The Word as Mythos
2008
Ron Lampi
It should be understood that this essay discussing Mythos is itself a form of The Mythos. This essay participates in its initial, philosophical unfolding. Reading through to the end, one would have come to realize that The Mythos was speaking. It will also become apparent that the density of this essay could be unpacked as a much longer work—a much longer telling.
Our contemporary world has come to be defined by scholars as the era of Postmodernity. It is surprising, however, how few people in everyday society are even aware of this, that just some few decades ago we had entered the Postmodern phase of history, as we find so many still making the assumption that we live in Modern times. But we should realize, in turn, that this time we are currently living in should be seen as a transitional period, a period between what we refer to as World Ages. In manifold ways, we could note the characteristics of living in this cusp period between Ages (between the waning Piscean Age and the new Aquarian Age). For many years now there has also been a great underlying sense that we, as a civilization, are indeed waiting for something transformational that is still coming. From the broadest metaphysical perspective, in a period that has seen the death of traditional metaphysics (which is one way to define the Postmodern), we live in the time of awaiting a new Word.
The great world religious Traditions have implicitly been undermined, if not considered voided outright, by Modern and Postmodern critique. This is not to deny the fact that they still do provide solace and soul-felt meaning for billions on the planet, which is obvious as we look around at our world today. The Traditions are still well-entrenched myth systems of our civilization for coping among all the uncertainties and vicissitudes we face in life, but metaphysically and spiritually they have come up, to a greater or lesser degree, bankrupt. The previous Word, in all its various forms, no longer adequately speaks to us, and no longer, if we honestly consider our world today, provides profound inspiring orientation for our continuing evolution. Whether the Word was Lord, Yahweh, God, Christ, Allah, Brahmin or Atman, Krishna, or Buddha, none of them completely addresses the situation of our Postmodern world. It has become apparent that our Traditions are unable to meet the growing crisis that challenges us as the 21st Century unfolds. What has come to replace the traditional Word for most who especially identify with the Postmodern, as we see its very real impact everywhere we look today, is the technological mindset, the new “God” we will call Technos.
By ‘Word’ we will mean that dispensation given by the Greater Reality (referring to that which is greater than the bubble of human reality, however we may metaphysically and spiritually view it) that reveals for us our place in the cosmos, which always goes back ultimately to our relationship to Being. It is Being which determines All-that-is (which includes the Greater Reality) and how we are to experience and apprehend such a totality of All-that-is. In our past relationship to Being, which has almost always been unreflectively assumed, unspoken, and taken for granted, a Word had always been given which came to determine our own being-in-the-world, that is to say, how we are to live our lives within such a totality of All-that-is (or, again, our place in the cosmos). This Word—a dispensation that in the most profound sense is Revelation—provided a metaphysical orientation for us and our whole cultural mythology—which the dictionary defines as a mythos—of what life is about. It is not necessarily that an encounter with Being as-such directly offers that Revelation, but that Being, the All that gathers and sets into play All-that-is, arranges that certain Powers (e.g. Divinities) of the Greater Reality provide Revelation for humanity. Here we are already hinting at the original meaning of mythos.
One Power may claim to be supreme above all others, such as the biblical God the Father, with theological claims subsequently made for it that it is in fact the Absolute, but this, we have come to realize, is an ontological sleight-of-hand and a destined historical misunderstanding. Even such an alleged Supreme Being as God the Father participates in the All that is Being. We are well aware that Modern and Postmodern critique has brought about the death of this God. UFO studies have also brought to our attention a great, new suspicion as to who this God the Father, or any alleged traditional God, was.
In the beginning was the Word... This Word that was written as the first verse of the Gospel of John in the New Testament is the Greek word Logos (in koinē, a latter, common form of classical Greek that the New Testament was written in). In the beginning was the Logos... The New Testament Word (Christ), therefore, was thought of as Logos in the Greek manner. Greek philosophy already had a long history with this word, beginning with Heraclitus, which went back at least some 500 years before the Gospel of John was written. Jewish mystical philosophy, represented by Philo, also furthered the metaphysical implications of Logos as an impersonal, creative power of God. The Apostle John could therefore not have been ignorant of the long philosophical tradition with this word ‘Logos’, and though he showed no interest in metaphysical speculation for its own sake (given the brevity of the Logos prologue to the Gospel, Logos mentioned only again in verse 1:14), he had to have been well aware of what he was intending. This introductory verse itself is perhaps the only hint of classically-inspired philosophy among all the verses of the Gospels.
Logos is first of all thought of here as the Reason, the Divine Reason, the Divine Blueprint and Plan, as it were, and ultimate Creative Principle, behind all things; it is the metaphysical basis for the Story of what life on Earth is about. The remarkably novel development of John was his evangelical claim for Jesus, a person, a mere man, as the Christ Logos. Christ, as an integral part of the Divine Plan—in later theological speculation, an integral member of the Trinity—, was the incarnation of the Logos that went forth into the world (the Word become flesh, as Jesus, a man) and thereby defined the divine purpose of life in the person of Jesus, in the mission portrayed as his life story.
Logos, as it was thought in Greek philosophy, was the Divine Reason for all things that then equally implied a cosmic order, again, the cosmic blueprint, given by Being, behind appearances. Logos then also implied rational thought—thought that was able to reflect the Light of that Divine Reason—that came to be expressed as words in language that could reveal in language the blueprint of Divine Reason. Rational thought was once considered, in fact, “divine.” As an everyday word in its original, common usage among the Greeks, ‘logos’ did mean ‘word,’ better yet, sentences of words, that is to say, speech, specifically the articulated words of discourse. To speak logos was to give an account—an implied accurate account—that revealed something truthful, which was further developed in philosophical thinking to the revealing of the universal Logos (Divine Reason). Human logos therefore had an intimate connection with the Divine Logos. This intimate connection has always been, of course, a profound mystery, and is often rephrased as the traditional philosophical conundrum of the relationship between thought and Being. Logos, as we have only been able to hint at here, was quite a complex notion with a famous history that would require from us a much more thorough explication.
What had become closely associated with logos was then the equally difficult and profound notion of truth. Christianity was to elevate its association of Jesus as the Christ with Logos to the Truth. That we have an everyday understanding of what we mean by ‘truth’ is recognized; we can but assume for our purposes here this everyday understanding as we proceed. But what is so special about truth? What is it about truth that it is so highly valued? To know the truth about something, to be in the truth, is to be aligned with what-is; if we speak the truth about something, it is said that we speak correctly and accurately, we are revealing through our speech what really is. If we speak as a Christian about the Truth, it is to believe then that we are correct about the Divine Plan, about what Divinity has revealed to humanity. The Truth therefore possesses within it a guarantee. We are guaranteed that what we say or what we do corresponds to the Word. This is a guarantee of certainty. There is no longer a need therefore to engage in metaphysical speculation when you possess the Truth; you are now absolutely certain about life and ultimate matters, confounding even the greatest philosophers who do not happen to hold your belief. Surely we have all known Fundamentalists of this type.
Now “certainty,” we should realize, is a particular way of psychologically attuning ourselves to Reality. We attune to Reality with the attitude that we want or demand to be absolutely certain about something. For example, we can promote certainty as an ideal that knowledge (science) should attempt to attain, or we can fanatically believe with a certainty as a religious Fundamentalist. With certainty about the Greater Reality, as faith would demand, we gain a sense of security and metaphysical repose. We feel secure and feel comforted in knowing for certain that we are held within the protecting embrace of Truth. We can count on Truth, then, to be on our side.
What we should take into brief consideration here is the ancient world in terms of its psychological milieu. A whole discussion which we cannot go into would need to be inserted at this point regarding the birth of the human ego in the Arian Age BC (roughly 2,000 BC to 0 AD). The human ego, which is the psychological complex of self-identity, had constellated itself through this long, approximately 2,000 year period of the Age of Aries, going into late Hellenistic times approaching the birth of Christ. This evolution of the ego, this evolving sense of having a self-identity, with self-awareness, increasingly came to crave some certainty of meaning in a constantly dangerous, uncertain world where, for example, the mass killing of human beings was commonplace. The late Hellenistic era (circa 100 BC into the 1st Century AD) was a time of world weariness in the Mediterranean world; it was a transitional period, as is our current Postmodern era, moving, at that time, into a new Age, which was then the dawning Age of Pisces. The earlier superhuman Gods of the Arian Age and previous World Ages (the Age of Taurus and going further back), who had determined Reality for humanity for some many thousands of years, had largely departed from our world come the waning centuries of the Arian Age, which is the Hellenistic era. The Mediterranean world in the late Hellenistic era, the time of the Roman Republic about to become, with Caesar Augustus, the Roman Empire, was primed to hear a new Word. Though the official government of the Roman Empire would resist that Word for some three hundred years, the Christian Good News of the new Fish God, starting as an underground movement, was able, however, to slowly and surely win over the Roman world. That Word, the Logos, which would come to determine Piscean Age Western civilization, came in the avatar of Jesus the Christ.
We should continue now to consider more closely the psychospiritual implications of this new Word. The newly evolved ego, conscious of self in an always uncertain world, needed to know what to expect about the Greater Reality—as there had always been previously the Greater Reality of the Gods—, needed to know how all was in place, how it all made sense, how it was all, in other words, God’s Plan. It was not that the Greater Reality was to be explored—only a small minority ever pursues the Path of higher knowledge—, but that the Big Picture had to be made clear and simple in relatively straightforward abstract language, a readymade interpretation of what the Greater Reality was about, that the ego could readily grasp. Thus could life go on as it always previously had and sense be made of the purpose of life in a material world.
We will suggest here that it is the ego-self which demands certainty and grasps for the security of knowing what is black-and-white in its world. This is contrary to what might be thought at first as a need of the soul (which notion must be completely rethought after Postmodern critique). It might be contended that it is soul that yearns for certainty and finds comfort in the Truth. That soul can have feelings in this regard is to be assumed, for it is through soul that we feel, but soul is so much more than a hypothetical “something” that seeks ultimate repose in an Afterlife. Soul itself is not restricted by the Reality Principle (Freud) that so clearly defines the ego. Soul, we would find upon deep reflection, is far more fluid and polytheistic in its multiplicity; it simply does not find complete satisfaction in any closed-book Story (such as the Christian Story) that would appear on the surface to address its needs. Soul does not demand to know the Truth, and then be done with it, it is the ego which demands to know the Truth, because it is the ego-self which will ultimately want control. We have only to look at our dreams, as but one example of our soul life, to realize that soul expressing itself through the dream world is not demanding the Truth. Soul is too involved in its exploring of whole other astral worlds; the Reality Principle counts for nothing in dream life. Those who share with us their out-of-body adventures, which are soul adventures, do not talk about a need for certainty or security on such adventures. Again, soul is too engaged in exploring the multitudes of other worlds of the ever-shifting astral plane. But what soul does yearn for is experience. It is through experience that soul comes to find fulfillment, and this includes the spiritual Path.
With the dawn of the new Age of Pisces, since the soul no longer had a relationship to the Gods that could constellate a whole pantheon of meaning for it, and since the soul was so intimately tied into the body and the Earthly plane (which was anathema to Christianity), soul was relegated by Christian theology to the status of an abstraction, a metaphysical something. Soul, the actual, palpable, living soul, in the Piscean Age had to be repressed. It was the still developing ego-self that thrived on this new mindset of belief (Pisces: I believe)—believing in the dogmas of Truth, therefore living in a collective delusion (Pisces ruled by Neptune, the planet of illusion and delusion) of knowing with certainty what the Truth is. Belief equaled certainty, which in turn was to become the rallying cry for science.
Modern science also acquired the ideal of certainty with its emphasis early on for the exactitude of mathematical physics. The early modern thinkers and scientists believed that we could gradually attain certainty as regards the blueprint of Nature through mathematical physics, since this science, following the injunction of Descartes for clear and distinct ideas, was beginning to prove that it could produce results, that Nature’s secrets were indeed being uncovered. This then became another, new indicator of having attained truth—truth produced results in the physical world. By uncovering Nature’s secrets we could then dream of someday conquering Nature. Here we see the ego’s need and desire for control. It is clear then that modern science too made its claim to Truth—the Truth about Nature. The true words about Nature were the logos of the sciences.
In the Western world, Logos established itself as the Word of Being, both in Christianity and in the rise of modern science. The Divine Reason for all things established itself spiritually in Christ as the existential meaning of life and in the disciplines of the hard sciences in discovering the Divine Blueprint in Nature. Christianity and modern science, contrary to the assumed impression that they have nothing in common, have both displayed the same fundamental attunement to Reality of certainty, resulting in a similar disrespectful relationship to Nature: Nature was to be dismissed and repressed (Christianity) and Nature was to be conquered and controlled (modern science). This really should come as no surprise, as they are both expressions of the Western mind, with its aggressive vision of destiny.
Coming into late Modern times, with the death of God and the critique of traditional metaphysics, Logos has been withdrawn from the notion of a Divine Blueprint. The whole notion of a knowable, rational cosmic order existing beyond the bubble of human reality, as a result of Modern and then Postmodern philosophical critique, has been dismantled. Logos, however, has still triumphed in science, especially as it has developed into today’s technology. Logos, as the entire interconnected conceptual framework of science, expressing itself through the instrumental rationality of the technical mind, has now been epitomized as Technos. Technos has become our new God and is on track with all the new technologies coming online, through conspiratorial manipulation by a secret global elite, to consolidate control of the entire planet. We today are living in the early days of the new reign of Technos.
When the Traditions we have known have been stamped void, to what, then, do we fall back? What defines for us our relationship to Reality (to Being, to All-that-is)? Technos? But Technos does not address any Greater Reality and our metaphysical disorientation before any Greater Reality. Though Technos has emerged triumphant as a result of Western metaphysics, Technos has shown that its essence is in fact anti-metaphysical. Technos is a denial of any meaning beyond the bubble of human reality (which is always considered an ego-oriented reality). Such a denial is founded upon the epistemological impossibility of any knowledge of a Greater Reality beyond the human bubble. In an utterly consumer-driven, materialistic world such as ours has become, old metaphysics is not worth a penny.
To what then do we orient ourselves anew? Back in the mid-20th Century, out of the existentialist movement it was often said that we must fall back upon ourselves—we ourselves must provide the new meaning we need from out of ourselves. To claim that we ourselves must provide the meaning of our lives is a confused notion if we don’t have first of all a clear idea of what we mean by “ourselves.” If we are not clear about this, then we are not clear about where from inside of us this new meaning is supposed to come. Is it the ego-self? The ego-self that today is so thoroughly media conditioned in a solipsistic human reality? The ego-self that today is succumbing to the domination by the will to power of Technos? If it is something more or something other than the ego-self that is meant by falling back on ourselves, then we need a new, larger view of human being. And where do we get this new view? Is the ego-self somehow going to provide for itself a larger view of human being that would then at the same time limit its little godhood? The Postmodern ego-self resists any larger view that might imply a Larger Self than itself. Only the ego-self is recognized in a Postmodern context; and the ego-self only recognizes other ego-selves within the human bubble. The ego-self might entertain the idea of some Larger Self, Higher Self, or what was often called the Overmind, but that is all it is, an interesting, entertaining idea. We must realize that the experiential reality of a Larger Self does not originate with the ego-self.
We are not thrown back then simply upon ourselves (as an ego-self), as if we could provide for ourselves our own spiritual orientation. We must be thrown back to that which is greater than current human being. That which is greater than current human being in a milieu of spiritual devastation is ultimately Being. It is therefore Being which potentially speaks to us anew and reveals the new Word.
The Word of Divinity, which originally meant the Divinities—the ancient Gods and Goddesses—, was originally not Logos but Mythos. We will again see that the Word that is coming as the New Age dispensation reveals a divine dimension, but this divine dimension in the dawning of the Aquarian New Age is that of human being, implying by no means, however, the ego-self but a Larger Self, a Higher Self, and a Higher Self in relationship—in a collective mind field—to Other Intelligences that have already attained a divine state, entitling them, even today, to the old epithet of “Gods.” (It might be questioned why we are still using the old word ‘divine’ in a Postmodern context. The two could not be more contrary. But let us realize that the word ‘divine’ for us today has an implication of “super-human,” as the ancient Gods were super-human. The Mythos, we will come to realize, transforms all previous traditional language.) The Word as Mythos does again speak of the Gods and Goddesses, only now they are to be known as Other Intelligences (the divine status may therefore apply to various ETs, Visitors from elsewhere, Other-dimensionals).
The new Word of Being in its initial abstract Form we will consider now as the notion of The Mythos. Though the Word as Mythos will be further determined as Spirit, as Higher Self, as Psyche (as the Living Image of the Higher Self), and as our encounter with a multiplicity of Other Intelligences, it is because of our Postmodern spiritual devastation that we are at first thrown all the way back to that which is most universal and from which we cannot escape—the All of All-there-is, Being.
It is Mythos that we must now come to gain a better understanding of. (This discussion of Mythos, with its obvious reference to the ancient Greeks—‘mythos’ is after all their word—, can apply with certain scholarly qualifications to the ancient Sumerians or other Mesopotamians, or to the Egyptians, or to any other ancient peoples of the world. It is common knowledge that all peoples everywhere have a mythology, which is what Mythos is the origin of.) Like ‘logos,’ ‘mythos’ is an ancient Greek word also meaning “word,” and also meaning a type of speech. Mythos, however, is the Word (as a flow of words) that gives original voice to the words of the Gods. It was the oral telling about what the Gods had told or did. Mythos, therefore, began as an oral tradition of bards (or priests or prophets who were already inscribing, as in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt , or Israel ), quite distinct in this regard from philosophical Logos. (The early pre-Socratic thinkers, though writing in a poetic or aphoristic form, were clearly beginning to think Logos.) What the Gods told of first of all were actually teachings, for they were the original teachers of the manifold arts of civilization: reading, writing, mathematics, astrology/astronomy, textile and pottery making, metallurgy, ritual, social mores, law, commerce, etc. And the Gods told stories (stories of the origins of all things, stories of their genealogies, their exploits, their involvement with humanity), which, because all the stories of the Gods and Goddesses were interconnected in a particular culture’s mythology, can be considered one, complex Story (a Mythos, suggesting our current definition of mythos). This Story too revealed a purpose, a design, a Divine Blueprint (like Logos in this regard) of a bigger, cosmic picture that the Gods were all part of. Mythos tells of what has been (going back to origins), so as to make sense of, to bring order to, what is now. Of course this telling required a prior listening on the part of the bards (or priests or prophets) as to what the Gods had revealed.
We understand Mythos, therefore, as the flow of words (channeled words, we would likely say today) coming to us from the Gods, of what the Gods have revealed. This telling is a bringing into language and culture (through the bard, through poetry), and is a telling that is retold again and again as the stories of what the Gods have told and did. They are the stories, then, passed on in first an oral tradition about the Gods—real Gods, we should insert here, not the Modernist interpretation of imaginary Gods. How the old Gods and Goddesses are to be interpreted has indeed been a challenge ever since Modern scholars began to investigate seriously the ancient myths; hardly, though, were the ancient divinities ever considered to be real—that is, real divine (super-human) beings. It is from our new UFO perspective that we now have gained a better understanding as to the reality of the Gods and Goddesses of the distant past.
Mythos, in its primary sense implying a direct relationship to the Gods, so as to tell about the Gods, over time eventually degenerated, however, into a secondary cultural role of “mere” story-telling during the early Christian centuries when living contact with the Gods had already been for a long time lost (the Gods themselves having long before departed from active involvement with humankind). Thus we find that the Logos of Christianity came to supplant the Mythos of the Gods. Poets and writers of the Roman Empire found themselves therefore in this secondary cultural role of “telling stories” about a once-upon-a-time when the Gods were present and were in actual communication with us. When Christianity did become the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century, the pagan religions of the earlier Mythos were soon to be ruthlessly suppressed. The “mere” myths of the earlier ancients were to become leftover cultural curiosities of the pagan past, not to be taken seriously under pain of heresy.
True Mythos will always be a possibility if we can renew an active relationship with what is revealed as Divinity. Rewriting the Good News, the Logos of Christianity should rather have been expressed as Mythos. The first verse of John should therefore have been written, In the beginning was the Mythos. Since it was Logos that supplanted Mythos, however, and took on this divine function with Christianity in Western civilization (denying the profound origins of poetry in favor of intellect-oriented theology), true Mythos almost literally died out in the dominant culture of the West, but barely surviving in esoteric traditions. The original, profound meaning of Mythos was largely lost until the scholarly efforts of hermeneutical studies in more recent times.
As we noted earlier, the current, dictionary meaning of ‘mythos’ refers to a society’s, a culture’s, whole underlying, deep structure of symbol, codification, and meaning; it is the interlocked “mythology” hidden, as it were, behind the activities of collective, everyday life that, whether we are aware of it or not, orients us and guides us in our activities, that is always there to provide us with background, assumed meanings. Even Logos is founded upon Mythos; even science and technology, in other words, would reveal an inherent myth structure. In a Postmodern world, there is of course nothing divine about this. Yet, if we were look deeply enough, that is to say, if we were to follow back the historical roots of our civilization’s hidden infrastructure of meaning, no matter how many thousands of years back that might be, we would eventually uncover the divine origins of just about every aspect of our lives. Now depth psychology would interpret that hidden infrastructure as archetypal; that, however, still begs the question of the ancient activation of the archetypal dimension of our psyche. This, if it needs to be said, is another whole exploration of its own. But our concern here is with Mythos in its profound, original sense, and how Mythos is destined to be a possibility for us again.
Today, in a Postmodern world, with the memory of the Gods so long faded in the misty past that scholars still debate as to what the ancients could have meant by them, and now with God the Father Himself having died, it becomes a supremely challenging question to ask, What divine source might Mythos refer to today, if indeed Mythos as the Word is once again a possibility for us? Mythos is indeed a telling. What is it telling of?
We realized that it was Being that we must encounter anew in a Postmodern era of nihilism. Mythos is the new telling of what Being is revealing to us; that new telling implies bringing a new Revelation into concrete cultural form—that is to say, this event must happen somewhere or another and must happen through a certain individual, or a certain few individuals. It is what is meant by:
The Mythos begins somewhere
and must begin with someone
It is apparent that whoever would claim this for themselves will be questioned, if not attacked, from all sides. It will be contended, Who has the right, who has the privilege, to bring forth a new Mythos for the entire planet? (For today a new Mythos would of necessity be global.) Who would dare, or rather, who is arrogant enough, to make such a claim?
As an orientation to the issue at stake here, let us consider this: If someone were to say, But I want to relate only with the Source (Being) itself, forget about attempting to bring anything into form, into language, into culture, the point we will still have to raise is: Is the Source—Being—not revealing? It is one thing to be open and to just “be” in a meditative state, but we do live in a collective world with others, we do live in a culture composed of forms. For as much as Buddha must have indeed meditated, did he himself not have teachings to share? Wasn’t something spiritually determinant coming through for him? We would say the same for Jesus. To just be open to Being per se is to remain in an utterly abstract state, like a person who might have had a profound experience but then not knowing what to do with such an experience, or not even making an attempt at sharing such an experience with others. There are those, for example, who wish to think of themselves as “spiritual” but cannot show any concrete expression of it. To want to remain in an abstract state of “just being” is to miss and to ignore the challenge that Being presents to us of co-creativity, that what Being might be showing us today is a Form (The Mythos) that calls us to bring it into human cultural form(s). Conversely, to claim that Being is revealing to us something far different than the interpretation offered here, puts one in the position of facing the same challenge—what is that other interpretation? What is Being revealing? We surely cannot take seriously the attitude of a Postmodern ego-self that would simply spout anything it wishes.
Before we go further, let us also acknowledge the view that “Being” reveals nothing to us, or can reveal nothing, that “Being” itself is just an empty word that certain thinkers have still clung to for grandiose philosophizing. A weaker version of this is that ‘being,’ as a word in a linguistic context, may indeed have some meaning, but we are not in a position as human beings to make universal pronouncements about “Being”; we can only really hear the chatter of our own minds, trapped as we are in our solipsistic human bubble. All of this, of course, is the Postmodern view, which puts us back to square one metaphysically. But we no longer wish to be Postmodern. Our whole intent in the reviving of Mythos and for bringing to birth The Mythos is to move beyond the Postmodern. To claim that such a project is impossible is almost as if to say that producing a poem or a painting or a musical composition is impossible, that art, in other words, somehow should not be possible. The Mythos, as we will see, but happens to be the Art of all arts.
As explored in a previous work (The Sun Experience, An Opening to Being), what Being is revealing to us today is first an Unlimited Potential. This is what Being as the “It gives” (Heidegger), giving all that is manifested, gives as Revelation for us today. (In the above mentioned work, this was referred to as the Event, specifically, our encounter with Being as the Event of Appropriation, which is Heidegger’s phrasing of it.) This claim is an interpretation of my own firsthand encounter with Being as an experience that begins beyond language. Such an experience is overwhelming to the ego; I call it “the Sun experience”—being blinded by Being as if one were gazing straight into the Sun. (Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah refers to the Unlimited Light.) Unlimited Potential implies unlimited in all respects, which is why Being can also be referred to as the Source, or, traditionally, the Void, which gives birth to all things. What I am beginning to introduce here is a fundamentally creative process of determination into form. It can be thought of as a stepping-down process into cultural manifestation from an originary experience.
I have further interpreted this Revelation as most relevant to human thought as an Unlimited Potential-for-meaning opening out an Interconnectedness-of-all-meaning. For it is as meaning first that we encounter things and all potential things. Logos, as we understand logos today as represented by the sciences, cannot answer to such a Revelation. It is the Word as Mythos which promises to be adequate to such an overwhelming revealing. As we proceed it must be kept in mind that we are speaking about a process, that we are developing a language for speaking about process, what is profoundly a supremely creative process. The interpretation that Being reveals Unlimited Potential and Interconnectedness is a first level interpretation, still utterly abstract, of a Revelation coming into language. Mythos is the further stepping down into human psyche of that first level interpretation of what Being reveals. Mythos speaks as this process itself of the coming-toward-us-entering-Form. This coming-toward-us as first the Formless (the purely Abstract) of all forms we will call Spirit. Spirit is the coming-toward-us, which is the It giving of Being. (Spiritual experiences, for example, are a coming-toward-us of a Greater Reality, having impact on our soul.) Spirit, more fully spelled out in a phenomenological manner, is the coming-toward-us-of-the-Formless-of-all-forms-entering-Form, which Mythos will be the telling of.
A question we can now ask is: What is Spirit revealing as the Divine that speaks to us today? Is it Spirit as-such itself? Spirit as a Revelation of the Divine is already an ancient dispensation, culminating in Modern times in the philosophy of Idealism, particularly that of Hegel. For us today to say that it is Spirit itself that is being revealed and to leave it at that is again to remain in the utterly abstract. (Hegel’s whole philosophical system of Spirit was to overcome all abstractness. However, his claim was that the Real is Rational (Logos) and the Rational is what is Real. The thrust of nearly all philosophy after Hegel was to deconstruct this and deny this.) Spirit, however, had never revealed itself in its entire splendor (Unlimited Potential); rather, we were always given a particular slice of the vastness of Spirit (Hegel’s notion of Spirit demanded that it be “rational,” a peculiarly human notion, and so was therefore a limitation). Our Traditions, primarily cultural control systems for an infant humanity, were never capable of celebrating—or were never meant to celebrate—the full splendor of Spirit. We should realize that Spirit is revealing itself in a profound, new way (the new dispensation), so much so that we can refer to the New Age as a new Age of Spirit. But, then, lest we remain in the empty abstract, we must ask this question more accurately, What is Spirit actually revealing as the Divine that is a new dispensation for this time, for the New Age we are entering? It is not Spirit as the timeless, as the eternal (whatever this might mean in respect to Being), that speaks to us today, but Spirit as a supremely temporal manifestation for us here and now, for our world, inside our human bubble. In other words, then, is there a new Form of Divinity whose Word will tell of it that Spirit as the coming-toward-us of Being is revealing to us? Again, how is Spirit, as the Formless Abstract, appearing to us in a concrete Form (a Living Image speaking to the human psyche) in its coming-toward-us to make that Revelation?
The revealing of Unlimited Potential-for-meaning opening out an Interconnectedness-of-all-meaning is Spirit as the coming-toward-us-of-the-Formless-of-all-forms-entering-Form. This is what Logos, as we have come to know Logos today, cannot address. Science as the exemplar of Logos today (as Freud said, Logos (read: science) is our god) narrows considerably what it takes into its consideration. What we know as the scientific method has already taken a pre-view of Reality (of Being, of All-that-is) and will only allow into its method what can be seen within this preset pre-view. Within this pre-view there, yes, can be certainty. (By this we always mean a relative certainty—an absolute certainty is only a comforting illusion.) But science, especially as it is epitomized as Technos, cannot hear the new Word that is the overwhelming Revelation of Being for us today.
Mythos, on the contrary, has no preset pre-view but is a primordial being open to Being and all that might be revealed by Being. The Reality attunement of Mythos is openness, not certainty. Mythos, open to the Revelation of Unlimited Potential, can therefore define a co-creative process of bringing that potential into human reality. What is implied here through this process is the realization of an Unlimited Creativity which allows Spirit to manifest into untold possibilities of form—which is Spirit coming into its glory. We will consider this to be the supreme Art, the Great Work, of Self-Realization.
What might not have missed the attention of someone is an alleged leap of logic we have taken here—that from an Unlimited Potential revealed as Being to our potential as human beings, as if such an experience of Being “proves” that within us (our so-called soul) hides a similar Unlimited Potential. It might be contended that such a leap of logic (logic, of course, derived from Logos) is unjustified. But we are no longer thinking the Logos of logic, of proof, of demanding any sort of certainty; by speaking Mythos, we are not out to prove anything. We are concerned with the Art of telling a new Story. Notwithstanding that, what is overlooked here is that any experience we may have of Being is our experience, it is speaking to us, as human beings, and it is our co-creative interpretation of that experience that comes into play. Why should we assume that the Unlimited Potential of Being is a free-floating abstract experience utterly remote from our everyday ego-self, having nothing to say to us? The Word coming-to-us becomes our saying, our telling, our putting into form what is new Revelation.
What Spirit, as the coming-toward-us of Revelation, is revealing as the new dispensation of the Ages, as the new Divinity, is our own Higher—Divine—Self. Remembering that “divine” implies super-human, we have within us then the potential of the Gods—to someday become super-human, able to manifest more and more of the Unlimited Potential of Being. (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is still a prophet of our future in this regard.) This is not simply an assertion, but is a Moment of Vision, true gnosis. All Traditions explicitly or implicitly (as our Western Traditions) teach of the ultimately divine nature of human being. We often hear today that we are in essence spiritual beings. But the crucial point is is that we today who are entering a New Age are no longer satisfied by mouthing abstractions, by nodding our head to the supremely Abstract. The Higher Self per se, that is, merely as posited, is of course again the Abstract. But now we have taken another step in the stepping-down process that is The Mythos. The question then becomes, How is the Higher Self appearing to us? What is The Mythos bringing into form?
Now the Higher Self indicates itself to us in a variety of ways, for example, in psychic and paranormal experiences of various kinds, in shamanic and spiritual practices, in meditation, in Visions. There is nothing new in any of this; ancient Gnosticism, for one, had already taught of the Higher Self. Yet, the entire range of the paranormal, of spiritual and shamanic practices, still does not address the question regarding a new dispensation, a new Word, that would at the same time embrace all traditional experiences of the Higher Self. The question is, If we are to develop a relationship with the Higher Self, how is that relationship to concretely take form? It is one thing to have experiences that may or may not be integrated into one’s life, but what we are concerned with here is a specific relationship that Mythos would be the telling of. Mythos, again, implies a concrete relationship to Divinity, as ancient peoples had very definite relationships to the Gods and Goddesses.
Co-currently with the Revelation of the Higher Self also comes a new Revelation of the Gods and Goddesses—Other Intelligences that are visiting our Earth, showing themselves by way of the UFO, and increasingly contacting firsthand individuals worldwide. This is no mere coincidence either. The Gods and Goddesses of former ages who have long ago attained the divine state are stealthily showing themselves to us again, inspiring us to attain our own divine state, our own Divine Selfhood. This synchronicity happening for us today is also what Mythos will be the telling of. The Other Intelligences are often encountered on a higher level of Self; their speaking to us is in a certain regard no different than the ancient bard or prophet hearing the voices of the Gods and speaking the Mythos about them. The enormous difference, however, that cannot be ignored is the whole evolution of self-consciousness since ancient times. The Mythos, which we will now call a process of mythmaking, is entered into in full self-conscious awareness. It is not, then, in any way a vain attempt to revert back to a previous stage of human evolution, that is, to any primitive, naïve, unconscious, so-called “mythical” phase that humanity had long ago passed through. It is rather the experience of what we would want to call the mythical, but on a whole other super-creative, enlightened level (The Mythos).
We are living in a time, in this current Postmodern transition period, of the Advent. (We are living in the time of the ontological Event of Appropriation.) The Advent of Spirit’s Revelation of the Higher Self is announced as a Vision—a Moment of Vision—in which a Living Image is the coming-to-us of this Revelation. It is such a Vision that I, as a poet, have offered. As the ancient bards had given names to the Gods, I, as a contemporary poet living in Postmodern times, name this new Divinity, which is our Divine Self, our Higher Self, Psyche. My Moment of Vision is the Vision of Psyche.
The Vision of Psyche is how the Living Image of the Higher Self has appeared to the poet. We will philosophically define Psyche in the most succinct manner as Spirit-of-soul—in other words, Spirit coming-to-us in the guise of soul, that we might rediscover soul, liberate soul, transform soul. To realize this for ourselves in a Moment of Vision is the Advent. To begin to tell of this process by bringing it into cultural form is to begin the telling that The Mythos is. The Mythos as this ongoing co-creative process with Spirit is the unfolding embodiment of the Higher Self, our own Divinity, into our very body and into our world. This is the simultaneous liberation of the Unlimited Potential of soul—it implies soul evolving further and further into Spirit, into a Greater Reality beyond our current day human bubble. The Unlimited Potential revealed by Being is therefore not simply an abstract experience, but is an Unlimited Potential revealed to us, the Earthling, concretely to be realized as the Unlimited Potential of our own soul.
Those who cannot hold humankind in such a higher light, who would still wish to see us in a more traditional, modest light as limited, fallible, and sinful, as merely human, merely mortal, after all, might view The Mythos, then, as a grandiose inflation of human being, trying to turn human being, sort of speak, into God. Unlimited Potential might suggest, through a perverse Nietzschean twist, an unlimited Will to Power—the will to be powerfully super-human, to be like God. But let us be clear, this aggressive Will to Power was the direction taken by Western Logos: The Logos of Christianity resulting in the little godhood of today’s spoiled rotten, narcissistic, Postmodern ego-self and the Logos of science now become Technos, a technological will to power, to conquer and control Nature. This is not the new Story of Mythos, and it is not the Vision of Psyche. The Unlimited Potential of an Unlimited Creativity to become super-human is not a power-mad Will to Power. This is to totally misunderstand the more inclusive levels of consciousness of the Higher Self (beyond ego-self) and the whole meaning of a collective mind-field; it is to ignore the Interconnectedness (of all things) of the spiritual.
The Mythos, we should realize by now, is a renewed valuation of creativity on a whole new level perhaps never before imagined, but for the old alchemists, Gnostics, and others of the ancient Hermetic schools. The full potential of creativity had always been greatly restricted by the doctrines of our Traditions; when it comes to religion itself, the suggestion that we can creatively transform and evolve the doctrines and dogmas of religious belief was considered simply heretical, even dangerous, if not totally out of place—religion and creativity had nothing in common. Belief says that the Truth cannot be changed. But all Tradition can be transformed with new Revelation. The traditional genres of the creative arts have also been almost completely tamed by the consumer marketplace. The Mythos promises a new spiritualization of the arts, bringing Spirit and thereby new meaning into them, raising them out of the Postmodern nihilism of consumerism.
It would be a mistake to think that The Mythos would enter our culture independent of all our new technologies. The Mythos is equally a new spiritualization of technology. Without the Revelation of The Mythos, the new God Technos, with advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), as it is becoming all so apparent today, is set to eventually take control of our entire planet. The Mythos must encounter the futuristic vision of the growing Singularity movement; in fact, our divine potential to be super-human parallels the futurist’s intentions on becoming more than human, to become cyborg super-human, and perhaps no longer to be human at all. (Already they are discussing a coming post-human era.) That Psyche, our own Divine Selfhood, must creatively integrate with Technos for the sake of human liberation rather than enslavement, and perhaps for the survival of human integrity itself, is the Story The Mythos in the future is promising to tell.
It would also be a mistake to think that The Mythos has no involvement with Earth and would ignore the changing condition of our biosphere. A whole other discussion would need to be explored as to how soul is intimately connected to our bodies as a psychosomatic mode of our being that in turn is intimately connected to all natural cycles and all life on Earth. The traditional, abstract soul that no longer has meaning in a Postmodern context only plays into the hands of a power-mad Technos. Logos had always been conceived as superior to Nature; Technos, as we know, has no special appreciation of Nature. The new Word as Mythos, however, fosters a deep respect for, and relationship to, Nature. Mythos would bring consciousness of our Gaia planet into a transformed Technos.
Let us summarize certain considerations of Mythos for us today, which, as the Word, we must view, and more than view, but co-creatively engage, as The Mythos. To speak Mythos, to actively bring The Mythos into the world, is to practice the art of mythopoesis—which is the Art of all arts, mythmaking. This, let us be clear, is not the mythmaking we find in the current cultural sense of the word, given still today’s negative connotations of the word ‘myth’ to begin with, which would be to misunderstand our discussion here entirely. In our Postmodern world, what is commonly referred to as cultural mythmaking, despite the intellectual’s condescension of it, is indeed quite rampant—we find mythmaking about conspiracies, Secret Controllers, the Illuminati, the global Elite, UFOs, ETs, ancient civilizations, Gaia, all aspects of the paranormal, in addition, of course, to genre-defined fantasy and science fiction books and movies that are often said to satisfy our contemporary need for myth. (Speaking personally, they have yet to satisfy “my need” for myth, as if myth as Mythos, we should realize by now, could be so neatly packaged. I do not have a consumer need for myth, so much as a need to live passionately and creatively with all of my soul in the flow of Being.)
The Mythos, again, is the telling of a new Divinity—our own Higher Self, revealed as the Living Image of Psyche. Yet, having said this, the bringing into form of The Mythos will very well take a wide variety of cultural forms, including philosophy, poetry, books, music, performance, films, art works, social forms and group dynamics, and undoubtedly new therapies, spiritual practices, and rituals. The Mythos, it must be understood, implies then a truly collective process, a movement, as more and more individuals align themselves to The Mythos. The Mythos promises to be the spiritual equivalent of, as if unfolding parallel to, someday to perhaps merge with, the future Internet.
It might be contended after all this discussion of the Word (keeping in mind its strong Christian, religious connotation), after all this discussion of the Word as Mythos, that it is a veiled way of talking about the emergence of a new religion, a New Age religion, in fact. Let it be said that this should not be veiled at all. After all, in a Postmodern context, we have become well practiced at being hyper-self-conscious. Yes, The Mythos is a potential, emergent religion, but it would be a completely wrong assumption to think that it will look like any traditional religion we have known. We must introduce here the notion of evolutionary novelty, that what is coming into the world (the new dispensation) is not a clone of what we have known before. The Mythos is a new birth, that of our Unlimited Creativity as we encounter the Revelation of Being of Unlimited Potential.
To speak Mythos, to bring The Mythos into form, therefore, is to imply:
I am directly engaged with the Divine Power coming through. (My Higher Self / Other Intelligences)
I am speaking from that Source. My speaking is a fully embodied speech, The Mythos manifesting as a fullness of embodiment, not merely an expression of abstract ideas or entertaining fiction.
I am not simply “telling a Story,” recounting a myth at secondhand, but am allowing the Divine Power of the Greater Reality to come through into Form, into stories of a Great Story that is comprehensive of the situation of our contemporary world.
I am therefore in an ongoing, co-creative relationship with that Source.
As we can see, The Mythos is an ongoing process, an Art, in fact, that we remain engaged with in our day-to-day life. The Mythos is the Art of all arts—truly Divine-inspired mythmaking.
October 2007/March 2008