Some days it feels like we're at the edge of a story our cultures have been telling themselves for the last 250 years - since the crafting of states around colonies, and the dawn of modern nationalism in a myth of ethnic purity inflamed by a British judge going to India and realizing that Sanskrit shared a common origin with European tongues.
We've built so much of our sense of the world around what's ultimately a blip of a cultural idea in deep history.
Will we live to see what comes afer it?
(Also, hello, good morning, and good Sunday. 💛)
@MLClark
We'll live to see some of what comes after it. I also feel like... whatever that is? The power structure and the governments; they're changing or ending somehow, literally right now as we speak. I have no idea what they're going to look like, but it really feels like we're on a brink.
@MLClark
I also feel like it's going to bring out some more nutcases/groups with bad ideas, unfortunately.
@MLClark
But people have lived through lots of changes before, you know! I expect this is not that much different than some of our ancestors experienced, collectively speaking. It's slower than I would have thought. You don't just wake up one day and say "Yep. That era ended." it takes frigging forever and you probably don't realize it until you're dead.
Well said. The Roman empire took centuries to decline, and pagan mythologies took centuries in regions to give way to something new.
We are sentient enough to see that we're part of a larger tapestry - and to anticipate some changes in the weave - but not powerful enough to hasten along whatever comes next.
We'll spend the rest our lives in the dregs of old myths - religious, cultural, political - with only a few guesses as to which fragments will craft the stories that lie ahead.
yes, it seems to be the case. it's as Foucault predicted: humanism and its myths are being washed away by the rising tide of inhumanity and currently there's nothing to replace it.
Jung thought mythology is necessary for human social cohesion, but christianity had lost its adhesive power.
he hoped that working with the unconscious archetypes would bring a new consciousness to birth, in which each individuated person instantiated a unique yet universal relationship with the numinous.
I'm currently prepping to record a BookTube piece about a book written out of a non-Western tradition of overlapping archetypes, which is infused with a sense of normalcy around the idea of myths rising and falling and coexisting in fragmentary forms in shared public spaces.
It might just be that myths of "the West" are joining those bigger, messier waters of multiple myth-structures at long last. If so, we at least have a loose cultural roadmap for what comes next.
yes, i agree with that too✌🏽
seeing through myths, their relativity, their emptiness, is part of the process.
one can benefit from the energy of metaphors without becoming possessed by them. the way is known.
seems to me that science is at the point of offering metaphors too, and they work well with, e.g., buddhist psychology, as well as Jungian analysis.
the field is getting prepared, imho.
it's up to us to dig, plant, water, weed.
Beautifully put, Holon.
It sounds like you've had a nourishing journey through prose and meditation as of late.
Thank you for sharing its fruits.
@MLClark
you're very welcome ✌🏽❤️
this is a joint sentient beings' journey within the endless mystery of being.
it can be beautiful, peaceful, joyful, and loving.
let it be🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻