Mesocosm

The abject failure to understand mythological thinking is one of the most serious problems of our age, politically, culturally, philosophically, and spiritually. Irrational forces drive individual behavior and collective action, and the failure to understand and live in productive dialog with the energies of the psyche leaves reason vulnerable on several fronts, and cedes a deep matrix of human motivation to noxious and self-serving ideologies.

The essay that follows, I must emphasize at the onset, is not a critique of science or an endorsement of myth; rather, it is a dialectical analysis of the interplay between both.

The Cages are Always Imaginary, Max Ernst, 1925

We live in an age of reason – at least, if we confine ourselves to the dominant intellectual cultures of Europe and the United States. Science, as reason’s totalizing exemplar, is widely accepted as a method for interpreting nature and history and the sole source of intersubjective legitimacy – so much so that we increasingly look to scientists to address social and cultural problems that were once the domain of philosophers, historians, and poets.

In common usage, “myth” refers to superstition, false belief, or dangerous ideology. Mythological thought as such is rarely an object of critical reflection, and is generally posited and valued in a purely negative mode as the antithesis of reason. It is cloven from reason in a dichotomy that on one side includes myth, superstition, tradition, barbarism, and authoritarianism, and on the other includes science, fact, modernity, civilization, and democracy.

Science and myth are not mutually exclusive; they are both essential features of modernity. There is no human society without myth, and no human being who does not engage in mythological thinking, which, properly understood, accompanies and structures all thought. Nor does myth itself lack a rational structure. Myth renders concrete images of the operations of the mind, the world, and the understanding, and contains within itself the essence of critical reason in the Kantian sense.

A structure of critical rationality is not an accidental or occasional feature of mythological thinking, but its deepest meaning – at least, according to the perennial view espoused by its elite interpreters the world over. The central mystery of all major mythological systems consists in a dialectical analysis of the relationship between the knower and the known, between time and eternity. This can be clearly seen in every religious tradition I have encountered, from Black Elk to Thomas Aquinas, from Al-Ghazali to Lao Tsu.

If we look to mythology itself for its essential character, we find that mythological thought consists of two complementary movements. First, experience is posited as a totality, by virtue of which its individual elements have meaning, such that they may be understood and valued. Elements of the world-system posited by the understanding are grasped, both semantically and existentially, in terms of their relationship to the other parts of the system, and to the system as a whole. This corresponds to what Joseph Campbell called the cosmological function of myth.

This function, which is prerequisite to the experience of the world as a domain of meaning, is integral to the vitalizing and redemptive character of mythological thought. I would refer the interested reader to Daniel J. Siegal’s book The Developing Mind, which chronicles years of research inspired by a developmental psychology study which found a strong relationship between mental health and an individual’s ability to articulate a coherent, meaningful narrative of their lives. Jerome Bruner’s Acts of Meaning, a cornerstone of the field of narrative psychology, also sheds much light on this important topic.

In its second movement, mythological thinking self-reflectively recognizes that this very experience of meaningful totality has a merely provisional character. It is a necessary condition for all sensible experience, but lacks any ultimate or transcendental basis.

Dogen expresses the character of this dialectic with beauty and elegance in his masterpiece Genjokoan:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

For example, when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round or square; its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only look circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this.

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water. A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements. When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small. Thus, each of them totally covers its full range, and each of them totally experiences its realm. If the bird leaves the air it will die at once. If the fish leaves the water it will die at once.

Know that water is life and air is life. The bird is life and the fish is life. Life must be the bird and life must be the fish.

It is possible to illustrate this with more analogies. Practice, enlightenment, and people are like this.

Dogen characterizes liberating insight as an understanding of the mutual constitution between interaction and interpretation. Our field of activity determines the domain of our concern. Our ontology, or the way we posit the basic elements that make up the system of interest, follow from that.

For one illustration of this issue, consider the coastline problem. Lewis Fry Richardson found that the perimeter of Great Britain is described by textbooks with a high degree of variability. Upon investigation, he found that the differences in measured length was a result of the fact that different surveys used different “yardsticks.” If you measure the shoreline with a mile-long “yardstick,” than inlets, outcroppings, and other features that are smaller than a mile are disregarded. The smaller the yardstick, the longer the coast becomes.

Adam and Eve, Augusto Giacometti, 1907

So what is the “real” length of the shoreline? There is no such thing – the very concept is incoherent. The measured perimeter depends on the scale of your analysis. In other words, some elementary physical properties of the world follow directly from how we frame or measure. Additional analysis is always possible, and there is no ultimate framework from which the entities we posit cannot be deconstructed by a reconsideration of the basic terms.

That is not to say the shoreline has no perimeter, or that it is all up to us in any simple sense – rather, the very concept of a perimeter is contingent on how we frame the problem. When we change our scope, the terms of our analysis have to account for different interactions, and different classes of interactions, and those modified dynamics are themselves the framework by which we posit the very elements of the system that we analyze.

When the Madhyamaka philosophers of India state that no entity can ultimately withstand analysis, this is what they mean. They have conventionally valid attributes, but there is no ultimate framework from which they can be experienced or described. All things are like this.

This is directly contrary to the way the understanding pre-reflectively takes itself to be, which is always accompanied by the intuition of its own basic completeness and sufficiency. Physical qualities occur as entirely given by the external world, and one’s frame always occurs as adequate to analysis. There is no age which has lacked confidence in the sufficiency of its analytical framework to account for the basic facts of the world, whether it has accepted four naturally-occurring elements or 91.

There are likewise very few individuals who doubt the comprehensiveness of their own analytical tools, except in rare moments of critical reflection. The understanding posits itself as always already sufficient, except when it encounters experiences which are unresolvable by its ontology. Then, as Jean Piaget described, we try to account for new experiences either through assimilation, whereby unfamiliar phenomena are explained with our existing concepts, or through accommodation, whereby the conceptual schema itself be revised to account for some new fact that it can’t explain.

Accommodation is experienced as a minor correction or modification to the existing scheme, not as indicative of a general lack of comprehensibility. Similarly, I learn from Jerome Bruner that deliberations about the world are experienced as subjective or internal, while the outcomes of those deliberations are experienced as objectively-established fact, things that we perceive, not that we posit.

The psychological tendency to mischaracterize the sufficiency of the understanding is what Buddhists call afflictive ignorance – or in the language of contemporary theory, one might call it reification.

We spoke above of the two essential movements of mythological thought – positing experience as a meaningful whole, and reflectively realizing the provisional nature of any such frame of experience. A severe misunderstanding of mythological thought comes from the pervasive failure to recognize these two movements, but to interpret mythological thinking as though it is merely an impoverished form of proto-science. The conscious mind, in over-identification with its own rational faculties, sees its own shadow in mythological thinking which occurs as destructive, superstitious barbarism.

That this misapprehension is widely shared by religious people does not make it any more accurate. In the case of evangelical Christianity, for example, the literal interpretation of the Bible is not consistent with the core teachings of the tradition itself. Augustine argued in Confessions in the fourth century, for example, that the creation of the world obviously did not occur in seven days. Rather, it is a way of understanding that the process by which the universe took shape occurred successively in time. Or consider Thomas Aquinas, whose deep devotion to the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius may have led him to utterly abandon work on Summa Theologica at the end of his life, and to keep noble silence until his death.

No one who confesses the Nicene Creed could plausibly maintain that its doctrines of Christ or the Trinity can be resolved with the ordinary operations of logic. These are not statements of fact in the same way “Sacramento is the capital of California,” is a statement of fact – they are images rendering an understanding of the intersection of time and eternity.

“I am crucified with Christ”, Paul wrote to the Galatians; “Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” To interpret this as an empirical statement would be imbecilic. To fail to recognize that there is a different kind of truth at work here is pedantry. This is a symbolic statement – Christ is an image of the structure and the dynamics of the psyche, and its relationship to the world and to the absolute ground of all being.

This is not a historical essay, so I won’t swell its length by exploring the countless ready-to-hand illustrations of analogous images drawn from the very heart of a dozen major living traditions, including Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and First Nations beliefs spanning the globe. We see it in the mystery of the Quran, the Law, the doctrine of the two truths, the union of Atman and Brahman, the Tao, the Way of Heaven, and the character of sacred story, respectively.

In positing mythological thinking as its own negative image, the understanding disregards the compelling problems that are addressed by mythological thought. In so doing, it simply repeats the basic error of assuming its own self-sufficiency, leaving the deep human questions addressed by mythology unanswered.

The loss of a viable image of the world as a meaningful totality has led to an existential crisis in the United States and Europe. Near the end of his career, Carl Jung wrote that a large number of his patients had no psychological pathology to speak of, but were simply afflicted by a sense of meaninglessness, which he called “the spiritual problem of our age.”

It is often reported that two centuries of “disenchantment of the world” have produced psychological and social turmoil, but what has been less analyzed is the failure of reason to confront that turmoil. As analytical reason always operates within a field defined by a provisional ontology, it is not in itself competent to posit a whole of which it is itself part, in terms of the understanding, and it never will be.

This is not to suggest that a “re-enchantment of the world” by the resubscription to pre-modern religious belief is either possible or desirable. We cannot ignore the findings of science, or disaster will quickly follow. Any progress with respect to the crisis of meaning must be commensurate with what we now know to be true, or else we cede the field of semantic totality to dangerous reactionaries who negate scientific discovery out of hand for petty reasons of naked self-enrichment.

There is no necessary relationship between engaging deeply with mythological thought and rejecting the findings of science. As Joseph Campbell astutely pointed out, every religious system is scientifically accurate from the standpoint of the time in which it was initially formulated. This cleavage between myth and reason is a spurious, modern construction, and it is extremely harmful. It is no more legitimate for reactionary ideology to claim spirituality as its exclusive possession than it is for it to claim love of country.

Instead of quixotically walking backwards into an imagined golden age of the past, these problems must be taken seriously as such, and a new and more sophisticated understanding of mythological thinking is necessary. Whatever form the new mythological taking assumes, it must allow for the validity of other forms in its essential character, or the project of globalization will fail. 

With regards to the second movement of mythological thinking, the self-reflective discovery of the provisional character of the understanding’s own sense of comprehensive totality, this is frequently lacking in unsophisticated advocates of unilateral rationalism or naive realism. All too often, scientific discourse is regarded as legitimate as such, merely by virtue by using its tropes, and by uncritically carrying over a reception of a popular interpretation of its findings.

But science is a set of tools, and adopting its mode of discourse does not guarantee legitimacy and rationality. We now have decades of research since Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolution, and we have learned something of the ideological, cognitive, social, analytical, racial, and financial factors that help determine how scientific research is conducted and disseminated. These are the practical limitations of its actuality, and no “pure science” is conducted in a cloud-cuckoo land where these constraints are not at play. 

It is worth noting that some of the branches of science that are most directly constrained by empirical results show the deepest agreement with mythological thought as I have characterized it. Particle physics, among the hardest of the hard sciences, has been mired in ontological chaos for over a century, lacking the barest capacity to express what their basic objects of study actually are. Among actual physicists, in my experience this often results in an ontological position of pragmatic agnosticism, or in extreme cases, a denial that science can and should describe the world at all. 

Quantum mechanics does not have the luxury of fudging its ontology with imprecise language to account for the problems described above. Its objects of study cannot withstand analysis, and that is why it has the least to say about what things actually are. The problem of emptiness, the lack of intrinsic existence of all phenomena, is not a metaphysical argument about the transcendent beyond, it is a practical recognition of the actual limitations of the understanding with respect to how it posits its own basic terms. For one fascinating discussion of relevant issues, see the recent Scientific American article Quantum Mechanics May be Even Spookier Than you Think, which explores an extension of John Archibald Wheeler’s “Delayed Choice” experiments.

These issues are well known to some of the greatest physicist of the last two hundred years. For example, Albert Einstein:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.

Erwin Schrödinger:

The reason why our sentient percipient, and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it. But of course, here we knocked against the arithmetical paradox; there appears to be a great multitude of these conscious egos, the world, however, is only one. This comes from the fashion in which the world-concept produces itself. The several domains of ‘private’ consciousnesses partly overlap. The region common to all where they all overlap is the construct of the ‘real world around us.’ With all that an uncomfortable feeling remains, prompting such questions as: is my world really the same as yours? […]

Such questions are ingenious, but in my opinion, very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from one source, which I call the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experiences the one world is concocted. The solution of this paradox of numbers would do away with all the questions of the aforesaid kind and reveal them, I dare say, as sham-questions.

The understanding, and any possible human discourse, cannot function without acceding to provisional assumptions about the structure and origin of the world. That is no less true for the scientist than for the Tlingit shaman. Mythological thinking surfaces an image of that structured cosmos, which is a condition for the understanding. Upon analysis and reflection, it imbues that image with the special transparency that comes from the recognition that its terms have validity merely from the conventional perspective of ordinary transactional usage, and lack ultimate or transcendental status.

The failure by those who posit mythological thinking as the negative image of rationality is a failure of dialectical reason, and like all such failures, the end result is that it becomes the very thing that it critiques. By rejecting mythological thinking, the hyper-rationalist unwittingly posits their own archaic, unreflected mythology. They take themselves as a rational hero, engaged in mythological combat with their own shadow, projected on the religious figure, who appears as an image of barbarism, darkness, and violence. This is not the culmination of reason, but its antithesis – a naive accession to terms that are drawn not from analysis, but from a set of prejudices and reified conclusions. Reason becomes its opposite.

The Truth, Ferdinand Hodler, 1902

The Sleeping Gypsy, Henri Rousseau

Sigmund Freud famously called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” as they often reveal our inner lives with a frankness and immediacy of which we are incapable during our normal waking experience. In his view, our sexual and aggressive instincts constantly pull us in directions that we can’t face or acknowledge, as they squarely contradict the dictates of our socially-trained moral intuitions. And so, some subset of our fears and desires are pushed off the stage of our daylight consciousness, to come popping out and night as we sleep. There’s a kind of law of conservation of psychic energies – they can be redirected or displaced, but never destroyed.

We collectively process and share unconscious images through myths, which have a dream-like character and, as Carl Jung elucidated, display recurrent patterns or symbols which are found the world over, which he called archetypes of the collective unconscious. This does not refer to Platonic forms or any kind of mystical ground of all consciousness, it is simply a way of talking about the fact that many unconscious symbols seem to be part of the shared human heritage.

This idea was taken over from the pioneering anthropologist Adolph Bastian, who discovered in his comparative analysis of many traditions what he called “elementary ideas,” or Elementargedanken. So the gods send a world-ending flood to terminate a bungled mankind not just in the Gilgamesh Epic and Flood Story of Genesis, but in the Mayan Popol Vuh as well. Trickster figures of remarkably similar character are found the world over – compare the Norse troublemaker Loki with the Tlingit and Haida Raven, or the Siberian Rabbit. And so on.

Dreams and myths speak in a common language which directly render aspects of experience in images suffused with the energies of instinct, connecting the world of consciousness to the biological facts of the body, and coordinating those two planes of our being. By definition, these symbols fascinate, disturb, and thrill. This is why Independence Day sold a lot of tickets, but Star Wars created a following that persists to this day. When the voice of Obi Wan Kenobi tells Luke to put aside his targeting computer and use the Force, he is saying something that audiences instinctively recognize. We may think that our tools and our intellects are piloting the vessels of our lives, but deeper instincts and energies are the real driver. That’s why this scene provides exultation, release, and delight – the manifest content of the film is a trivial space opera, but its message is profound.

What we need to fully appreciate is that myth and dream are not light entertainments, or a fanciful diversion from the rationally-ordered scientific and economical world in which we really live. This is an age of science, and the great discoveries made possible by the scientific method endanger our groundedness in our manifold human nature by prompting many people to over-identify with our rational centers, and to view the worlds of dream, feeling, and instinct as trivial asides. It is as though we would lop off the second term in our age-old definition of man as “rational animal.”

We do so at our peril, because we are animals, and we are moved by the unconscious. Deciding that the unconscious is of no value or interest does not make it go away – on the contrary. To ignore it is to leave it dangerously unintegrated, and unchecked.

Joseph Campbell expressed the matter succinctly in his Masks of God series:

Clearly mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible forms of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world is now too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.

Solar and Lunar Energies in Conflict

Just as individuals have stages of greater or lesser degrees of mental integration, coherence, and health, so, too, do societies. I was first alerted to the critical importance of this fact reading Jung in my early 20s. He was not a political man, and was reticent to comment on even the most serious social issues, but he nonetheless observed first-hand that the rise of the Nazi ideology was a direct illustration of the dangers posed by the unconscious. As the archetype of the eternal swastika rolling forever like a cosmic wheel swept like wildfire across German-speaking lands, great masses of people were galvanized by archetypes of the collective unconscious. In a short essay, he argued disturbingly and persuasively that the principle silent mover of the Nazi ideology was none other than Wotan or Odin, the repressed shadow-opposite of Germany’s Christian self-identity. Wotan is a truly awful war god who sets armies on the move in the Period of Migrations and Viking Age, and he demands human sacrifice.

Jung’s follower Erich Neumann took up the social analysis of the unconscious as thematic for his work. In his monumental study The Origins and History of Consciousness, he tracks out the development of mythology as the collective working-out of the conscious parameters of individual development. For example, when the possibility first emerged in history that the individual might carve out their own autonomous destiny in contradistinction to the role assigned to them by the tribe or society, we saw the emergence and rapid spread of myths showing hero figures overthrowing a primordial god or goddess that threatened to swallow and overwhelm the individual in its matrix, such as we find in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, in which the hero Marduk slays Tiamat, a quintessential expression of the “devouring mother” archetype.

In Neumann’s view, social change and social revolution require a concordant adaptation by the collective unconscious, which is comprised by the shared set of guiding symbols that organize and direct our instinctual patterns of belief and activity. These are generally articulated through myth and mythological symbol, and the study of myth – and of art, literature, poetry, and related fields – is therefore a royal road to the collective unconscious, which can alert us to the contours of this landscape, and the pitfalls and the promises of our historical situation.

The twentieth century was the great period of discovery of the unconscious by Europe, but what we worked so hard to learn, we have now largely forgotten. Our artists are regarded as entertainers, by and large, and our arts increasingly become entertainments. And the techno-Utopian character of our age regards social problems as best analyzed and best solved by scientists, as though technical skills provide a general tool kit for understanding and dealing with any problem in any domain. This much is clear from our New York Times best sellers.

Carl Jung warned that what remains unconscious returns as fate, and I daresay that history will remind us of what we have chosen to forget. This has been a dark year in world history, and still-darker clouds gather on the horizon. Our public discourse has, in the main, virtually no sensitivity to or appreciation of the facts of the unconscious, and social turmoil is exclusively articulated and processed as a matter of competing positions. The more this limited framework strangles the life out of the real human energies driving historical conflict, the more shrill, polarizing, and ineffectual public discussion will become.

To me it seems perfectly obvious that you cannot understand the ability of putatively-rational people to ignore the overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic climate change without considering the role of repression. Nor can you adequately explain why the Catholic church actively concealed the systematic sexual abuse of children for decades. Nor can you understand why the dark specter of Islamic terrorism elicits a horror that is fantastically disproportionate to the actual threat that it represents without understanding something of the Jungian archetype of the Shadow.

Dancing Maenad

Nor, for that matter, can you come to an elementary understanding of what Islam is, if you regard it exclusively as a historical set of positions and views, and utterly neglect it as an aesthetic, psychological, and spiritual force – and that understanding can only be won by going into it, and letting its forms and symbols speak to you.

As Joseph Campbell warned us, the world is too small for that kind of neglect. More than one billion Muslims are here on this Earth, sharing it with non-Muslims, and national boundaries are porous. The United States and Europe are in deadly peril of allowing the image of the Muslim as the shadowy other – an archetype that elicits our own repressed shadow-nature – to drive policies that are as inhuman as they are doomed to failure. And no amount of rational analysis and debate is going to solve that problem. We must enlarge our psychic horizons, we must have a broader understanding of culture and history, or we may not survive.

Whatever that image of the Other is for you, you must find your way to enter it, whether it’s the Qu’ran, Rumi, Attar, Saint Francis, Picasso, the Buddha or Einstein. Find your way in, and make it part of your own story.