accused of being witches were tied up and thrown into bodies of water - if they floated, they were witches (since a witch was believed to have spurned the sacrament of baptism, it was thought that water would reject their bodies and keep them from drowning). Brutal. So yes, indeed, the uncritical, unhelpful beliefs that arose from solely living within that mythological worldview proved problematic, and needed to be changed.

Our answer was the material lens. Over a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things, science, reason, and rationality became the methods and systems that framed our lens on life. And yes, these tools, they are amazing. They provide much clarity! We can knowthings and verify them and build upon our knowledge. The problem is, for it to work (at least the way it presents now), one is forced to think about truth, and what reality is and means, onlyas matter and information in the world, as things we touch and see and count and order. Within this framework, the material worldview does not negotiate with the spirit, and does not like acknowledging things that it can’t verify, and therefore know. Thus, in order to participate in our newer material ethos, one must, in a very real way, discard the spiritand the unknownas what is real and meaningful, instead replacing it with the physicaland the knownas the legitimate Way to understand life.

This switching of worldviews has proved successful; we have almost completely diverted our gaze from the older mythological lens and towards this newer one. And yet for all its benefits, this switch (or at least the way that we did it) has turned out to be devastating for humanity: we lost the capacity to navigate the unknown. We can’t help but try to ‘know it’, or claim that we can.

On the surface we pretend we don’t care, that we’re over all that unknowable stuff. But deep inside we yearn for that other Way. Deep down we all know that seeing this material view of the world as the be-all–and-end-all of what reality is, has cheapened our humanity. By convincing us to dismiss other ways of understanding and experiencing life, it teaches us to detest the irrational, to repress the unconscious, and revere reason above all else. The material worldview is indeed incredible, but we are trapped in its gaze and dazzled by its lights. Reason and scientific knowledge are amazing tools, but we are seduced by their formulas, and, for the time being, have succumbed to their spells.

*

John and Gara were putting the chess pieces away and sipping their coffees. John brought the topic up. ‘It’s a real shame that we don’t think we need any lens outside of the scientific one...’ he said, ‘…we think: what’s the point of providing space to attend to the mysteries of life, and explore truth, with a lens other than science? What’s the point of finding meaning, or figuring out how to act as a human in the world, outside of the rational framework?

‘A lot of us are confused about that, it’s true.’ Gara admitted. ‘I hear it a lot, people who say they feel spiritually empty….’ They gazed out across the sea and thought about it for a while.

How do we engage with the ‘spirit’? The modern story has us laughing at those questions, magazines and TV shows don’t discuss them, we learn to scoff at their value. We feel superior to our ancestors, but are left stunted in the darkness of their shadows, and find it hard to live with a deep sense of ‘why’.

Our new worldview strips life of ritual, so we’re confused as to how to attend to mysterious and metaphysical matters. We’ve forgotten how to tap into the deeper parts of our being, we can’t remember how to use symbol and metaphor. We’re estranged from our bodies and find it hard to be in the present moment. So we dwell on the past, and are more anxious about the future. All this leaves us unsure about what exactly life is supposed to mean, and how to best deal with the uncertainties and discomforts of life.

*

John and Gara both sat there for a bit longer, looking out onto the ocean and sipping their coffees. They were both silently thinking the same thing: if we were to dislodge ourselves from the material deterministic worldview as our sole guide for ‘how to be alive’, what would our lives look like?

John Makes his Way Home

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: “He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know”. Joseph Campbell[i]

On his walk back to his little stone house, John's thoughts remained on the problem at hand. He rolled his up pants and walked the surf in the warm thick evening air. How did people believe thousands of years ago? He thought of what the inner world of people's psyches must have looked like when the mythological view reigned supreme. Before science and reductionism overshadowed all, making fact synonymous with truth. He had no clue - not really. Sure, he could read how First Nations peoples had spirits or gods for almost everything, he could look at hieroglyphs and totems and cave art and try to get a sense of what it meant to them and how it shaped their lens.

But it was all a guess really, an educated one or not. He'd read Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell. He’d lived in far-off lands and studied Eastern philosophies. He’d visited ancient Mayan cities and Buddhist temples on his travels. From his knowledge and experience he understood, in theory at least, that there was this other way of being. But in a scientific age where philosophy is not stressed and metaphysical reflection is not part of our sidewalk banter, it seemed all but lost.

‘For all their superstitious and dogmatic thought, at least organized religions are pondering these things, ‘I'll give 'em that’, he said out loud to the ocean moving at his feet.

Nietzsche was right: our switch in worldviews led not only to the death of God, but so too the metaphysical assumptions that were part of the package. How now do we contend with mystery and wonder? Have we killed our greatest insights? Is the voice of our spirit but a muffled whisper in our new mode of living?

John breathed deeply and walked up to the house. How and where are we moderns supposed to think about these matters of belief and truth and reality? With both reason and religion so certain in their ways, where does the spirit find solace? Where are our elders now? Who will show us the rituals, who will lead us through the rites of passage in our present world? How do we commune with the ineffable under the intoxicating knowledge systems of the smug?

In that moment, John wished he had been a friend with Nietzsche, that brilliant mind so concerned with the death of God. He wanted to talk it out with him. When he got to his place he went inside and did the next best thing: open his copy of The Gay Science:

How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? [ii]

The question was as relevant as ever, what with so many people these days admitting that they don’t really believe in anything. In the margins of Nietzsche’s passage, John wrote notes to his would-be friend:

You’re right to ask, dear man: are we glad to see God go? Yes, Christopher Hitchens, we know, it is ridiculous that there would be an omnipotent father and super-ego in the sky personally invested in our lives. ‘That is for superstitious fools’, says Richard Dawkins and the like. ‘It’s the unresolved Oedipus complex of our kind’, says Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic friends. But these are now obvious, not radical points. Do we have to proceed with a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude? Do we have to throw the baby out with the bath water?

John looked up for a moment and gazed out his open-air window at the sea. He breathed in the warm misty evening air and kept jotting down words:

The human experience is not one we can explain in boxes with well-defined boundaries. So much of what it is to be us is murky and impossible to properly comprehend. Despite any claims to the contrary, neither reason nor religion have the answers. Until we are agnostic in our approach, armed with both the material and mythological worldviews, we won’t best approach this thing called life.

He put his pen down and looked out intently through the window to the sea. He could taste the salt and feel the misty spray in the air. He finally was clear about what to write in his book: how can we understanding meaning, and see life as sacred, in the modern world?

With this question floating around in his head, he flung himself into bed and was asleep within seconds.

The First Dream

John found himself in a great hall. Beams of dusty light from small windows focused here and there on the cobble-stoned ground around him. He was older, maybe twice his age, shorter by quite a bit and his skin was much darker. He was wearing some sort of coarse off-white robe, and leaned against a knotted cane that looked to have come from a very old tree. He didn't know exactly what he was doing there - maybe he was vaguely aware. He looked down and noticed a pouch tied to the rope around his waist. There was a small hole in the bottom of it, and, looking behind him, saw a trail of some sort of dried plant coming from the direction he had just walked.

‘Shit,’ he thought, ‘how am I supposed to do whatever it is I'm supposed to do?’ Suddenly a great wooden door, bigger than any he had ever seen, opened in front of him. He couldn't make out what was in the darkness beyond it. Then he remembered, 'Oh ya the King is sick. I'm supposed to heal him.'

He looked back at the trail of fallen herbs and realized it was medicine that had been leaking out of his pouch for quite some time. ‘Dammit’, John thought. But there was no time to curse any longer; he was quickly escorted by hooded faceless figures through the huge door. It swung with great force behind him, kicking up dust in the beams of light that cut across the room.

The King was a beloved leader, his people worshipped him. He was thought to be perfect, a genius, immortal, a direct line to the heavens; indeed, his leadership and action had improved the kingdom in countless ways. No one knew that he was sick. John had been visited in the middle of the night a few hours before by a silent rider who had delivered the message personally to John that he was required in the King's chambers.

He was taken to the Kings bedside, and the shadowy hooded figures disappeared through a side door. There he was, the great King, lying down, a long thick well-oiled white beard curling about his handsome brown perfectly symmetrical face. His eyes were piercing; he stared right at John. He looked fine, and John said as much: 'Your worship, you don't look sick. What is the trouble?’

The King cut to the chase. 'I have fallen in love for the very first time, with a woman from my dreams. She's not real, I know, but I dream of her every night,’ the King paused and looked at John with a horrible desperation, ‘I know she doesn’t exist, but I feel her so much. How can it be? It’s driving me mad.’ He raised his hands above his head and then threw them upon it. ‘She has cast a spell on me. I can't control it, I don't where she comes from, who she is, what she wants.' The King flopped his hands down beside him on the bed with emphatic frustration.

Right then John realized this was a first for the King - something he was uncomfortable with, unsure about, something he didn't understand and, for all his power, couldn’t control. It was indeed a tough predicament. Imagine. Being in the throes of ambivalence with someone from your dream. John could see it now, the ailment, the panic in the Kings eye, the wild flitter of the pupil. But what was he to do? Looking down, he realized his pouch had turned into a scroll. He unfolded the top of it and noticed there was a passage written on it, but as soon as he took a closer look at it, the writing disappeared from the page. He shook his head. ‘Shit,’ he thought.

'I am afraid,’ said the King.

*

John woke abruptly and sat up in the last bits of the night’s darkness. After a moment, he got out of bed and walked over to the window to check out the pre-dawn waves, the moon shining down on the white caps of the break. Remembering his dream, he felt bad for the King. He wished he could have helped him out, or said something wise, but had no idea what it would have been.

As he got ready to take a dip in the warm dark shallows, he remembered that Carl Jung had somewhere wrote about the kind of anxiety that the King was feeling - a fear of the unknown, the strong desire to avoid what makes us most uncomfortable, the hesitation to question our Ways. He flipped through the copy of Man and his Symbolsthat he had brought. There it was, on page 6: 'misoneism' - the fear of the new and unknown, our psychic resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche.

John thought about what he had read in Greek philosophy class about Socrates, how the great philosopher would walk around the city of Athens asking people if they were sure that what they believed really made sense and was worth believing. It annoyed people, having to stop and think twice about their convictions. They named him the 'the gadfly’ and would go to great lengths to avoid him and his pesky irritating queries.

John brought it up the next time he saw his friend. The sun was at that angle again, so Gara was watering his garden. ‘If there’s things we can’t know, should we even waste our time thinking about them?’ he asked, after explaining his dream, and his reading of Jung.

Gara had finished up with the hosing, and was searching the brush for a couple of coconuts on his way over to sit with John. ‘People say: ‘if we can’t know, what’s the point?’' He walked back to John, hacked through the top of two coconuts, and liberally poured some vodka that John had brought over inside of them. 'But maybe they’re missing the point – because in the asking, our perspective changes, our lens is more polished.’ He put his hand over the opening he had cut into the coconut and shook the vodka and coconut juice inside.

There is a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never by proved. It is that they are known to be useful. Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life and enable him to find a place for himself in the universe. Jung[iii]

Gara handed over one of the now potent coconuts, a ‘coco-loco’ as he called it. He lifted it up: ‘Here’s to embracing the unknowns of life, to confronting our shadows, to the fuelling of our creativity, and the forging of our purpose!’ They thudded their coconuts together. John took a sip and shivered at its strength. It seems like it’s our craft to have such considerations, he thought, and our fate to not know. It was becoming clear to him: science and spirit, reason and religion, material andmyth, both are vital to the story, both needed to interpret and experience reality in the most optimum way. Serving different purposes, sure, but necessary ones. John hoped that the naïve and adolescent age of believing ‘one or the other’ was nearing an end, and that instead, a new merger, a new myth, a new story, would be born.

After the coco-loco's and a jump in the sea, John said goodbye to Gara and made his way down the steps of the cliff to the sea below; the tide was coming in and soon the path back to the village would be submerged. He walked along the rocks that were slowly filling over by warm salt water, hopped onto the sand, and went straight to the house. The sea had pushed him home, and his thoughts wanted pen and paper. It was time to get writing. It was time to begin.

The Fantasy of Reality

by

John Ryder

Part 1: A Reason to Be?

The Impossible Task of Oneness

Nothing rips us out of the moment like our ability to abstract. What takes us out of the present more than thinking about thinking? The same applies for considering death; we know about things that don’t exist in the now.

Some argue that this way of considering existence is a uniquely human phenomenon, but others aren’t so sure. Elephants, say the experts, mourn the deaths of their friends and family. Whales communicate in highly intelligent ways. Prey hide from their predators, and in those moments seem to be aware that death is at stake.

But on a regular day, when a dear is roaming in the woods, without danger in sight or a death in the family, do they consider their existences the way humans do? Or say when a squirrel collects nuts for winter, does it ponder over the fact that it’s doing it? It’s highly doubtful. As far as we can tell, most animals don’t spend much time thinking about their own thoughts, or second-guessing their actions in any moral kind of way. ‘Squirrel-ness’ is less abstract and more instinct, and, driven by nature’s will, enjoys a kind of ‘present-moment-ness’ that is near-impossible for the past and future, cause and effect, and time and space beings we have turned out to be.

Compared to the squirrel, life for us is another matter entirely; our style of self-consciousness understands time, at least for us, as limited. We might not be thinking about it consciously most of the time, but there it is, just beneath the surface, influencing our whole trip. Knowing this makes us anxious, but no matter how hard we may try to avoid it, we can’t escape its inevitable grasp. Regardless of how oblivious we might convince ourselves to be, it is largely out of our hands: considering such matters is our charge, abstract thinking our nature.

*

Whether it’s thoughts about ourselves as individuals (quite often the case in our self-obsessed age), about the universe, about infinity, or about nothingness, these curiosities are in us. We can turn out the lights, but the stars will just remind us. We can bury our heads deep in the sand, but the grains tell a story, and lead us right back. It’s always been like this. If we look as far back as we go into history, there it is, on the walls of the caves. And if we had a way of looking into the future, there it would be too: considering this whole affair; ‘why’ing, ‘what’ing, and ‘how’ing our way through life.

These are the essential questions, and bring us together as a species (although, and quite fairly, we’d often rather not think about them and just get on with the day). Some embrace this type of inquiry, but for all of us, at least now and then, it’s a terrific burden.

It doesn’t matter what era we were thrown into, or the family and culture to which we were born. Regardless of our plot, be we destitute or ridiculously rich, a cardinal in the Catholic church or a scientist in a lab, all of us tell ourselves, and live by, stories that interpret our experiences and work to answer our practical and moral questions about being alive.

These are the narratives that will us to life and attempt to justify our person, that explain our lives and compel us to action. These are our views on how to place value, witness the world, and even, perhaps, be at peace with our behaviour on this road of life.

It could be that for the most part we think of our ideas about what life is (and how to live it) on our own. More likely, we adopt our values and assumptions from family and culture. In many cases, it's a mix of both – integrating our society’s version of reality with our own critical thinking and unique creative take on it all. At least that’s the hope.

It’s easy to argue that having too much of one or the other is fickle and counterproductive: a life lived without attempting to relate to society at all turns out to be too lonely for most. It doesn’t resonate with our social instincts and personal urges. Conversely, a life unconsidered leaves us ignorant and in danger: if all we do is unknowingly follow the masses, and unquestioningly take on the values of the day, we leave ourselves susceptible to manipulation and enslavement by the tyrants that roam the lands.

Isn’t it unwise to take on the ideas of a culture simply because we have happened to be born at that certain time and place? Sure, some of the ideas that are proposed to us are good ones (like ‘treat others with respect’), others not so much (like ‘it’s ok that our garbage ends up in the ocean’), but how will we know unless we attempt to think of them critically for ourselves? To what end do we unquestioningly accept?

Taken together, the societies of our collective history hold a mixed bag when it comes to the quality of the ideas on how to live a good life. These days, (at least where I’ve been informed, in the 21stcentury West) what is real and true and of value has become increasingly and uncommonly suspicious: economy before spirit, money before nature, the known before the unknown, the physical before the metaphysical, private gains before social good, profits now before a healthy world later. The list of warped priorities goes on…

It’s so normalized behind all we see: the ads on the subways, the words and topics that we see in the news feeds of our smart phones that we end up discussing and holding in high regard. Often it’s even subtler than that, the way we quietly take on the popular ideas that surrounds us. It can be hard to remember that it doesn’t have to be so.

Some of the explanations people tell us about life (and what might happen after) sound especially attractive to the more insecure parts of our selves, the warm blanket of their certainty a relief as we spin on this rock in the cold of outer space. But deep down, these ideologies leave us unsatisfied; we’re skeptical of their assuredness, we feel that there’s more to it, that maybe it’s ultimately out of our grasp. All of us: theists, atheists, agnostics, and every other sort of person yearn for insights that will shape our ideas about existence and also the metaphysical. We join religions, we meditate, we read self-help books, we do drugs – regardless of the medium the desire is the same: to understand ourselves and the world better - even transcend! After all, we are not only a creature that considers our origins, our present, and our future. We are a creature that ultimately comes up against that which is greater than itself.

*

Contemplating that which is greater than itself is harder than feeling a part of it. As they say, sacred and divine experiences are impossible to put into words, so our personal and even group experiences of it remain elusive. The psychologist Carl Jung believed that truly exploring these matters can only happen within a mythological and symbolic framework, since we can never adequately explain it logically or rationally to any lasting satisfaction. Of course, even our symbols fall short - as myth expert Joseph Campbell writes:

…the person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. [iv]

Regardless, poets, artists, philosophers, and just about everyone else has been wondering and sharing their ideas not just about the nature of life and how we might see ourselves in it, but of a wholeness or oneness that might be behind it all. This type of metaphysical inquiry wonders into the nature of our being, and considers ideas like time and space, universal truth, the infinite, objective reality, and even wanders into the moral realm. This type of thinking concerns itself with what to do, and how to act, in the world we find ourselves. Moreover, it’s interested in the idea of an inexpressible essence that exists, in some mysterious capacity, beyond our realm of fragmented comprehension.

Creation stories include, at their heart, the concept of a wholeness that is greater than its parts: a God, a Big Bang, a will to life. We are mystified, but consider it none-the-less: ‘what is this condition for the possibility of life to occur, at the core of our universe? What is this force of oneness hidden behind the veil of difference?’

But hold on. Right away, before we begin, we are riddled with a problem and troubled by a paradox. How can there be just one? One what? Experience shows us difference, not oneness. There's me the writer, and you the reader - right there there's two. Duality and difference, such as the relationship between you and me right now, presents itself at each turn of our waking and even dreaming life. As particular and limited beings in a sea of otherness and distinction, we are constantly reminded of the inaccessibility of the unity and oneness for which we might quest.

After all, answers to our deepest questions about meaning, purpose, the infinite and the divine are not obvious or even apparent. We are cut off somehow, our best faculties unable to raise us out of our limitations, instead forcing us to understand the world not as oneness, but its opposite: duality, diversity, particularity, and fragmentation.

…real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites – day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be, and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. Jung [v]

In the end, any reality of oneness is lost as soon as we act as agents in the world, if there were no distinction, there would be no subjectivity, there would be no person. With consciousness engaged, our egos aware, otherness appears. I see not me and so I see me.

Duality grounds us: badness is needed for goodness. We conceive of right because we conceive of wrong. If there is a something,then it implies that there is something else. In this sense we need the other, it is the source of ourselves, it’s the condition and prerequisite for our particular lives to exist. Try as we may, we are not built with the ability to comprehend such infinite matters unbound by difference, subjectivity, time, space, language and symbols. I am I, for I am distinct.

So as subjects cut off from all but some vague idea of wholeness, we are left musing: ‘Why do I have this feeling and idea of oneness when all I see is the opposite? Is there anything we can know about it for certain? Are we stuck in this uncertainty and caught in this Way?

The Unresolvable Paradox

It’s a Catch 22: a mind that tries to make a claim about unlimited infinite matters has to use its limited finite mind to make the claim. We’re stuck in subjectivity and limitation, and must contend with fragmentation and finitude.

This applies to our relationships with each other: we don’t know each other directly, since our experiences and interpretations of existence are never exactly the same. I do not know you immediately or, perhaps, the way you intend me to, but modified by my particular blend of belief.

We can use shared symbols and language to communicate our unique experiences and ideas as best we can, but even within the agreed upon parameters, we can’t help but imbue others with our individual brand of meaning and bias. In our attempt to be understood, we can do our best, but we’re always shy of our goal. Me-ness gets in the way.

When, in conversation, I use any such terms as ‘state’ ‘money’ ‘wealth’ or ‘society’, I assume that my listeners understand more or less the same thing I do. But the phrase ‘more or less’ makes my point. Each word means something slightly different to each person, even among those who share the same cultural background.[vi]The fact that [these differences] exist shows that even the most matter-of-fact contents of consciousness have a penumbra of uncertainty around them. Jung[vii]

Here we live, within the confines of this kind of consciousness, unable to know about an ultimate reality of things with any lasting satisfaction. To know is to capture and remove, to separate and name, to anthropomorphize and imbue categories with meaning and symbol. It is to take apart and examine. To identify and make sense, we must pull a thing out of any prior uncategorized, unfiltered state in order to experience it through the filters of the mind: ‘that is an ocean, the sand is not ocean’. ‘The ocean is magnificent’, ‘the ocean is mean’, ‘the ocean is Godly’, ‘the ocean is a perfect place for my garbage’. The very existence of consciousness, of separating and being separated, is where the paradox resides.

In short, for these profound matters of the spirit, for that universal thing, we have no idea what we’re talking about.

This realization both frustrates and inspires. Burdened and delighted, the paradox persists. Time and space are ours to believe. Good and bad are presented, up and down never to be resolved. We are stuck in duality; we are caught in this Way. So if a Buddhist tells me he has reached the bliss of enlightenment, I narrow my eyes in suspicion. If you are still alive, good monk, how then can you have ridden yourself of ego, broken free of the yin-yang, and joined that ‘higher order’? And when the Christian fundamentalist tells me the Bible is to be taken literally, and all of the answers to our deepest questions are to be found within, I can't help but be skeptical. And when reasoned scientists tells me they have the real template, the correct interpretation on what life is all about, I question mark their statements and take a couple steps backwards.

The Oceanic Feeling

If all we know is separation and duality, where did the idea and experience of oneness come from? In the face of the evidence, why does this feeling and idea persist? One theory that works to explain its origins comes from the field of psychology and psychoanalysis, referred to as the oceanic feeling. Coined by Romain Rolland and popularized by Sigmund Freud, an oceanic feeling of unity and limitlessness stems from our earliest experiences as an infant, a time prior to our understanding of ourselves as subjects, before our egos began understanding themselves as different from an ‘other’.

During this stage of life, so the theory goes, the infant does not have a clear concept of self: it cries, and automatically and immediately the breast is there. In a very real way, it does not consider the breast as different than itself. It’s only when mothers stop breastfeeding infants that they begin to see themselves as different than their environment. They cry, but the breast fails to appear. The child starts to see itself as distinct from its mother, and begins to comprehend otherness. From this, subject/object tension is born. In this moment of self-awareness, the oceanic feeling of oneness, though not forgotten, ceases. In its place, subjectivity emerges.

…originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive — indeed, an all-embracing — feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it. Freud[viii]

Perhaps, Freud thought, ideas of spirituality and the search for unfragmented unity stem from these memories. We hold faint recollections of an experience of shared egos and hazy borders between the self and the world. We sort of remember a time of unity and pre-distinction, and long to return to its innocent safety. But alas, it is no more. Self-awareness gets in the way.

Despite these limitations, despite our separation from the universal things, the material worldview assumes that reason and rationality are somehow not interpretations, but direct lines to the objective Truth of reality. At this point real damage and danger emerge:

The dark side of the Self is the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the Self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to 'spin' megalomaniac or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and 'possess' them. A person in this state thinks with mounting excitement that he has grasped and solved the great cosmic riddles; he therefore loses all touch with human reality. M-L. von Franz[ix]

It is here, lost in that ungrounded certainty, where the soul collapses, where any sort of spiritual life becomes impossible to live, where awe fades away, replaced by delusions of Truth. If we’re not careful, we might end up in this palace, stunting our spirit’s development, and leading ourselves astray.

The Benefit and Limit of Science and Reason

How magnificent a tool, a lens, to see the world, and make the sense. But oh! For those that call it God, and revel in their reasons, is spiritual treason.

Uncertainty makes us uneasy. Just ask any person that ever lived. Think about living in the wilderness without the comforts we are accustomed to. Not knowing what's lurking in the darkness, or if and when an unfriendly tribe might show up, naturally puts us on high alert. Justifiably, we’re nervous. We question our safety and build up our defenses. It’s understandable for us to react to uncertain and potentially harmful stimuli with worry, and to cope by creating as many safeguards against it as possible. The same, it seems, goes for existential questions and unknowns; as a species, we don't like to not know what the greater purpose, if any, lies at the root of our lives. As Jung pointed out:

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. [x]

Indeed, eliminating uncertainty in favour of knowing things is certainly beneficial for many and most tasks we might find ourselves engaged in while we live. And for this, reason, rationality and the scientific method are necessary. These central tenants of our current view of reality have obviously improved the quality of our lives in countless ways, and to an unimaginable degree. Their accurate and precise tools help us comprehend the world: deductive and inductive reasoning, critical thinking - these are arguably the most fundamental tools we have to understand the physical and even the psychological world. Without them, human life would be much bleaker, sicker, shorter and in many ways, way more confusing. Technologies, healthcare, increased life expectancy, standards of living, common sense; all have reason and science to thank.

Further, unlike blind faith and superstition, science, when practiced correctly, looks for cracks and faults in its hypotheses in an effort to better understand and grow. When it attempts to falsify, contrary to other systems of belief, it’s glad when information contradicts its theories, since truth and certainty are its greatest goal.

It’s a potent tool that allows us to expose and deconstruct irrational thinking, and reset our perspective and way of interpreting events. Without doubt, reason, rationality, and the scientific method are all necessary and indispensable methods of understanding and navigating reality.

However, proclaiming their benefits is, as you might have guessed, not why this subject is before us now. The central question is: where, if anywhere, does reason’s usefulness end? Sure, its method is excellent for building bridges, going to outer space, and cooking a complicated meal; but how effective is it for considering chaos, for talking about love, or explaining how to act in the world? Is it of any use for understanding and experiencing meaning in our lives?

It’s easy to understand how one could be a faithful follower of reason and science, and hope that through them understand, not only matters of the physical world, but also that of the metaphysical. It’s not difficult to see how we would be tempted to use it to find some sort of 'objective truth' or 'ultimate reality' that we could grasp with our conscious minds. Mathematics and logic, these tools we use - do they not show us what is true and false? Isn't 2+2=4 a true statement always and forever? How can we dispute such a simple equation? Same with ‘cause and effect’ - we see it in nature, A+B=C – who could say otherwise? The seductive quality of reasoned systems like mathematics is plain to see: in its seemingly perfect and flawless (if not self-referencing) symmetry, why wouldn't we use it to grapple with the metaphysical questions that our souls and spirits cannot resist but ask?

To answer that question, it’s best to figure out what we mean when we say 'truth'; is it subjective or objective, is it relative or absolute? Does it change with time or across cultures? Can something be true for someone and untrue for someone else? Is a fact a truth, is a feeling a truth, is an action a truth?

Two Types of Truth

One couldthink about the two types of truth as: scientific truth and religious truth. Indeed, those truths are two very different things. Scientific truth is concerned with what a thing is, whereas religious truth (the way it was believed hundreds of years ago anyway) was more interested in truth as it pertained to ‘how to act’ and ‘what is the moral of the story?’ These days, however, we don’t tend to think of religious ideas as true in that original and ‘lived experience’ kind of Way. People often announce that their religious ideas aretrue, but they are usually referring to the scientific way of thinking about truth, usually arguing that they believe their religion is literally and factually true. In doing so it becomes easy to confuse scientific truth with the religious kind.

A slightly different way of understanding these two kinds of truth is to refer to them as lower case truth andupper case Truth: lower case truth refers to the type of truth that reason, rationality and logic, can handle. This is the truth that, for example, mathematics can find with certain satisfaction within the parameters of its system. 2+2=4 is an example of such truth. 2+2 and 4 are two ways of saying the same thing: so long as we are within the confines of this truth table, 2+2 will always be 4. Dualistic interpreting is much the same - and we are, for the most part, drawn to this way of thinking, for example, that the opposite of up is down, or that black is the farthest shade from white. Cause and effect work much the same way and should be considered as a lower-case truth: although we don't knowthat the sun will rise tomorrow, it most likely will - we can confidently infer it, we can say that it’s true. This type of interpretation is great for understanding science, natural law, the movements of the planets and tides, and countless other things that make life easier, sensible and understandable.

Upper case Truth is an altogether different idea. This is the Truth that theologists, philosophers, and artists concern themselves with, and refers to a Truth un-interfered by our lenses of understanding. It speaks to an idea and feeling of a sublime arrangement to life. It refers to an unfragmented whole, an infinite oneness, something all encompassing, an alternative to duality.

Appropriately, the capital ‘T’ type of Truth has been (for the most part) thought to be outside of our grasp, beyond language, incomprehensible to the ego and the limitations of our beings. Now, we too often use the same word to describe these two very different ideas. It seems we have forgotten the distinction, though truth and Truth couldn't be further in definition.

This forgetting has been devastating to us as a species, and as individuals. We must remember that what is real and meaningful and true about life is not necessarily what is real or meaningful and true according to reason.

With this distinction between truth and Truth in mind, we can better return to our assessment of science and reason. The question is, are they equipped to deal with Truth?

Part 2: Europe's Search for Truth

The Material View of the World

As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to equilibrium. Jung[xi]

One of the greatest attempts to comprehend what was until then assumed incomprehensible, to ‘know’ all that is contained within the universe, came to be in what is commonly called the Enlightenment Era. The French say it started in the early 1700's, when Louis XIV died and people began rejecting the monarchy and the Church. Others put its beginnings in the early 1600's, with the start of the scientific revolution. Many historians point out that it owes its roots to the ideas of the ancient Greeks well before that. Still others say its ideas were borrowed from the ancient Chinese philosophies that had made their way to Europe over the sea and through the Silk Roads.

Regardless of its origins, until the 18th century, it was a quiet whisper in the European psyche, one that most people did not hear, or contemplate, to any great degree. Soon enough though, the ideas of the Enlightenment, the scientific method, spread with vigour and rigour. As the century unfolded, the empirical whisper grew louder. Before long its volume rose to a thundering cry, clear as a bell and plainly heard in the classrooms and coffee shops across the land: ‘Truth is ours! Objective reality can be known!’ This would be the lens to interpret reality and find our place within it.

For those that spirited this movement, it would be a system that freed people from incomplete knowledge. It promised to rid our minds of delusional ideas, and instead provide a method of understanding that would pull humanity out of the dark ages. No longer would we fumble through life with our superstitious primitive symbols and stories. No longer would we be at the whim of our infantile, and even repulsive, unconscious drives.

From that lowly place, we would be led into the light of day, discarding our fables and replacing them with facts. Using the tools of rationality and science, the Enlightenment would offer a light in an otherwise dark and murky world of superstition, feudalism and black magic.

Updated lenses to interpret and understand life and the world were crafted in the newest scientific laboratories. We were primed to question, and compelled to ‘know’. They promised to unveil a reality that we could control, predict and comprehend - even, it hoped, the ultimate Truth of the universe.

In other words, this material worldview, through the prism of the Enlightenment, was not simply a way to interpretreality, but a clear way to see reality itself. The effects of this age went far and wide and deep in space and time. Without a doubt, much of the foundation of our current view of reality was formalized and normalized by the Enlightenment project - and here we are, still, somehow, in the Age of Reason.

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Europeans were desperate for a new method of interpreting and experiencing life, and many curious minds welcomed these new ways of thinking. From them, ‘radical’ ideas emerged that undermined the millennia old iron fist of royal and religious authority, and planted the seeds of 18thand 19thcentury revolution. These new ideas were liberal and humanistic, and gave a sense of power, freedom and rights to the individual that had never been reality before.

During this welcomed ideological upheaval, long established traditions were broken, and ideas like democracy, as well as racial and sexual equality, were debated more freely. The average citizen was now, in a very real way, able to think and talk about life on his or her own terms. Imagine the thrill – to question whatever it was that one wanted to question! It might be tough for us moderns to understand the weight of this, but not long before, it was too taboo, the consequences too great, to question the establishment and think outside the box. Anyway, most of us didn't have the skills. The education system had been too bleak, and existed for the rich, and for the Church. Before the Enlightenment, the story folks got about life was the story those in power wanted them to get (most often a story that perpetuated that power).

Eventually though, people turned their thoughts away from God-fearing piety to liberty and progress. Education spread, ideas abounded. Destiny was in the eye of the beholder. (It should be noted here that even during the Enlightenment, it was still risky to question the tenants of the church. Interpreting the holy books ‘incorrectly’ could get you excommunicated or worse: many people have been hanged for having the wrong interpretation of scripture).

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From the Middle Ages to the ancient Greeks, and all the years leading up it, thinkers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Kant - all influenced this modern Western material lens. So ubiquitous became the views of these people that it is, nowadays, hard to think of any other way of understanding. How could we possibly think of reality and truth as anything but what we do through the reasoned lens? What was this superstitious, ‘primitive’ view of the world that supposedly occurred before? What is this talk of a time where stories, mythologies, and religious thought were the central players in how we lived our lives, how we found meaning, and how we understood what was real and true about the world?

Whatever it was, the thinkers of the Enlightenment weren’t interested. Myth and story, compared to this new clear knowledge-based system of science, was no longer seen as a mature, legitimate method to interpret reality, share experience, and find truth and meaning.

It’s easy to see where everyone was coming from - who wouldn’t want to join the Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge and understanding? (Of course, in retrospect it might seem obvious that an essential part of what it is to be a human is not well explained solely through its lens.)

But there it is, the pendulum had swung with empirical force, away from mythology and ritual, and into this new age we find ourselves. Over a relatively short amount of time in the grand scheme of things, reason and the scientific method have become the new standard. In the classroom and on the streets, it has replaced religion and mythology as the only necessary and productive lens to understand all aspects of life.

Religion and the Enlightenment Part 1

Deism and a True Reality

In and around the 1600’s, religious conflict, like the Thirty Years War, was causing havoc in Europe. When examined through the new ‘enlightened’ lens, it seemed obvious: it was time to rethink religion and return it to its less confrontational roots. How could there be so much war between religious ideologies that essentially shared the same God? What is the point of this senseless killing in the name of faith? It was time for fresh eyes and new ideas to lift religion out of the murky, superstitious, bloody and hate-filled swamp it had fallen into.

With the new filter on reality and truth at our disposal, crafted in the labs of Newton, Galileo and the like, the timing seemed perfect. And why not? The Enlightenment was answering so many questions, shedding light on so many ideas. It was a time of great hope and faith in the new saviour of Reason. It seemed only natural to apply this to theological and philosophical matters that had until then been shrouded in mystery and metaphor.

And so, focusing this lens at the heavens, a new image emerged: that the universe was a vast machine - created and set in motion by a creator-being using natural law. It was coined 'necessitarianism' (or today, determinism), the view that the universe (and as a consequence, humanity) behaves in a way that is causally determined by natural law (like cause and effect).

Within this view of reality and the heavens, while there was still considered to be a deity or God, ‘He’ was one who, after creating the universe, drifts into the background without ever again intervening, letting the natural laws and governing forces of his creation work out within the beautiful and perfect system of rationality and science. It’s an idea referred to as deism: the belief in a creator God, without reference to holy books or any other miraculous source (this according to Thomas Paine). All a deist needs is their own personal relationship with reason to inform their belief.

At first, deism was received as an extreme idea, blasphemous to the most, but an exciting and welcomed change to the more radical (though it probably didn’t go far enough for the few atheists of the time). Until this moment, a personal and active God was the assumed idea on virtually every city street and country farm in Europe, one that heard your prayers and judged your actions. It was deeply embedded in the centre of most people’s belief system; any other way of conceiving of God was considered absurd or heresy. For many, it still is. But that is a matter for later.

Generally speaking, atheism, at this point, was thought of as a completely preposterous proposition; laymen and scholar alike were deeply imbedded in a culture and society that was so religious, faith so central to the ethos, that fitting God within a reasoned system, like what deism was proposing, made far more sense to them than to do away with it altogether. John Locke, a philosopher of the age, agreed, writing that in a Godless world, people:

could have no law but his own will, no end but himself. He would be a God to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will be the sole measure and end of all his actions' [xii]

As this seemed too absurd for most, deism was to be the brave new explanation: God, now, is like a divine watchmaker, not a magical intervener; the universe acts in accordance to natural law and does not include miracles. But that’s OK, because the deists don’t need them: reason and observation of the natural world are enough to determine the existence of a single creator of the universe. For the rationally grounded deist:

Reason put you in touch with God... because the mind of man cleared of its fallibilities is sufficiently capable of the knowledge of God. [xiii]

This change in ideology was a big deal, and brazen, for it was the first time that we took something that had otherwise been assumed to be unthinkable, incomprehensible and unknowable (and only relatable through myth and faith and symbols) and attempted to make it comprehensible, knowable, and relatable through fact. Through the deist’s eyes, the divine realm was removed from its superstition and mystery, its unknowingness overcome, allowing people to understand, to comprehend and to know what was until then unknowable.

Making the Unknown Known

The deist’s view grew in popularity as more and more people grew disenchanted with organized religion. As the empirical method grew, so too did skepticism of religion’s belief in miracles and magic. And fair enough - supernatural interpretations of reality often lead to unhelpful, irrational thought and uncritical ends. Deism’s offer was enticing: reason and the scientific method would reveal objective universal Truth, and our childish interpretations of reality could finally be put to bed.

Like other ideas of the Enlightenment, the roots of deism preceded it by many years. In the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Europeans were out 'discovering' the world and 'contacting' other cultures (read: colonizing), they were exposed to some of these views. But even on the continent, the seeds of deism were planted long before the Enlightenment. It was the ancient Greek Heraclitus (he lived around 500 B.C.) who conceived of the idea of a 'logos' - a supreme rational principle. And of course there’s the Greek triple-threat: Socrates (450 BCish), Plato (400 BCish) and Aristotle (350 BCish), who together laid the groundwork to the dialectical method. (Essentially, this was a way of figuring out what was true by having a reasoned logical discourse between two or more people with the aim of establishing truth. In modern philosophy this idea is often called the 'correspondence theory of truth.’)

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As we consider these early heavy hitters, we should most definitely give a nod to Thomas Aquinas, born about eight hundred years ago (1225-1274), who was convinced that humans were able to knowthe mind of God. According to him, humans acquire knowledge of truth first empirically through experience and the senses, then rationally through understanding and judgment done by reason. For Aquinas, the truth of the human intellect (logical truth) is based on the truth ‘in things’ (ontological truth). Because of this direct understanding, he believed we had a direct line to the Truth of reality. To this end, he wrote a kind of re-statement of Aristotle's view in his Summa 1.16.1:

Veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei (truth is the conformity of the intellect to the things)

This theory might sound appealing in its cut and dry conception of Truth, but problems quickly emerged. Physics, for example, points out that external reality usually isn’t as it seems: as science advanced, and our microscopes and telescopes got bigger, we realized that what we thought of as certain and static was not the case at all. What lookedsolid through the naked eye ended up having space and emptiness within, when seen through a microscope. All over the place, the stuff of the physical world broke down the closer in and further out we looked. In this wake, our certainties were left ungrounded. Unfortunately for Aquinas, this proved problematic for his argument: trusting the faculties of our mind and body to give us objective representations of what reality is, did not work out the way he wanted.

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Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was another influential guy who spent considerable amounts of time trying to find Truth, or, ‘an unshakeable ground on which to understand reality.’ Obsessed with certainty, and an advocate of rationalism and science, his idea, methodic doubt, sounds good enough: doubt everything in order to get to the undoubtable.

And that’s what he did, he put everything up for revision, he made everything doubtable, down to the things that seem most obvious in life. He would sit at home and ask: ‘am I really here, sitting by my fireplace? Perhaps I'm having a dream. Perhaps I'm being fooled by an evil genius designed with this very trick in mind. Perhaps my body is an illusion!’

In the midst of all of this doubt and uncertainty, Descartes claimed that he happened upon the thing he was convinced couldn’t be doubted - the thing doing the doubting: his mind. His reasoning was simple enough: if someone is being deceived, then there is something that must exist in order to be deceived in the first place: the mind! After all, thinking is needed for doubting, he undoubtedly thought. It was his eureka moment, and from it he came up with his famous words:

I think therefore I am: cogito ergo sum[xiv]

For his idea to hold water, Descartes needed to bring in a new conception of reality - a separation between the body and the mind. He needed this separation so he could ‘prove’ that the mind was an entirely different entity from the fallible body. So Descartes came up with what he said were two fundamental substances, that of space (not outer-space but space in a physical sense, like our bodies) and that of the mind.

Out of this hard-core dualism came the certainty that Descartes was looking for (or so he thought): our bodies might be able to deceive us, but our God-given minds cannot; we can’t doubt the mind that’s doing the doubting. This idea informed the Enlightenment project by placing the mind and its reasoning powers as the centre of reality, for the most part unaffected by forces outside of the known self.

The act of doubting is a noble one, and Descartes can certainly be admired for this starting position. But the criticisms to his conclusions soon rained down. For some, it was arguing that our thoughts are much more closely linked to our bodies than Descartes believed. (For example if you damage your brain, you damage your mind as well.)

Other objections of note come from the logical positivists: they point out that the meaning of any proposition depends on its method of verification - and since one can’t verify the mind empirically, Descartes’ argument about the mind is empty and meaningless and only metaphysical in nature. Indeed, locating the mind, or consciousness, turns out to be more problematic than Descartes was hoping. As Joseph Campbell, the great master of myth points out:

It is part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ origination consciousness. It isn't. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness. [xv]

But perhaps the biggest error in Descartes big idea is this: to prove that the mind is reliable in the first place, one has to prove the existence of an absolutely honest God. To do this one has to presuppose the existence of God from the start as the ground for the reliability of the mind. This self-referencing logic he actually admits to throughout the Mediations:

I see that the certainty of all other things depends on this knowledge of God, so that without it nothing can ever by perfectly known… for if I did not possess knowledge of God...I should thus never have true and certain knowledge about anything, but only shifting and changeable opinions. [xvi]

...and....

Thus I see plainly that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends uniquely on my awareness of the true God, to such an extent that I was incapable of perfect knowledge about anything else until I became aware of him. [xvii]

Descartes was convinced that he had found Truth and God, but only because he was looking for them in the first place.

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Next up: Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Proclaimed by many to be one of the most important scientists of all time, he played a central role in the development of the scientific revolution. So deep, in fact, was his impact at the time, that the Enlightenment is often referred to as the Newtonian view. His view is the scientific empirical one, of course, and strives to differentiate and categorize the stuff of reality to produce knowledge, a knowledge that can tell us exactly what the world and reality is.

Newton shared the deist idea that the universe is like a well-made clock: determined, predictable, and controllable. By using the scientific method to understand life and reality, Newton argued that a philosophy was possible that merged truth and Truth into one great scientific system through which we could know all that was worthwhile to know.

No more did reality include the stuff of spirit and mystery. Reality was now the stuff of matter (seemingly easier to predict and control). For Newton and the growing enlightened masses, ‘reality’ came to be synonymous with ‘objects in the world’. This very specific way of defining truth - and understanding reality - became the pivot point on which we could now shift our claims of knowledge and Way of interpreting life.

Until this time, subjective experience had had more of a say in what humans considered real, meaningful and true in their lives. But for Newton, by defining reality solely through the objective and the material, truth and meaning became calculable and impersonal. Suddenly, we were taught that there was no room for personal experience (outside the realm of scientific knowledge) to have a say in crafting a lens on which to experience reality. Newton and his buddies were only concerned with what they could know, and assumed that all that was worthwhile to take as real was contained within that knowable objective materialism. And so it came to be that nothing of concern was unknowable anymore. As a result of this reductionist approach to truth and reality, we claimed to find the objectivity we so desperately wanted to find.

The Newtonian view put the mythological and religious one in an awkward position: nothing had really challenged its account of reality before. Evidence and fact were, up to then, not a real concern for theology, since religious truths lived less in the literal and more in the metaphoric and symbolic realm. Religious thought was concerned less with fact, and more about the best ways to act. The religious assumption had until then held to the notion that some things are meaningful without being quantified and reduced to fact, and therefore can’t really be explored using those tools. It had instead always offered a different way of life – one where stories and ceremonies were the doors to experiencing, understanding, and attending to the questions and tendencies that lie at the core of our beings. These were ‘true’ but not 'fact' – fact was irrelevant to the meaning and life of its truth. Unknowability was implied as the symbol was used.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. Jung[xviii]

But with reason the new darling of Europe, even religion could not evade its influence into matters of reality. Religion began to feel that it toohad to use reason to explain itself, if it was ever to keep up with the times. Pressured by the ‘divine’ tools of Newtonian science, religion felt that it was forced to rationally justify its dogmas and doctrines.

For this, taking the bible literally became a trendier position, and a prerequisite for the usefulness of religion to endure. Usurped by reason, it was suddenly on everyone's mind to provethat God existed, for empirical proof was now needed for truth. This infiltration of reason into religion is still felt today - fundamentalism is on the rise, and the need to justify religion using the material worldview remains strong.

Although it may have snuck up on us over the past 500 years, our ethos shifted: matter and information have become the ground of reality. Steadily throughout these years, even philosophers and poets turned away from the Bible and towards science and logic as a way of understanding the world. The age saw reason not as a tool born of our limited minds and subject to its limitations, but as a clear and innate empirical method in which to understand and comprehend the mandates of the ineffable.Reason was saviour, and within it the way to know God.

This left man’s greatest instrument, his psyche, full of deep unconscious drives and vast capacity for meaning, without a space to express itself. In fact it became mistrusted, despised, and for some, even rendered irrelevant. As Jung points out, these days ‘it's only psychological' too often means: it is nothing. [xix]

Religion and the Enlightenment Part 2

The Harsh Reality

So did it work? Are reason and science all encompassing, fit to resolve the great metaphysical puzzles of our lives? Are our philosophical questions, existential dilemmas, and religious quandaries now neatly wrapped up for all to understand and comprehend, like a math problem with no remainders? Are all our spiritual and sacred experiences, all our questions of life after death, morality, love, meaning, and purpose, finally explained and resolved? Obviously not, for these questions and paradoxes of life remain. As quantum physics continually reminds us, the universe doesn’t behave the way science predicts:

...in microphysics the observer interferes with the experiment in a way that can't be measured and that therefore can't be eliminated. No natural laws can be formulated, saying 'such and such will happen in every case'…. this naturally presents a tremendous problem for our classical physical thinking….it could thus be said that scientists can no longer hope to describe any aspects or qualities of outer objects in a completely independent 'objective' manner. M-L. Franz[xx]

It’s true that even before the Enlightenment got into full swing, critics were already considering its limits, and weary to fully endorse the Newtonian material lens as the Way to understand all things. Amidst the intoxicating fervour of the promise of reason, there was an unease brewing - a hunch that even science’s methods could not view reality directly and without bias.

John Locke, a 17thcentury British thinker, was on the case. In 1689, he wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he set out to 'enquire into the Original, Certainty and Extant of human knowledge'. In it he argued that when we are born, our minds are like blank slates - in Latin, tabula rasa:until experience (in the form of sensations and reflections) provides the basic stuff of knowledge, nothing innately exists in the mind.

This idea was at odds with the Rationalist assumption that we have a God-given gift of reason in us at birth. For the rationalists then, a person’s essence precedes existence. But Locke wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t at all certain that we have innate ideas in our minds from birth, like morality, or God. As far as he was concerned, knowledge was: ‘the perception of the connection and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.’[xxi]

For Locke it was clear - knowledge and ideas come from experience, and not before: in other words, existence precedes essence. For this view he was considered an empiricist (that is, to get knowledge you must experience the world), not a rationalist (that knowledge and thus reality comes from the mind, not the external world). Although Locke loved reason, and thought that morals and math could be known with certainty, he was convinced that knowledge of material things is probabilistic and only opinion, not objective knowledge. The real essence of reality, he contended, was hidden from us. Because of insights like these, reason turned in upon itself, and philosophy had begun to scrutinize the instrument which it so long had trusted. Durant[xxii]

*

About 50 years later, in 1737, a Scottish philosopher by the name of David Hume wrote a book named Treatise on Human Nature. Similar to Locke, he was interested in the question: 'what is the starting point for knowledge?' Also like Locke, he disagreed with the rationalists starting points. For Hume, like Locke, knowledge is evidence-based and comes through our perceptions, gathered from the external world, it’s not already in us.

Hume argued that humans never seecauses or natural laws, instead we perceive events and then infer its cause and necessity. An example: we can assume that the sun will rise tomorrow but there remains no proof that it actually will; law and causality are inferred but not known. (Math, of course, is different; as it is contained within its self-referencing system, its formulas are guaranteed and necessary)

In his essay Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding,Hume explains that reason should be divided into two types – ‘relations of ideas’ and ‘matters of fact’. Relations of ideas are: the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic, and, in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain.[xxiii]So 3x3 is always 9 because 3x3 and 9 is exactly the same thing expressed differently. They are unchangeably true, yes, but only because the predicate is already contained in the subject. [xxiv]

For matters of fact we come to reason differently. For these, operations of thought are not enough: you need observable truth. For matters of fact, the contradictory notion of the fact is still possible (however remote): that the sun will rise tomorrow is not absolute; it could be the case that it doesn’t. Of course, since the sun has risen every day of our lives so far, we can of course be quite certain that it will rise again tomorrow, and plan our days accordingly.

Matters of fact, then, are founded on notions of cause and effect. ‘If I drop this stone, it will surely fall to the sand’. Gravity is the cause, falling to the sand is the effect. This knowledge, Hume says, comes to us through experience, not reason. We have to see it to believe it: imagine if we had never dropped a stone or had any concept of gravity, and then were about to do so for the first time. There is nothing in the stone itself that would help us to reason out the cause and effect relationship that was about to happen, there is nothing a prioriin the cause that will lead us to its effect. Only experience gives us this.

The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause. Hume[xxv]

With all of this in mind, let’s not forget that we have to get by in the world and therefore live by our assumptions and beliefs about matters of fact, but it’s helpful to remember they’re not guaranteed. Even the most basic matters of fact break down when put to inquiry, and are not absolute in their claims. They may be truths, but they can never be Truths. As Hume writes in section 1 of The infinite divisibility of our ideas of space and time:

It is universally allowed, that the capacity of the mind is limited, and can never attain a full and adequate conception of infinity.

And so there it was, Europe's search for Truth now in question, faith and reason in the hands of the skeptic.

Our minds are but our ideas in procession and association, our certainties but probabilities always threatening to be violated, broken. Hume[xxvi]

*

Hume and Locke’s contributions to the matter of truth and Truth are exceptional and extraordinary, but perhaps none more than the ideas of the 18th century Prussian genius, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Let’s jump in: for Kant, ‘objective reality’ can never be known through reason (or any other way) since we are forced to understand and experience the world with inherent lenses (like time and space) that keep us from knowing what, as he called it, the ‘neumenal’ or ‘the world in itself,’ really is.

Kant had issue with both the rationalists andempiricists, and came up with some weird terms to demonstrate his points: a posteriori knowledgedescribes the particular pieces of knowledge we gain from experience, whereas a priori knowledgemeans a necessary and universal knowledge that we can have independent of experience.

Essentially, Kant did not believe that pure reason had a priori knowledge, and therefore did not have the power to grasp the mysteries of the universe. And while Kant sided with the empiricists in believing that experience is indeed important for gaining knowledge, he didn’t think that experience could account for all the concepts that we have. An example: time and space. For Kant, these are not ideas we acquire from experience, they are already hard-wired into us (or synthetic a priori concepts, as he puts it).

Awkward terminology aside, Kant’s ideas help us understand that we are compelled to use these hardwired biases and lenses to experience reality. In other words, we can't experience anything except through these filters. We live in the phenomenalworld, the world of things and experience, according to Kant, not in this neumenalworld, the world as it reallyis, independent of our filters. For a Kantian then, all experience necessarily takes place in time, and obeys the laws of causation: we are caught in time and space, they are pure and inescapable intuitions of the mind.

Kant was convinced that his predecessors had not given any clear grounding for their metaphysical speculation, because they had assumed that ideas and experiences like time, space, and causation are the content of an external reality that the mind must reach out and grasp. In turning this assumption around, what arises is the insight that these concepts are not found in experience but are instead the form that the mind givesexperience.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us. Kant[xxvii]

The Kantian conclusion is the Taoist and Buddhist one: we have no certain knowledge of things in themselves. We can’t conceive of any kind of objective direct reality, or any kind of eternity or infinity outside of time and space. We cannot truly comprehend of a starting point without a point before that. For better or worse, we are stuck, causally, in this mode of interpretation.

The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. Campbell[xxviii]

*

The Edge of Reason and Return of the Spirit

Kant’s ideas about the way humans experience reality were a big blow to the Enlightenment’s dream. From it, the Newtonian age was forced to admit that scientific knowledge, while essential, could not show us the divine. Its methods and formulations could not satisfy the yearnings of our spirits, or sufficiently explore the idea of what ‘sacred’ is. It could not find the certainty it wanted to, or the Truth of reality for which it was looking.

By using scientific instruments [man] can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses. For example, he can extend the range of his vision by binoculars or of his hearing by electrical amplification. But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes, or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass. Jung[xxix]

*

The search for Truth may have not ended the way the Enlightenment thinkers hoped, but with the limits and boundaries of reason now apparent, another door opens: when we see that materialism is, by itself, an incomplete and oversimplified method of understanding reality, we are freed from the expectation that it could be otherwise.

Unburdened by impossible ideals, reason now re-positions itself, allowing space for that other and more ancient lens to emerge again, that had been, until now, hiding in the shadows of Enlightenment ideology. From here, it is easier to imagine how both the material andperhaps the mythological worldview could together influence and determine the way we interpret reality, look at truth, and finding meaning. With these two modes of being as allies, it seems we’re in a much better position to proceed.

But is this how we experience life? Do we live as if reason and science don’t give us everything we need to interpret our lives and act in the world? Do we actively and intentionally add the mythological perspective to the mix as we go about our days? Not really, it doesn’t seem so, not according to the surveys. In this reductionist and fact-driven world we have found ourselves thrown, science and reason are still thought of as the exclusive lens for finding out what is real, true and meaningful about life. Even with the limits of reason exposed, its shortcomings well pointed out for hundreds of years now, we are prone to think of it as the way, the truth, and the light.

It’s a sad truth: the value of myth is lost on the streets of the modern world. Rituals and myths are still seen as unproductive, infantile and weird – they are now only strange terms, no longer a lived experience. The question that arises: can we course-correct? It’s a pivotal time in human history, and as our modern secular souls suffer, unable to explore the spirit, we can’t begin our paradigm shift soon enough.

The general undervaluation of the human soul is so great that neither great religions nor the philosophies nor scientific rationalism have been willing to look twice at it. Jung[xxx]

At this juncture let’s remember that it’s not science itselfthat is so damaging to the spirit, rather, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, it's the way we believe it [xxxi], a way that excludes all other forms of knowing and being. It’s obvious that the material worldview is incredible at understanding and organizing reality, and we are profoundly grateful for the near-certainties it provides. But interpretations they remain, products of our limited and fragmented minds. Reason itself knows this, but if you ask it, it is not quick to admit it.

Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known… it is not interested in totality but with particularity. The scientist aims to be impartial and objective. Philosophy aims to question these facts and test their limits... a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom. Durant[xxxii]

What a mission! - to use the reasoned methods to help us make sense of the world, while at the same time keeping them from clouding our overall perspective and experience. What a challenge! - to go about our lives with belief in our symbolic machinery, while remembering that it is just that.

Part 3: Caught in the Way

The Wisdom of Ancient Eastern Thought

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The name is the mother of the myriad of things. Lao Tzu [xxxiii]

Whether through the Bible or a biology textbook, modern ideology argues that the Truth of reality is ours to discover. ‘Read the Bible - it will tell you all the answers to the mysteries of life!’ shout the fundamentally religious. ‘Science will show you what is real and objectively True!’ proclaim the scientists. The absurd war rages on.

The counter-argument has roots that stretch far beyond the Age of Enlightenment, back into our earliest of histories. Eastern philosophies like Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism are all privy to the same common foundational philosophy: as temporal beings forced into subjectivity, direct experience with ‘objective reality’ is impossible. For these belief systems, claiming knowledge of ultimate reality or God has always been considered a ridiculous notion. For those matters, we can’t pretend to understand.

The way is ever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small. No one in the world dare claim its allegiance.Lao Tzu[xxxiv]

Within these thought systems, unknowability is implied. Mohammed is to never be drawn. The word Yahwehadmits it can’t describe God in any satisfactory way. Only through these concessions, reflected through metaphor and symbol, acted through rites and rituals, can humans explore such matters, and thus bring that kind of understanding and meaning to their lives.

In Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language at least 3500 years old, there is a word: maya. It can be taken to mean both ‘reality’ and‘illusion’. Referring to the illusory nature of the physical, phenomenological world, mayacontends that things that exist in the physical world are constantly changing - and thus spiritually unreal. For the serious Hindu, it’s what lies outside of the physical, conscious, egoic world that is True. Instead it is what we cannot see or know that is the ultimate Truth of reality, or Brahman.

Brahman has no opposite, is not distinct from anything else and, unlike humans, is not bound up in the duality and limitations of the mundane world. Since maya takes this into account, it helps shape deep core beliefs about reality. In the Western materialist world, the opposite has been decreed: reality is only what we can see, sense, come to reason, is a thing we can know. Illusion has come to mean the thing that cannotbe seen or sensed, instead of what canbe. For this, the modern Western thinker thinks that the paradox is resolved, a more solid ground on reality achieved, the chaotic unknown now ordered and known, the sacred and mythological lens now unnecessary and worthy of retiring.

In the Western tradition, up to the beginning of the present century at least, it has generally been assumed that only what exists can be real, so much so that when, at one time, universals were denied existence, an ad hoc subsistence had to be invented to give them reality. With the Taoist, however, whatever has existence cannot be real, for whatever exists also suffers from the limitations of the specific. tr. by. DC. Lau[xxxv]

Taoism and Confucianism (the two main branches of Chinese philosophy), both hold the same paradoxical approach to reality: ‘thingness’ is specific and illusory, and keeps us from the real thing itself. Drawn to this idea of oneness, we are fragmented beings living with opposites: being and not being, true and untrue, I and thou, life and death.These ideas originate, as far as we can tell, in the extremely old book, the I Ching. Thought to be from the late 9thcentury BC, it’s based on the hypothesis of the oneness of man and the surrounding cosmos, but also the ying and yang duality that frames our experience and keeps us from being this idea we call ‘one’. [xxxvi]

*

The name that can be named is not the eternal name. Lao Tzu [xxxvii]

In Taoism, there is the concept of the Way, or the Tao, meaning ‘the path’, and refers to both a way of living as well as a way of thinking about living. The Chinese character for Tao is comprised of a few central ideas. The first part refers to the idea that we are forced to live with duality, and is represented by the yin-yang: known and unknown, finite and infinite, chaos and order. The symbol for ‘oneself’ is found in the Chinese Tao character as well, and speaks to the idea that the Tao, or the path, is within us. The last part means ‘to go’ or ‘to act’, and suggests that the Taoist doesn’t need to look for external authority to achieve balance, instead only needs the self. In this sense, it is recommended that we model ourselves, not after a certain thing or idol or saviour, but after something that is far more elusive: the underlying order of the universe.

There are essentially two ways to think of the Tao. One is to understand it as a Way of thinking and acting in order that we might live the best kind of life and obtain optimal psychological well-being. It’s an aspect of the Tao that can be talked about and practiced. The second way of understanding the Tao is metaphysically. This Way is vague and can’t be properly penetrated by language, since the Tao is that very thing can’t be talked about or understood: a pre-fragmented condition on which all life came to be.

Thus we can see that no term can be applied to the Tao because all terms are specific, and the specific, if applied to the Tao, will impose a limitation on the range of its function. And the Tao that is limited in its function can no longer serve as the Tao that sustains the manifold universe. tr. D.C. Lau[xxxviii]

*

That first way of understanding the Tao, as difficult as it is, is to live in accordance with it, which is to practice what the Taoists call wu-wei. In English, this translates roughly into ‘non-doing’, or ‘action through non-action’, or ‘effortless action’: one tries to model oneself after, and accept, the natural laws of the universe, living in harmony with them as much as possible. How does one do this? It is indeed a strange and difficult endeavor, and a lifelong project for even the most disciplined individual. The Taoists say that looking for the natural rhythms and balance of nature, seeing nature not as inherently good or bad, but as a balanced state of order and chaos, is a good start to modeling one’s behaviour and thought. We are taught to attempt to attune to an order or stillness behind the chaos of things, and proceed within that frame of mind and behaviour. As Lao Tzu saw it, nature does not hurry and yet everything gets accomplished.[xxxix]Abstract? Sure. But these ideas resonate for many, helping them formulate a Way to approach their lives.

The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and yet it does not compete. It dwells in places the masses of people detest. And so it is like the Tao. Lao Tzu [xl]

Wu-wei in no way implies laziness, but instead refers to the paradox: the way never acts, and yet nothing is left undone.[xli]Rather than being a lesson in inaction, wu-wei suggests acting as effortlessly as possible.

A good man seems to do little or naught, yet he leaves nothing undone. A foolish man must always strive, whilst leaving much undone. Lao Tzu[xlii]

Attaining this requires a person that can, to some degree, achieve a state where effort and effortlessness flow together. It requires a mind that can focus attention on the present moment, instead of avoiding it. To not distract oneself, but instead learn to sit with the discomforts of life with more ease, check perspective with more clarity, and perhaps be more at peace in the midst of daily tasks.

Alternatively to this model of life, the modern story reinforces a mind/body separation. It’s interested in testable certainties, external validations, and market-driven distractions that keep us from what some might call a simpler Way of life. Taoist insights and lifestyle choices are rarely found these days, trampled on by our conceptions of what value is, what knowledge is, and where it can take us.

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong. There is an often-quoted verse in Sanskrit, which appears in the Chinese Tao-te Ching as well: He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And to not know is to know. Campbell[xliii]

Jacques Lacan Interprets Reality

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely. Lacan[xliv]

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalyst from Paris, France, and categorized mental functioning into three orders: the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic’, and the ‘real’.

Lacan theorized that our egos are conceived and born in the imaginary order, where we go through what he calls the mirror stage. It is so named because in this stage, during infancy, we get the first sense of subjectivity and separateness. We look in the mirror and see ourselves for the fist time: ‘I am not my mother’ we claim for the fist time. This realization, says Lacan, is what gives rise to our ‘person’ - we see our reflection, we recognize our selves as just that, a self, distinct from things that we are not.

In this birth of selfhood, a tension arises: we are grateful for our measure of autonomy, but for it we are ripped away from any kind of oceanic feeling of oneness.

For Lacan, the symbolicorderis what is generally thought of as reality. It encompasses rules, language, and social structures. In it, we are decorated with the symbols of our cultural norms and stories, even before our first breath: we are given names and families and gender and race and so on. These categories inform the basis of our beliefs (especially to those who travel through life without questioning them) - ‘I’m a man, my name is John, I have a family who has these values and believes in these gods’, etcetera.

The third order, for Lacan, is the order of thereal, and refers to a type of objective reality that we cannot know, similar to Kant’s neumenal ‘world in itself’. For Lacan, since the world is mediated by ego and language, we don’t have access to the order of the real, and thus cannot know anything directly. Instead, subjectivity breaks up and differentiates ‘real’ reality into words and symbols for us to understand.

As in Hinduism, the Lacanian notion of the realis essentially meaningless – it simply is. Meaning and belief is resigned to the imaginary and symbolic orders. Our ideas are thus not to do with what’s real, but our symbolic interpretation of it. As Slavoj Zizek, a notable Lacanian, wrote:

For the Real is meaningless and senseless – it just persists, and meaning can only be found within the reality of the symbolic order. [xlv]

And as Jung puts it on page four of his ‘Man and his Symbols’:

…because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. This is one reason why all religions employ symbolic language or images. [xlvi]

*

Have we fooled ourselves into thinking that we have risen above symbols and metaphor as necessary ways of thinking? Are we really as liberated from the mythological as we believe? Deep inside we know it, don’t we, that we are interpreting agents, that we live in a symbolic realm? Our obsession with reason as the only guide for life, as the only true way to understand and experience reality, it wanes, does it not?

It’s hard to know: as we stand in the rubble of this age of reason, we continue to snicker at those whose interests lie in the mythological lens, who rally around symbol and metaphor to make meaning in their lives. But only because it’s still popular to do so, only because we have lost the Way.

As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason... at this point reason must admit its incompetence; man is unable to define a 'divine' being. When, with all our intellectual limitations, we call something 'divine', we have merely given it a name, which may be based on a creed, but never factual evidence. Jung[xlvii]

What is Mythology? Or rather, What Isn’t?

Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. Joseph Campbell [xlviii]

Reclaiming Mythology

When asked what mythology is, responses are almost always the same: mythologies are stories, fables, and legends containing moral lessons to apply to one’s personal life. When pressed, people tend to make a distinction between something that is fiction (the myth) and something that is real: a fact. The myth, according to our present worldview, is understood as something not real, and thus viewed as relatively unimportant and irrelevant. Instead, it is thought of as primitive, infantile and even counterproductive to the human project.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, mythology is defined as ‘A) an allegorical narrative, B) a branch of knowledge that deals with myth, or C) a popular belief or assumption that has grown up around someone or something, especially: one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society’. It is this last broad definition that is most intriguing, for if the norms and assumptions taken up by any group of people is a myth, then aren’t all belief systems a kind of myth?

It’s interesting - but also troubling - that according to the same dictionary, the opposite of myth, is said to be either A) fact, or B) truth. We’re left confused: on the one hand, we’re supposed to take myth to be the norms and beliefs that a society takes on. But on the other hand, the opposite of myth is considered a truth and a fact. How can something be understood as ‘not true’ but also be understood as ‘the beliefs that make up the fabric of society?’

Exposing this contradiction makes it easy to see why, in our modern times, we have great trouble wrapping our heads around the idea of myth, let alone how it might be valuable to our lives. Today’s empirical mind too tightly frames our ideas about our human project, even though, as Campbell says:

Civilizations are grounded on myth [xlix]

If we are to take the Lacanian view - that is, that we are beings living in the symbolic realm, then everything is interpreted, everything is a story - even science.

...even our basic scientific concepts remained for a long time linked with archetypal ideas that originally came from the unconscious. They do not necessarily express 'objective' facts (or at least we cannot prove that they ultimately do) but spring from innate mental tendencies in man - tendencies that induce him to find 'satisfactory' rational explanatory connections between the various outer and inner facts with which he has to deal. When examining nature and the universe, instead of looking for and finding objective qualities, 'man encounters himself' in the phrase of the physicist Werner Heisenberg. M.L von Franz[l]

All attempts at explanation and comprehension of Lacan’s order of the realare all equally unsuccessful; we cannot put our existence back into a unified whole. Up and down, good and bad, love and hate, I and thou, yin and yang, time and space, order and chaos; these are the basic dualities, filters and symbols that structure our existences. They act as the framework of our narratives about life. Consciously and unconsciously they are the roots of our stories, be they religious or scientific in nature. No matter how we may try to think otherwise, it is clear: we live deep within the symbolic.

This mythological Way of understanding life finds its expression in the arts and the humanities, in ritual and practice. Meaning and truth, in this lens, are understood and experienced differently than they are through the material one. For the materialists, truth is ‘out there,’ but others (Nietzsche and Darwin for example) understood truth in a different way, more subjectively, as something ‘in here.’ An aspect of life is true not just because it exists externally, but if it is meaningful in relationship to the person and how it survives and thrives.

Truth, in this Way, is understood as something more contextual, varying from culture to culture, and even individual to individual. Truth is more pragmatic - things are true in relation to some sort of end. Is your tool good enough to do what you’re trying to do? If so then it is sufficiently true, and need not try to be absolute: truth serves life.[li]It is what is meaningful to us, to our lives, to our survival, that is real and true. The mythological worldview helps us understand this in a way that the material worldview cannot.

Myths help us explore truth as a thing that is acted upon, not just a fact that has been agreed upon. Psychologist Jordan Peterson writes in his book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, that human experience, and what we see as true, is not just about ‘what is,’ but also ‘how we should act.’ We are not only concerned about the world as a ‘place of things,’ but also the world as a ‘forum for action.’ [lii]Joseph Campbell agrees:

Myth isn’t just about believing things that aren’t factually ‘true’, it’s about looking at how truth is lived through experience, as it serves life, and attends to the sacred. That is what we do as humans. Campbell[liii]

In University of Toronto professor John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the meaning crisis lectures, he asks: are myths really just false stories from the past, or are they perennial stories that set the groundwork for how we see our lives?

Within all of these insights and points of view, the lesson emerges: to reconsider what myth is and what it means to us, to remember it’s value, to add its lens alongside the lens of science and reason, to admit that in the end it is through it’s mode that we are wired to believe:

Even comparatively modern scientists and thinkers have relied on half-mythological, archetypal images when building up new concepts. In the 17th century, for instance, the absolute validity of the law of causality seemed 'proved' by Rene Descartes 'by the fact that God is immutable in His decisions and actions.’ M. L. von Franz[liv]

*

Perhaps we used to live too deeply in the mythological worldview, relying on its lens to explain and decipher all our experiences and ideas. For that, uncritical belief systems left us irrational to an unhelpful degree, slaves to those that wield the power and run the show. Unaware of the qualities that rationality could provide (most notably a healthy skepticism), our superstitions and suspicions got the better of us. But despite these dangers, surely it doesn’t mean we should toss the whole thing out: the need for that lens remains, however obscured it may be by shiny instruments of science. It’s easy to see that we have forgotten its necessity. The question is: can we remember?

If the mythological lens is once again thought of as relevant and important, our experience and understanding of life willchange: the ideas and stories we have about the incomprehensible, the way we understand the makings of a meaningful life, the way we approach truth, the rituals and ways that we might come to practice, will evolve and grow and become a part of who we are. In such a time of emergency, it is imperative we reconsider our attitudes towards the mythic, symbolic, even mystical mind. It is long overdue that we admit we were wrong: living with myth is not infantile and counterproductive to the human project. It’s not something to be ashamed of. The opposite is true.

The Dangers of the Demythologized Worldview

… in our time, there are millions of people who have lost faith in any kind of religion. Such people do not understand their religion any longer. While life runs smoothly without religion, the loss remains as good as unnoticed. But when suffering comes, it is another matter. That is when people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences. Jung[lv]

We think of ourselves as free thinkers. But how free could we possibly be if we are prisoners of a certain Way of understanding life, and dismiss all other forms? How free are we if we think we have bested myth and risen above interpretation? We pat ourselves on the back for giving up the old mythological lens, but credit is given too soon: our spirits are neglected, our symbols grow rusty, our ways of understanding life becomes too narrow. As our souls are left unattended, we grow anxious, confused, disoriented and discontented.

The modern human condition has grown dire, our situation in great need of change. ‘Don’t over-react,’ some say, ‘standards of living are better than ever!’ But the evidence is clear: more and more people report anxiety and depression as an unwelcomed component of their lives. More and more we find life feeling essentially meaningless and without purpose.

The material worldview so badly wanted to understand humans as easy-to-figure-out deterministic beings, but in this shortsightedness, it failed to speak to the fullness of the human dilemma, it failed to contend with the depths of what it is to be us. Our anxious and de-mythologized world has left us unable to consider the full spectrum of human experience: the conscious andthe unconscious, the rational andthe irrational, fact and action. The consequences of this are enormous: we stop associating truth with experience, with meaning, and stop acting it out that way on the ground.

Evil is the force that believes that its knowledge is complete – and that it can do without the transcendent. And as soon as it makes this claim it instantly exists in a place that is indistinguishable from hell. Peterson[lvi]

What happens to society when spiritual values are exposed to the impact of this modern de-mythologized civilization? Tragedy: humans lose the type of meaning that they once had in their lives, social organization disintegrates, and with it, moral decay. Our present condition brings with it the danger of stripping all things of their mystery, leaving us unable to recognize - and uninterested in interpreting - the forces of our unconsciousness.’ Nothing is ‘holy’ or ‘sacred’ to us any longer, at least not on the surface:

Contemporary man pays the price in a remarkable lack of introspection. He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by 'powers' that are beyond his control. His gods and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. Jung[lvii]

The modern materialist predicament situates us in a world still dominated by a truththat attempts to strip subjectivity, and any consequential meaning thereof, out of the equation. Inner experience, impossible to accurately share using science and reason, are left supremely undervalued, and little attention is paid to the forces within us we can’t begin to understand. Deep inside we know better: we are and always will be interpreters, forced to use this craft. But our worldview, in coping with the unknown by declaring objective knowability, denies us this, leaving us terrified of the uncertainty we find in our lives, offering no narrative or hero’s journey to express it. We killed God, sure, but now we are left ungrounded, lacking, and far from full.

We’re left in an uncomfortable position: having ignored these integral aspects of interpreting and experiencing life for the last few hundred years, we now have to work twice as hardif we will ever attempt to get them back:

Modern man does not understand how much his 'rationalism' (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic 'underworld'. He has freed himself of superstition (or so he believes) but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and disassociation. Jung[lviii]

*

Ours is a world where ritual and myth have lost their force. Reason’s reign has tried to kill our gods and silence our myths, and in doing so has made us strangers to ritual and liturgy. Once upon a time, our unconscious motivations were given voice through countless symbols and rites and traditions; significance and intention were imbued through ritual, down to the smallest of tasks. But for us moderns, this sentiment is a strange one, we aren’t really sure what it means; ritual once conveyed an inner reality that is now merely form. [lix]

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature.... thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied. Jung[lx]

The fragments of symbol and ritual might remain, but they rarely speak to the heart of a human. In court, when we stand up for a judge, we're not standing up for him, but for his mythological character.[lxi]Maybe we kind of realize this, but a lot of us don’t really know why we do it, and it certainly doesn’t feel meaningful when we do.

When a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology, we have life in the modern world, where you find: the news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people[lxii]…society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. Campbell[lxiii]

For a being that would fare much better with a frame of mind that sees the experience of life as the interplay between material and mythological worldviews, we are doing a terrible job.

*

Today America has no ethos, no unstated mythology Campbell[lxiv]

With no great myths to be a part of, we have come to believe in nothing. But it’s not satisfying, our drive for understanding and expression remains. In the mythology of earlier times, these driving forces were called spirits, or mana. According to Jung, these inner forces are as active today as they ever were, they’re just relegated to our unconscious minds, since they’re unwelcomed in consciousness. He points out what was our hunch all along: the modern world refuses to admit that we are dependent upon powers that are beyond our comprehension and control. [lxv]

What we call civilized consciousness has steadily separated itself from the basic instincts. But these instincts have not disappeared. They have merely lost contact with consciousness and are thus forced to assert themselves in an indirect fashion. Jung[lxvi]

And this is why, as Joseph Campbell states, they make them up themselves:

…. kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they're doing the best they can. But they're dangerous because their own laws are not those of the city. They have not been initiated into our society. [lxvii]

Crazed, anxious, and on our own, our hyper-individualism has us without a good story on how to act, and no rituals to enforce it even if it were so. We are left wondering, ‘where is our initiation?’

A Short Note on the Functions of Myth

In his seminal book on mythology, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell describes the ‘fourfold function’ of mythologies as they pertain to human cultures and societies.

The first function is The Metaphysical Function. It works to awaken a sense of awe in an individual or group regarding the mystery of life. These myths are statements about being, represented (and to an extent captured) through the rituals associated with that particular myth.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion.... The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is. [lxviii]

Decades earlier, Carl Jung had a similar sentiment:

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend. [lxix]

The second component Campbell calls the Cosmological Function, which serves to explain the shape of the universe. Here, myths act as a type of proto-science, merging the physical material world with the metaphysical and psychological beliefs of the other functions of mythology.

The third part, the Sociological Function,validates and supports existing social order, helping us as we necessarily conform to some sort of consensus in order for society to endure.

The fourth is the Pedagogical Function. This function acts as a guide as we move through the psychological stages of life. In the face of inevitable challenge and stress that our psyches face, myth functions to prepare and guide us through childhood, into adulthood, and as we prepare to die.

From time immemorial, men have had ideas about a supreme being and about the land of the hereafter. Only today do they think they can do without such ideas. [lxx]Indeed, ...the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements. Jung[lxxi]

In the material worldview, the resulting tension is painful: we can’t help but be feel these mythological elements at the periphery of our experience, but we push those musings to the far corners of our minds. There they remain, itching to be acknowledged.

Modern man may assert that he can dispense with them, and he may bolster his opinion by insisting that there is no scientific evidence of their truth. But since we are dealing with invisible and unknowable things (for God is beyond human understanding, and there is no means of proving immortality), why should we bother about evidence? Why, then, should we deprive ourselves of views that would prove helpful in crises and would give a meaning to our existence? Jung[lxxii]

Part 4: The Paradigm Shift

The Pendulum Swing

As creatures of psychology, we are swayed by the conscious and unconscious forces within. From this standpoint alone it makes sense that we would need both the material andmythological worldview to best experience and make sense of it all. It’s no surprise that we crave reason andreligion, that we revel in science andspirit – we necessarily interpret life in both these ways.

No complete world-picture can be generated, without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological world-view tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective – who assume that it is, or might become, complete – forget that an impassable gulf currently divides what isfrom what should be. Peterson[lxxiii]

These two modes offer very different models of how to view the world, and both offer insight into our survival and evolution. As Peterson suggests, it is, unfortunately, not popular to consider these two modes of understanding as complementary, and there is legitimate concern that they might never be. For Nietzsche, the 20thcentury would play out as a war of truth and reality between science and religion. His fear, according to Peterson, was that the conflict between religious and enlightenment thinking would favour reason, ruining people’s ability to believe in their metaphysical assumptions. In Paradise Lost, Milton had a similar fear and forecast. Peterson sums it up like so:

The destruction by rationality of the evolved systems of meaning [the people had previously lived within] had undermined the psychological strength of each individual, divorced from their own history. That led them to gravitate towards nihilism or as a counter position to gravitate towards totalitarianism. The whole 20thcentury played out the pendulum swing between nihilism and totalitarianism. [lxxiv]

1. Believe Nothing: The Nihilist Problem

Disillusioned by the awareness of subjective limitation, the hero’s journey often leads one down the path of nihilism. But the stay at this camp should be short, for the problem with nihilism is simple: the claim of believing in nothing is still a belief. It’s a bit of a paradox, as the thinker Paul Hegarty points out: the absence of meaning seems to be some sort of meaning. We are meaning-making machines; to deny belief is still a declaration to the world, for even the nihilist must state her mind.

One might say, ‘I can think about things without believing in them, can’t I?’ It is possible, for example, to think about religion without having to believe in it. But does it follow that thinking isn’t a belief? To get by in the world, we are forced to put our faith in some system, even if it’s the system of language, assigning words to things and to ideas that shape our meaning of it and form the way we think about and communicate them. As Lacan reminds us, we can’t help but believe in the symbols and syntax and signs we have created, as slanted and subjective as their meaning might be. We’re believingin them in order to state such unbelief, aren’t we?

Ideology is not something you can think your way out of, as it represents the actual limit of thought in the same way that blindness represents the limit of sight. Zizek[lxxv]

Or from Jung:

it’s not so much that we have ideas, it’s that ideas have us. [lxxvi]

This faith, this inherent belief we have, grounds our existence, and takes ‘believing in nothing’ off the table. We can’t escape it, reason won’t show us how, and meditating can’t completely snuff the ego. Flung into our brief and absurd existences, we’re wired to make meaning, and forced to believe. In the end, for all of us, even the nihilist, the important questions remain the same:whatshould we believe, and how should we believe it?

2.Believe Everything: A Religious Problem

If science and the empirical mind can’t offer us everything we need to satisfy our existential cravings, and nihilism won’t do, how about reinstating the mythological lens by joining an already existing organized religion? After all, there’s much wisdom in the scriptures of these holy books, so wouldn’t it make sense to join in?

There’s good argument for it: here in our lonely godless modern world, organized religions claim to speak to the part of the self that has been lost in our age of reason. Religious experience resounds within the archaic, unconscious andphenomenological parts of us, through the acts and ideas contained within. They are full of ritual and custom and myth, seemingly satisfying the very thing we're missing from our lives. They have it all set up for us, really - it would be a much easier task to join one of these faiths then it would be to try creating one from scratch for oneself or with our friends. And it’s not difficult to find one; we can usually, with great ease, find a religion that has played an important role in the life of our immediate ancestors. Even more, organized religions are actively looking to increase their membership.

But do these advantages outweigh the dangers and disadvantages of signing up? Aren’t organized religions riddled with ideology that can be counterproductive to, and devastating for, the very spirit we are trying to nurture? Let’s look at a few:

Blind faith

Can we bring about a radical transformation of the mind: not accepting things as they are but to examine it… but that depends on you and not somebody else, because there is no teacher, no pupil, no leader, no guru, no master, no savior. J.Krishnamurti[lxxvii]

Perhaps the biggest problems with modern day organized religion come for those that blindly follow their dogma. This is not to be confused with taking a ‘leap of faith,’ which we must all do to get on in our world of uncertainty. Blind faith is different: those that live by it are at the mercy of the powers that dole out the doctrine. As tempting as the answers and certainties might seem, blind faith traps us by totalitarian ideologues: we become puppets to those who pull the strings.

People of blind faith were either introduced to their particular belief system when they were young and have simply believed it since then, without thoughtful scrutiny or skepticism, or have come to it themselves later in life, usually to help them deal with deep personal existential burden: longing for meaning, for certainty, for morality, looking for closure, and dealing with suffering. Some convince themselves that they’re too afraid to cope with the tragedies and tribulations of life without the warm blanket of certainty that their blind faith brings them, without the promise objective Truth from their personal and invested God.

The trouble is we’ve been separated by being born, given a name, and an identity and being individuated we’ve been separated from the oneness – and that’s what religion exploits – that people have a yearning to be a part of the overall one again, so they exploit that, call it God, says he has rules, and I think that’s cruel. George Carlin [lxxviii]

Fear and the afterlife

The idea of an afterlife, whether it be the concept of heaven and hell, or reincarnation, has been a popular one throughout time. But promises of an eternal heaven (and threats of an eternal hell) can easily take important focus and responsibility away from the very life we are living right now. With our focus in the wrong place, it’s hard to reach our full potential, here, on Earth. With our attention and energy directed at some dreamy world after this one, we stop seeing our planet as sacred, and instead see it as a waiting room to another. As our attention is distracted by dreams of an eternal life, we forget that it is ourplanet that is holy, and as we forget, and suffer for it, the planet does to.

Beliefs about what happens after we die go far in determining our overall philosophy about how to best live our lives in the here and now. Take mortality. Have you lived if you haven’t stared death in the eyes?

Preaching heaven and hell, in a literal way, invokes fear in the believer, especially the child. In an attempt to control behaviour and thought, the child is told that they’re a sinner, and unless they apologize and believe everything the priest’s say, they could very burn in hell for all eternity. How cruel.

Religion is... designed to bring this extremely complicated thing, which is a human being, to maturity, which means to be self-motivating, self-acting. But the idea of sin puts you in a servile condition throughout your life. Campbell[lxxix]

The idea that some organized religions have (like the Catholic church, whose membership totals over a billion people), that we are broken and in need of repair as soon as we are born, is one that the late journalist and philosopher Christopher Hitchens disliked with a passion. Whether it be by using the promise of an afterlife to make us feel that we are created sick (with sin) and ordered to be well (through piety), or the promise of an afterlife to keep us from confronting the natural anxiety of our own mortality, this idea keeps us from confronting the depths of who we are.

Morality

Some declare that a world without God would be a savage and unforgiveable one. For them, the idea that we could make meaning and rules for ourselves, without God, is automatically thrown out, too unthinkable to consider. The world, they say, would be too awful a place without a hand from above to make things make sense and have order. Anything short of a God of absolute knowing is too foreboding to contend with, the perceived anarchy and chaos of it all too awful to bear.

But the argument that without a personal, punishing, all-knowing God we would not know right from wrong belittles us all. Being decent to each other does not require a celestial dictator. Is it really so hard to see that ‘act this way or else you’ll be punished’does not lead one to act as well as: ‘act this way because you think you should.’ Religious morality too often teaches us that doing things that are good and right are done only because we’ll be punished if we don’t.

Alternatively, there exists the person who decides for themselves what’s right and wrong, and tries to act accordingly. Do we really think that the only thing stopping us from acting out heinous crimes is a father-in-the-sky super-ego ordering us not to, seemingly against our will and desire to do so? Let’s give ourselves some credit.

Some myths don’t serve the modern world

Here’s a ridiculous sentence: because we need myth and ritual in our lives, any old myth or religion will do.

For a myth to endure it must change with the times, and for that to happen it must be lived every day. Sure, we need the mythological view, but we need it to fit our needs and reflect the knowledge, understanding and assumptions of the times. Campbell[lxxx]

Of course, some ancient religious myths are timeless, and no matter the age or the land, we can see their value and appreciate their metaphor. Others are far less relevant. Like a bicycle that’s never ridden anymore, myths (and their corresponding rituals) become rusty, hard to ride, outdated in their lack of use. At some point many of them stop serving us.

Myths are so intimately bound to the culture, time and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. Campbell[lxxxi]

In an academic sense, we know more about mythological symbolism than ever before. But as Jung points out, in former times men did not merely reflect upon their symbols; they lived them day to day. In this spirit, we need newer more relevant myths and rituals – and a way to experience them based on who we are now, not who we might have been thousands of years ago.

Using the material worldview to justify the mythological one

Taking religious scripture literally could well be the most dangerous aspect of adhering to an organized religion and its doctrine. Fueled by our reasoned scientific modern view, mistaking metaphor for fact has caused billions of humans - Muslims, Jews and Christians alike - to reject, divide, and kill each other - the very opposite of the root message that each religion purports to preach. Indeed, we believe our religions incorrectly when thinking that ourparticular religion is the best one, and literally true.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam - and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical God, they can't get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don't realize its reference. They haven't allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, 'we are the chosen group, and we have God.’ Campbell[lxxxii]

As reason and the scientific method changed the way we look at and understand the world, it has become the lens in which we try to understand the religious realm. It infiltrated the mythological view, demanding it to understand the world through the acquisition of facts and explanation of phenomena. That framework provides little room for the humility, decency and wonder that it was originally intended to foster.

Now, false certainties block the path The sole focus on rationality continues destroys the old systems of belief. When considering all these concerns together, the dangers of joining an organized religion in order to reclaim the mythological view become clear.

3. Somewhere Between Order and Chaos

On Being Reasonable and Religious

If we assume nihilism as unrealistic, and organized religion potentially too risky a venture to pursue, where do we turn to develop a mythological worldview? How do we enact ritual, reflect on metaphor, and explore the paradoxes of being alive? Sure, we want to be both critical thinkers andspiritual beings, but with no guidance, it’s hard to make reality.

The new age movement in the 60s and 70s attempted to fill this void, but by and large, it oversimplified the human experience: too often its philosophy was grounded simply on finding ‘happiness.’ In so doing, it couldn’t speak to the heart of the human dilemma. It didn’t emphasize what discomfort and suffering could offer to meaning and spirit. In hindsight, the failed efforts of the movement reminded us that to feel fulfilled in our lives, we must face our shadows and anxieties regarding existence head on, and, as the existential psychotherapist Rollo May said, ‘not sugarcoat experience in the attempt to avoid or cope with the struggles of life.’ [lxxxiii]

This conundrum led many secular Westerners to borrow other philosophies and practices, like Buddhism and Hinduism, in the hope that they would give voice back to the mythological. And indeed, they arewonderful practices for the many that venture to adopt them, and arguably better than not trying anything at all. But almost inevitably, the history, rituals and customs they provide are too unfamiliar, and for the majority, fail to resonate. Most of us are unable to take these worldviews up in any real, personal or meaningful way:

Nowadays, more and more people suffer from a terrible emptiness and boredom... The only adventure that is still worthwhile for modern man lies in the inner realm of the unconscious psyche. With this idea in mind, many now turn to Yoga and other Eastern practices. But these offer no genuine new adventure, for in them one only takes over what is already known to the Hindus or the Chinese without directly meeting one's own inner life centre. M. L. von Franz [lxxxiv]

We are left at the beginning, forced to take up the charge for ourselves. This is a great burden our ancestors didn’t have to carry. For them, the mythological system was something they were born into. For us, the landscape is much different: it is up to us to create new ceremonies and metaphors to help guide and inspire us through life. It’s both a daunting and exciting task.

Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in the face of the present condition of the world. Jung[lxxxv]

*

It seems our charge is to foster a view of life that allows for both reason and myth, science and spirit, facts and experience, the known and the unknown. We aren’t limited to choosing just one or the other once we discover that instead of competitors, they are actually bedfellows.

When we create a space for both methods of interpreting reality, the way we move between them without getting stuck in one or the other becomes the focus of attention. So how do we do it? Whatever the best approaches are, it will certainly involve considering how to believe:

Firstly, that reason and science are a great and necessary lens through which to view the world, so long as we keep in mind:

a) Some ways we find meaning and see truth are not accounted for through science, reason and the empirical mind.

b) Science and reason are themselves bound by subjectivity and not as ‘objective’ as they aim to be. Alas, we are forced to see the world though the types of lenses that our finite limited consciousness can conjure up.

Secondly, to consider the mythological worldview as a differing yet equal lens, also great and necessary, so long as we:

a) Don’t confuse it with the reasoned way, and try to justify our mythological lens within the logic of the rational tongue.

b) Help to craft a narrative about how to be in the world, how to act in the world, that brings meaning and purpose to the present day.

The Burden and Delight of Agnosticism

A man likes to believe that he is the master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master. Jung[lxxxvi]

The dialogue between atheists and theists is loud - you must belong to one or the other! Both sides desperate that their interpretation of life is correct - reason is at stake! Faith is at stake! Clouded by desires, their approach is sticky and slow. Free of this crossfire, the agnostic sees further, by admitting that they cannot know.

Knowing that we can’t know about matters like objective reality and matters of the divine is central to agnostic philosophy, and crucial to how we approach the way we interpret life. So is the paradoxical nature of our existence: that we are finite beings interested in the infinite cuts us off from it, but also binds us to it. The very act of thinking about the infinite makes it finite, leaving us further from any truth it might have to offer.

If you’re like the agnostic, this Catch-22 brings with it a certain kind of despair, but so to its opposite. After all, it’s the struggle between knowing and not-knowing, between joy and suffering, beauty and filth, chaos and order, that gives us our grace. For the agnostic, recognizing the paradox, and not turning solely to a rational orreligious frame to resolve it, is the best course.

Many have trouble defining agnosticism - it’s been thought of quite incorrectly for some time. Atheists and theists both tend to think of it as a weak, indecisive, ‘sitting on the fence’ position. They blame the agnostic with not being able to commit to anything, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Agnosticism is based on a tenant that is very clear in its ideology: coined by Huxley in 1869,

Agnosticism… simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific ground for professing to know or believe. Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the great part of anti-theology.[lxxxvii]

The spiritually-minded agnostic, knowing that they can’t scientifically know all that they are existentially concerned with, is in a unique position to understand the importance of the symbolic realm, to appreciate and wield its power.Untainted by the delusion of certainty and knowable Truth, the agnostic can better explore the bounds and limits of what we canknow. For the agnostic, reason and language are essential tools, but tools they remain, born of finite minds for our finite matters. Wired to believe, forced to symbolize, we are mere interpreters of the Way.

In all of this, the silver lining comes into focus: we have a say in howwe choose to believe. Just this awareness, that we are capable of different ways of interpreting the stimuli of life, changes our conception of it. By broadening our view of how we understand truth,we have broadened our view of how we understand myth, finally returning it, unashamed, to the forefront of our lives.

The Importance of Ritual

Ritual plays itself out in both private and social life, and has been with us as far back as history can show. Rituals demarcate the events of our lives, make ceremony of major life changes and transitions, help us embody our ideas, and give meaning to the otherwise mundane. They offer a way of experiencing meaning and truth that the material worldview all too often dismisses. The act of ritual brings the moment alive. It often connects us to some sort of underlying whole. It speaks to our joys and sorrows, to the knowns and unknowns of life. It helps guide our actions, and breathes life into our story of being alive.

Doing ceremony is inherent to us. We can’t help but take part, whether it be automatic or intentional, that is, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. The difference is, if it’s intentional, if we mean to do it, ceremony and ritual have the ability to imbue structure and significance into our reality.

These types of symbolic acts are often religious in nature, and though ritual and religion are not the same thing, religion excels at providing a structure and space to engage in them: to remind a congregation of a message, ceremony and ritual are there. In this sense, the mythological realm understands we’re a forgetful species often driven by habit, and that remembering, repeating, and acting something is crucial if it is to become the Way we see life through. To great effect religions use ceremony and ritual to remind us of our ideological allegiances. And though their philosophical sales pitch might not be worth the taking, we should give the process credit: at least they provide a space to explore that way of understanding and experiencing life.

In today’s Godless secular world, the scene is much different. We underestimate the psychological needs that liturgy satisfies. We think it’s silly and useless. We have forgotten how it gives our life meaning, intention and perspective.

Without a religious life to guide our natural ritualistic tendencies, and a social life that actively downplays them, our intentional rituals are few and far between, and typically don’t speak to our psychological and spiritual needs the way they used to. But again, we can’t help but have them, these rituals, and so, without direction, or even awareness, we see them manifest in weird, neurotic, and unhelpful ways. We’re obsessive and compulsive; we counterproductively repeat behaviours and thoughts that hinder our psychological well-being. But with intention, the opposite can be true: self-directed and curated, rituals become a gateway to an understanding and experience of life that the scientific material lens simply does not allow for on its own.

As we consider the role of ritual and ceremony in our modern lives, it’s wise to remember that we don’t needorganized religion to have them. We can, and do, make them up for ourselves, and with our friends. In many ways, the task of creating new rituals, at least personal ones, will differ for everyone, since we all think about our connection to ourselves, others, and the greater whole in slightly different ways. Everyone’s transcendental or mystical experiences (if we are lucky enough to have them) are intensely private and impossible to adequately share, so by and large we’re left to our own devices.

It doesn’t matter the manifestation, it’s the intention behind the ritual and routine that creates the space for the symbolic, mythological account of truth and meaningto have its turn at interpreting our reality, shaping our experience, and packaging the goings-on of our lives with meaning and catharsis. For a lot of us, this all sounds strange or preposterous. Admittedly, in such a world as ours, the task of creating rituals is strange, even over-whelming. But it’s necessary if we are to best sit with the existential concerns of our lives.

Ritual, Re-wiring the Mind, and Flow

One of the most profound advantages of creating a ritual, routine or practice into one’s life is that it has the ability of snapping us out of our tendency to live in automatic, mindless, and other unhelpful Ways. It could be a cognitive re-wiring routine that works to pay attention to old unhelpful ways of thinking and behaving that we are trying to interrupt, while also attending to the new ways of thinking and behaving that we are trying to implement. It could be a mindfulness practice that works to focus our attention on the experience of life in the present moment, helping us sit with discomfort and distraction from an non-judgmental ‘observer’ or ‘witness’ standpoint. According to University of Toronto’s John Vervaeke in his lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, having a mindfulness practice increases one’s capacity to get into what is referred to as ‘the flow state’. Flow is an embodied Way of being, often described as a state of deep oneness and connectedness. It is, as Vervaeke suggests, not the same thing as physical pleasure, but instead is more connected to meaning. It’s also a universal: people from every walk of life report the flow state and describe it in similar ways. Often thought about in relation to a physical activity such as a martial art practice, it describes a perfectly balanced mind/body state of effort and effortlessness. Flow is a spontaneous experience of life (‘a cascade of insights’, an extended ‘aha’ moment, as Vervaeke describes it) where our sense of time and self change in deeply positive ways. ‘The more you’re in flow, the more you’re training your ability for insight.’[lxxxviii]These types of states are a perfect example of how implementing intentional rituals into our lives can serve as the gateway to psychological well-being and successful meaning-making.

Ritual and the Navaho

To preface any attempt of understanding a belief system that lies outside of Christianity and Western contact, I must admit my incompetence. The empirical view, and the way it was forced into adoption by other belief systems, complicates my picture even further. That said, and with this in mind, there is a lot we can learn about the mythological worldviews of other cultures. Take the Navaho Way of life:

Mythological decree is just as real – that is ‘circumstantial’ to a Navaho as his dinner. To the Navaho religion means ritual. Each ceremony has its own myth…the myth, the material properties, the ritualistic acts, the rites that make up the ceremonies are held together by an elaborate system of symbolism, a sum total of numerous associations. Reichard[lxxxix]

It might be difficult for us to understand exactly what this means, how it feels, or what it looks like, because the Navaho people frame life and reason from this sort of mythological precedent.[xc]For them, myth and ritual need not be logical or consistent; it is the purposeof the ritual that is important, not the factual components therein. From the briefest glances into Navaho tradition it becomes apparent that man is so closely related to deity that it is impossible to draw a sharp line between the human and the supernatural[xci]: the Navaho relate to the physical body anatomically but also spiritually. For them, ritual extends the individual to the spiritual realm, and in doing so, hopes to bring it into harmonious relation with the powers of the universe.[xcii]

This type of worldview, as different as it is from our current scientific and rational one, gives us more clues clues into what function myth and ritual can play in the lives of humans.

Nature, Ritual, and the Spirit

The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature – our separateness is perceived and illusory. Spinoza[xciii]

We’re a part of nature, but it also makes evident that it’s greater than us. ‘It puts it all in perspective,’ we say, and it’s true: the raw power of nature can humble even the most ego-centred narcissist. The natural world is both terrifying and comforting: it reminds us not just of our connection with the planet and with the cosmos, but also with the great unknown. The known and unknown, day and night, creation and destruction, order and chaos - nature symbolizes so much for us, and in doing so, is often used as an access point into the mythological and spiritual realm.

Experiences in nature confront us with our subjectivity, its limits and potential. Rooting nature in our myths and rituals has, since the beginning, helped explain and give significance to our place in the world and in the stars. Nature moves us to the depths of our psychology, but we can’t exactly explain it rationally - we’re reminded how all methodology used to do so fails.

Baruch Spinoza, the 17thcentury Dutch philosopher, stressed the link between nature and spirit. In fact, for him, they were the same thing. (He is often thought to be the first western champion of Pantheism: God is everything, and everything is God.) Spinoza’s M.O. was to challenge the central ideas of religion: instead of seeing God in a superstitious way, (intervention from a personal and invested divine deity), Spinoza thought of God as nature itself, impersonal and judgment-free. This is, of course, in conflict with the view of God in organized religions, where God stands outside of nature, looking in on it, controlling it as it so chooses, unbound by its forces.

Spinoza’s God does not hear our prayers, and can’t punish or reward us with some version of an afterlife. This God might sound very weird to a lot of people, and might not, to many, even count as a God. But Spinoza was in no way an atheist. For him, God was everything. Similar to the Taoists, he believed that if we align our will with the will of the universe, with the whole of nature, in some way we align ourselves with God. This was the route to a meaningful life. (Anecdotally, his ideas were not received well: they were called ‘blasphemous,’ and ended up getting him excommunicated from his Jewish community in 1656. He was cursed by the holy leaders, and forced to leave Amsterdam.)

Some folks criticize Spinoza saying he failed to understand how things otherthan reason, like emotion, and belonging to a group, lead people to religion: we enjoy the ritual, the communal meals, the community, components Spinoza did not stress in his proposals. Without this consideration, Spinoza’s philosophy failed to resonate amongst the masses (more on this in a moment).

The point remains: our relationship to nature can help give satisfaction to our deepest urges and drives, and fundamentally frame the traditions that help us experience and understand life. Myth, ritual and nature have always been deeply connected; from the First Nations people of North America to the Taoists of China to the philosophers of Europe, nature, myth and experience are interwoven into the fabric of human life.

Conversely, the Hebrew and Christian Bible tout a spiritual value that is beyond nature, a God that transcends it. Worship becomes something not directed at nature but to the ‘creator’ who, it just so happens, decrees a human dominion overit.

Nature against man. Nature against God. God against Nature - very funny religion! Dr. D. T. Suzuki [xciv]

The Next Myth

Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring. We are one species, we are star stuff harvesting starlight. Carl Sagan [xcv]

Myth and ritual are born from the depths of our being, link us to the transcendent, and provide a canvas for understanding and experiencing the full spectrum of what it is to be human. But it’s not enough to engage in alone. Though personal rituals are paramount to existence, they will not suffice: we do not live in isolation. Over-emphasizing the individual in our Western materialist Way is so common we forget that we are not simply alienated subjectivity: we are part of something bigger. And so myth and tradition, if they are to survive, must reflect the idea that true self-actualism is born out in service to community and to the greater whole.[xcvi]

As the Spinoza critics suggest, community is an integral aspect of human life, even and perhaps especially when it comes to matters of the spirit. We’re a creature that depends on social cohesion for survival, so we can’t celebrate our rites of passage, or explore our spirit and place in the world, solely on our own. With a mythological lens that’s framed completely within the personal, alienation is the only guarantee. Any lasting mythology will understand this, and its rituals, symbols, metaphors and ceremonies will reflect it.

Joseph Campbell agrees, arguing that today’s myths should not be private, or even limited to one’s sub-culture, but instead should reflect our current global world, and be relevant to everyone. In today’s societies, where information and access to each other are instantaneous and international, Campbell’s idea is not a far stretch of the imagination.

… the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody in it. Campbell[xcvii]

We’ve never in history been as connected to each other as we are today. At the swipe of a screen and the click of a button, we are live-fed to virtually anywhere, able to translate almost anything, and share information in real time and at a moment’s notice. On a deeper level, insights from quantum physics confirm what Yogis have been saying for thousands of years: that we are all one.

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good. Thomas Paine

Is it finally the case that ideas and identities that reinforce separation and conflict are passé? After all, polluted rivers don’t stop at a country’s border. The ocean pays no heed to partisan politics. As we evolve, ecology, technology, and the economy remind us that we live in one world, and more and more, in one grand narrative. Of course, it’s not that simple, since as much as we are ‘one’, we are also separate and distinct. Nature is a unified system but of interdependent variables, and so must be the social world: our survival depends on how we exist with everything around us.

Who can say, in a detailed way, what a new myth could look like, if it were ever to play out. Campbell offers this:

…what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with - the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. [xcviii]

Some believe that if we are to ever have a shift in the Way we do life, it will have to be on the heels of a giant catastrophe that will force us into it, that without a fatal emergency, we will never change our selfish and unsustainable Ways. And what do you know, that very emergency is here – just look outward, at the state of the planet, or inward, at the state of ourselves.

As a species we watched the pendulum swing from an excess of irrational superstition to an excess of rational reductionism, and as we left our holy places in droves, we have come to toss the whole thing out, abandoning the mythological in its entirety. In the new ‘enlightened’ materialist Way, we found ourselves neurotically afraid of the unknown - alienated and disembodied individuals with only scientific instruments to interpret our lives.

Uncomfortable with untestable uncertainties, and without the social structures to help us come to terms with it all, we were drawn into unrealistic claims about absolute knowledge to cope with our existence. Over time, we forgot the role that the mythological lens played in understanding truth and experiencing reality. Striped of our meaning-making apparatus, our uncertainty and anxiety grew, as did our estranged relationship with ritual and spirit.

Now, we find ourselves in a modern panic, but we kick the can down the road instead of facing the situation. As we become more decadent and isolated in the face of the crumbling natural and social environments around us, we realize our strategy hasn’t left us better off: our material-driven, oversimplified lives have only worked to ignore and repress our natural burdens, joys and potential.

Science and spirit have warred for long enough! The rational and irrational have been pitted against each other for far too long! It’s a tragedy; the truth of their shared nature has been hidden from view, and we’ve been left without the means to connect to the deepest parts of our being.

But now that the dust has settled, it grows clearer by the second: truth belongs to physical reality andmoral spirit, meaning is shaped through physical andmetaphysical means, reality is informed by conscious and unconscious forces, by fact and action, by thought and experience. In the end, it takes both lenses to really see.

Epilogue

John stopped writing and looked up from his desk. It was getting dark, he wanted to swim, and he didn’t have anything else to write. He rubbed his eyes and checked his watch. He’d been at it for hours. He had been writing in his underwear, so as far as he was concerned, his bathing suit was already on. He got up, left his room, went down to the beach, and stepped into the ocean without breaking stride. He walked up to his waist and sat on his knees in the sea, the warm water splashing against his chest. It felt glorious, by himself, in the ocean, just him and the few stars that were shining through the dusk. It almost took his breath away, and in the vastness of the tropical environment, with his mind swirling with his philosophical ideas, he felt a flash of peace.

It didn’t last long though. Almost immediately he felt annoyed as a plastic bottle floated by him towards the shore. It reminded him of how unsure he was of the future of his species, and doubted as to whether we could change our ideas about life before it was too late. ‘Sorry about that, I really am,’ he said to the water around him, ‘I know you’re feeling it these days.’ But what could he do, other than write his book, and pick up the odd piece of trash, to help?

John splashed around for a bit and let his thoughts wander. Eventually he returned to the shore, walked back up to his little home on the beach, threw the ocean trash in the garbage, and lay down on the bed. He picked up his copy of Tao Te Ching and opened it up to a random page:

There is a thing confusedly formed, Born before heaven and earth. Silent and void It stands alone and does not change, Goes round and does not weary. It is capable of being the mother of the world.

It was one of his favourite passages; he knew it well. He closed his eyes and read it from memory, as he drifted off to sleep:

I know not its name So I style it ‘the way.’ I give it the makeshift name of ‘the great.’ Being great, it is further described as receding, Receding, it is described as far away. Being far away, it is described as turning back. Hence the way is great; heaven is great; earth is great; and the king is also great…

The Second Dream

John was back in the great hall. Once again he was being summoned by the King. The same hooded figures whisked him through the same enormous hallways of the castle, and left him at his majesty’s bedroom door. He didn’t have a pouch around his waist this time, and there was no scroll with impressive words written on them that he could share if need be. He noticed he wasn’t wearing his white robe anymore either, and his knotted cane was nowhere to be found. In their place, he had on a pair of faded blue jeans, a light grey sweater, and bare feet. Once again unsure as to why he was there, John entered the room.

As soon as he entered, he looked back at the large wooden door closing behind him; it didn’t seem like he was in the right place. The King’s bedroom was now some kind of library, or office. It was an enormous space, with couches and tables and lamps scattered around it. Old Persian rugs were strewn here and there, bookshelves full of leatherbacks graced two of the walls, and a grandfather clock ticked quietly away on another. The smell of pipe smoke permeated the room. The King was sitting on a red velvet chair, his thick well-oiled white beard still curling around his handsome brown face. He was wearing a suit, but sometimes it switched to the robe John had seen him in before.

Then John was sitting across from the King, a coffee table with a candle lit on it between them. They were looking at each other, but before either of them could speak, a door in the far corner of the room opened and a woman walked in. As she walked towards them her white dress flowed hypnotically around her. Her intoxicating scent and impossible beauty literally took John’s breath away. It was all he could do to not start crying with joy or laugh with despair. At once John realized this was the woman from the King’s dreams.

John smiled and bowed his head towards her as she took a spot beside the King. She gazed intently at John in return, with both happiness and pain in her eyes; somehow, with one captivating look, she emanated the full spectrum of human emotion.

The King cleared his throat and broke the silence, getting right to the point. ‘We are madly in love, but we can’t see eye to eye.’ He looked over at the Queen, who smiled sadly back at the King. ‘We just don’t look at the world in the same way. Are we doomed, doc?’

John frowned. His forehead burrowed deeply. But then it suddenly dawned on him, for a split second, that he was dreaming; that the King and Queen were really the manifestation of reason and religion, of material and myth. In that moment of clarity, he knew what to say.

‘You guys complete each other, though it might seem that you’re driving each other away.’

They both nodded, hesitant but impressed.

‘But if you want it to work out between you two, you both must change your ideas about the world, you both have to update the way you interpret reality and relate to each other.’

They both shook their heads, now unconvinced.

‘I’m not sure if that’s an option,’ said the Queen. ‘He seems to think he’s always right, he’s unwilling to change. He sees the world as a bunch of tidy, neat categories, all organized and stacked in their order of importance. All he cares about is what you can see and know.’

As she spoke, the Queen looked at the flame of the candle on the table. The flame started bending towards her, until it was pointing right at her heart. John’s eyes widened, forgetting again that he was dreaming. The King didn’t seem surprised, or even to notice, though he was looking right at it. ‘When I tell him that some things can’t be easily explained, he just laughs and ignores me.’ She closed her eyes and the flame leapt back up, straighter than ever, as if it was hoping that no one noticed its short lapse of natural law.

The King frowned and looked over at her. ‘It just doesn’t make any sense to me. First you say that there are things that can never be known, and that mystery should be worshipped. But then you say that there’s some God in the sky that oversees everything, and you tell me as if it’s a fact.’

It was quite the dilemma indeed. They both seemed so stubborn and set in their Ways, they lived their lives so differently. Could they really stay together? Were they destined to break up? The thought of it saddened John, and right then and there determined to do what he could to stop the split. And anyway, he thought as he again remembered that he was dreaming, he had just written a book arguing that it’s possible.

He looked at the King. ‘Some things can’t be understood, and if all that is real to you are things that canbe, then you’ll miss out, and won’t even see the fire in front of you.’ He gestured at the flame on the table. ‘That doesn’t make for a meaningful life – it’s like tunnel vision.’

John looked over at the Queen. ‘You’ve changed since you met him, he’s influenced you.’ He motioned towards the King. ‘It’s going to take effort to remember who you were and how you believed things before you met him – it might do you good to remember. So much of what you value comes out in action and passion, and can’t be rationalized, though it’s tempting to do so. I can understand what you’re doing though: using his methods to try to help him understand. But if you do that, his belief system might corrupt your own.’

John stopped talking and looked at the pair. It didn’t seem to be helping; the King and Queen were looking increasingly uncomfortable. John could sense their unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to create a life that worked to serve them both. He got up and paced the room for a moment, and made a last-ditch effort to plead his case. ‘Both of you think you don’t like uncertainty, but both of you actually thrive on it. Your Majesty, you like uncertainty more than you think you do: it helps you discover flaws in your system, and new ways of thinking. And you, my Queen, well your method of understanding is basedon an experience of life that thrives on mystery and uncertainty, it’s the core of who you are. You’re more similar than you know, you complement each other, your differences long for each other, your opposites attract each other. Together, your views complete each other.’ John paused for a moment and looked at the troubled couple. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

But the room had changed again, and they couldn’t answer his question. John was suddenly cold. Looking around he realized he was no longer in the nice warm room, but standing at the top of a snowy mountain. The sun was setting, but it was taking a while to do so as high up as he was. There were other mountains in the distance; in fact, John could just make out the King and Queen on the top of another one. They were arguing. The wind seemed to pick up every time one of them opened their mouth to speak. They yelled louder, hoping to be heard over the whistling air. John could only hear faint murmurs. What were they saying to each other? It didn’t look good, whatever it was. The wind picked up even more, and a dark cloud formed over their mountain. Snow started blowing sideways; John had to squint to see them in the hazy frigid distance. Then, in all their commotion and passion, a giant gust of wind came through, and they slipped off the slope at the same time, disappearing from view.

In their absence, John saw that there was something that had been behind the arguing couple. He squinted to see if he could make out what it was, but he was suddenly on their mountaintop anyway, and the wind had all but disappeared. He walked through the snow that had piled up high on the ground towards the object that had been hidden behind the fighting King and Queen. It was a crib. He heard the cries before he could look inside. It was a baby, but just then it had grown into a little girl. She jumped out of the crib and stared at John, wiping tears from her impossibly bright eyes. ‘Hi’ John said. The girl just looked at him, motionless. There was something about her, a wild look in her eye, but also a deep sense of calm, like she was privy to something that John was not. Before he could think another thought, she turned and ran down the side of the mountain. John ran behind her, not exactly sure what he was doing. But just then the sun had set behind the mountains and under the clouds, and he could no longer see.

The End

[i]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 65

[ii]The Gay Science, Nietzsche, Sect. 125

[iii]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 76

[iv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 73

[v]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[vi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 28

[vii]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 29

[viii]Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, pg. 4

[ix]M-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, pg. 234

[x]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 17

[xi]Psychological Reflections, 12:657

[xii]Wiki Deism 66

[xiii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 31

[xiv]Descartes, Discourse on the Method, first paragraph of part 4

[xv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 18

[xvi]Descartes, meditations. 5, AT 7:69

[xvii]Med. 5, AT 7:71

[xviii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 92

[xx]M.eL. Franz, Man and His Symbols, pg. 382

[xxi]Locke, IV. I 1. p.525

[xxii]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. 256

[xxiii]Hume, Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding, pg. 47

[xxiv]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. 258-9

[xxv]Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding, pg. 50

[xxvi]Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding, pg. 265

[xxvii]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Section B, 33

[xxviii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 57

[xxix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xxx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 93

[xxxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. xix

[xxxii]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. xxvii

[xxxiii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 1

[xxxiv]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 32

[xxxv]Xx Tao te Ching, Tr. DC. Lau

[xxxvi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 357

[xxxvii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 1

[xxxviii]xviii intro, Tao Te Ching, tr. D.C. Lau

[xxxix]Tao te Ching Ch. 37

[xl]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 8

[xli]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 37

[xlii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 38

[xliii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 65

[xliv]Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique

[xlv]Myers, ‘Zizek’, pg. 26

[xlvi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 4

[xlvii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xlviii]Campbell, from Arlow’s Ego Psychology and the study of mythology, pg. 1

[xlix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 72

[l] M. L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, pg. 381

[li]Peterson, YouTube - Maps of Meaning lecture series

[lii]Peterson, Maps of Meaning, Chapter 1 pg. 1

[liii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 5

[liv]M.-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, 380-381

[lv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[lvi]Jordan Peterson, YouTube lecture

[lvii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 71

[lviii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 84

[lix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 8

[lx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 85

[lxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 14

[lxii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 8

[lxiii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 9

[lxiv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 10

[lxv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 71

[lxvi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 72

[lxvii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 9

[lxviii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 28

[lxix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[lxx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[lxxi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 86

[lxxii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 76

[lxxiii]Peterson, Maps of Meaning, pg. 15

[lxxiv]Peterson, Milton 23:45, 26:45, YouTube

[lxxv]Myers, Zizek, pg. 19

[lxxvi]Peterson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XieOdyVThLU

[lxxvii]Krishnamurti https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/256015-you-know-if-we-understand-one-question-rightly-all-questions

[lxxviii]Carlin, https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/16c6zq/i_cant_believe_this_great_george_carlin_quote/

[lxxix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 66

[lxxx]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 28

[lxxxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 73

[lxxxii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 15

[lxxxiii]Rollo May, Thinking Allowed, YouTube

[lxxxiv]von Franz, Man and His Symbols, pg. 228

[lxxxv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 92

[lxxxvi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 72

[lxxxvii]Huxley, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Thomas_Henry_Huxley

[lxxxviii]Vervaeke, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF9HeXg65AE&t=724s

[lxxxix]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 3

[xc]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 12

[xci]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 20)

[xcii]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 36

[xciii]Spinoza, from The Story of Philosophy, pg. 187

[xciv]Dr. D. T. Suzuki, Zen Philosopher, from Campbell’s Power of Myth Part 2

[xcv]https://quotefancy.com/quote/783247/Carl-Sagan-Our-loyalties-are-to-the-species-and-the-planet-We-speak-for-Earth-Our

[xcvi]Johnathan Rowson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Fwhs3HBGE

[xcvii]Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth pg. 41

[xcviii] Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 41

Endnotes

[i]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 65

[ii]The Gay Science, Nietzsche, Sect. 125

[iii]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 76

[iv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 73

[v]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[vi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 28

[vii]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 29

[viii]Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, pg. 4

[ix]M-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, pg. 234

[x]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 17

[xi]Psychological Reflections, 12:657

[xii]Wiki Deism 66

[xiii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 31

[xiv]Descartes, Discourse on the Method, first paragraph of part 4

[xv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 18

[xvi]Descartes, meditations. 5, AT 7:69

[xvii]Med. 5, AT 7:71

[xviii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 92

[xx]M.eL. Franz, Man and His Symbols, pg. 382

[xxi]Locke, IV. I 1. p.525

[xxii]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. 256

[xxiii]Hume, Skeptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding, pg. 47

[xxiv]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. 258-9

[xxv]Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding, pg. 50

[xxvi]Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding, pg. 265

[xxvii]Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Section B, 33

[xxviii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 57

[xxix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xxx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 93

[xxxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. xix

[xxxii]Durant, The Story of Philosophy, pg. xxvii

[xxxiii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 1

[xxxiv]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 32

[xxxv]Xx Tao te Ching, Tr. DC. Lau

[xxxvi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 357

[xxxvii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 1

[xxxviii]xviii intro, Tao Te Ching, tr. D.C. Lau

[xxxix]Tao te Ching Ch. 37

[xl]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 8

[xli]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 37

[xlii]Lao Tzu, from the Tao te Ching, chapter 38

[xliii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 65

[xliv]Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique

[xlv]Myers, ‘Zizek’, pg. 26

[xlvi]Jung, Man and his Symbols, pg. 4

[xlvii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[xlviii]Campbell, from Arlow’s Ego Psychology and the study of mythology, pg. 1

[xlix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 72

[l] M. L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, pg. 381

[li]Peterson, YouTube - Maps of Meaning lecture series

[lii]Peterson, Maps of Meaning, Chapter 1 pg. 1

[liii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 5

[liv]M.-L. von Franz, Man and his Symbols, 380-381

[lv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[lvi]Jordan Peterson, YouTube lecture

[lvii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 71

[lviii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 84

[lix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 8

[lx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 85

[lxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 14

[lxii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 8

[lxiii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 9

[lxiv]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 10

[lxv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 71

[lxvi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 72

[lxvii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 9

[lxviii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 28

[lxix]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 4

[lxx]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 75

[lxxi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 86

[lxxii]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 76

[lxxiii]Peterson, Maps of Meaning, pg. 15

[lxxiv]Peterson, Milton 23:45, 26:45, YouTube

[lxxv]Myers, Zizek, pg. 19

[lxxvi]Peterson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XieOdyVThLU

[lxxvii]Krishnamurti https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/256015-you-know-if-we-understand-one-question-rightly-all-questions

[lxxviii]Carlin, https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/16c6zq/i_cant_believe_this_great_george_carlin_quote/

[lxxix]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 66

[lxxx]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 28

[lxxxi]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 73

[lxxxii]Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 15

[lxxxiii]Rollo May, Thinking Allowed, YouTube

[lxxxiv]von Franz, Man and His Symbols, pg. 228

[lxxxv]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 92

[lxxxvi]Jung, Man and His Symbols, pg. 72

[lxxxvii]Huxley, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Thomas_Henry_Huxley

[lxxxviii]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 3

[lxxxix]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 12

[xc]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 20)

[xci]Reichard, Navaho Religion, A Study of Symbolism, pg. 36

[xcii]Spinoza, from The Story of Philosophy, pg. 187

[xciii]Dr. D. T. Suzuki, Zen Philosopher, from Campbell’s Power of Myth Part 2

[xciv]https://quotefancy.com/quote/783247/Carl-Sagan-Our-loyalties-are-to-the-species-and-the-planet-We-speak-for-Earth-Our

[xcv]Johnathan Rowson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Fwhs3HBGE

[xcvi]Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth pg. 41

[xcvii] Campbell, The Power of Myth, pg. 41