Thursday 15 August 2013

Living myth

There's a point where an individual fits into an historical context, where individual physiology is matrixed by cosmic aeons and a point where individual consciousness merges with infinite mystery.

Imagine this remarkable point of departure, entry, contact being tucked away in the elusive core commonly known as "you" yourself.

That's how very mysterious, powerful and extensive you are. Your boundaries are not limited to the here and now, nor to the appearance or disappearance of money from your purse, also not to the various moods that persuade you from time to time that some things are more important than others.

One of the biggest feats that humans aspire to is to tell the story into which they fit for real. So important is this that they even kill each other for the sake of the story that they cling to. Families can be split by preference for a story, nations upset and faiths kept at war. The stories are many and varied, authored by people of all kinds including pioneers, puritans and pirates.

I was fascinated by stories from an early age, blessed to have one Aunty Carol who was no relative but stayed in our home, and created stories with me, and  told them over and over. I still have no idea where she came from. She died when I was twelve and went to heaven, and still embarrasses me with a keen interest in what I do with my life. Carol Russo. If anyone knows anything about her background, I would very much like to know more about her personal history.

Most of my academic work revolved around working out what a story is, what the idea of "story" means, what the relationship between identity and story is, how consciousness and narrative interweave, how social awareness and story create authority.

Three books come to mind immediately: The Body of Myth by Sansonese, The Cry for Myth  by Rollo May and The Roots of Civilization by Marshack.

These and many more shaped my thinking. Gradually I learned that shaping my thinking wasn't as important as challenging my feelings. I began to probe where I would not have probed before, losing important boundaries of fear along the way. When I read Freke and Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries, a huge light came on. It took me ten years after that to recognize what was being illuminated to me: that truth does not arrive as one single though possibly long narrative that rests on a platform of absolutely accurate details.

No scientist will ever arrive with the truth. No theologian will even be able to package it. No spiritualist can unravel what happens after death. I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos regularly and more than once and accepted that the impossible immensity of the universe requires equally huge dimensions of thinking.

The truth and an accurate story overlap in a court of law, but not in a universe observed by a human mind. The human mind has to lose a bit of egotistic glue and "resinate" a bit more with what's going on in the observable and intuitive aspects of temporal and infinite living.

Each individual is a star-gate through whom meaning, purpose and intention flow. As you are honest to tell yourself and others what flows through you, you participate in living your own myth, which is guaranteed not to be limited to yourself. It's a living myth, not a merely accurate account but a creative movement reflected by what's going on in your life, your personal history and your growth and in particular your changing beliefs.

One of the biggest fears I grew up with was connected to loyalty to belief. The more free I am to believe what makes sense, the less I am compelled to believe for the sake of loyalty, which has always been a hallmark of human conflict.

Choose why you believe.

Once you've hammered your flag into the mast, that 's it , that's also not it. Decision can be changed.

A lot of people believe rubbish. That's why humanity doesn't do well. The emotions set up, the mindset sets, decisions assist bad choices. There's something in the core that doesn't make sense, but it's still chosen.

I think it's called badly interpreted instinct. Humans are wired to act instinctively. They obey because they feel to do so, they engage because they need to, they love, too bad, because they don't want to meet doom alone.

The living myth reaches out, quite despite humanity. Humans are a nexus of the universe, a very real one, a corner that requires quite a manoeuvre from that which is human , and more, I'm not sure how they will officially admit that humanity stops short, necessarily, of knowing much more than tomorrow's weather.

There's a challenge in just being conscious: meet your story...

Far from what you may have been influenced, the story is wide open to relief, a  new sense of reality, release.

I can guarantee this: simply ask "what is my story?" and if you mean, it, so much will change.......



 

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