Individually, I must ask myself each day; am I stuck or am I unfolding, growing, learning, developing, becoming all I can be?
Collectively, we must again ask ourselves each day; are we static and folded or are we dynamic, unfolding, progressing forward, reaching toward our full potential and deeper understanding of the universe, of the Earth, and of life on earth?
Individually and collectively, we each have an underlying, foundational narrative that defines and informs our lives. Is this narrative something that is fresh and new each day? Or is this narrative old and dry and cracking? Are we constantly defending it in our own minds and/or with others?
Are we putting new wine into old wineskins? If we are growing and learning, so must the foundational narratives that inform and contain our lives. Do we tend to gravitate toward sameness and comfortableness, certainty and security? Or do we push ourselves forward, deeper, higher, broader, expanding outward? Do we prefer being stagnant, petrified, putrefied? Or do we seek fresh input and feedback, the new and creative and innovative? Can our grand narrative hold and house our personal narrative that informs our lives and creates meaning for us?
A culture’s organizing myth is the cultural DNA, the building blocks of society.
DNA must sustain itself or go extinct. But at what point does sustainability become destructive? When what is carried on no longer gives meaning or gives life to a person or a society.
“The organizing myth of any culture functions in ways that may be either creative or destructive, healthful or pathological. By providing a world picture and a set of stories that explain why things are as they are, it creates consensus, sanctifies the social order, and gives the individual an authorized map of the path of life. A myth creates the plotline that organizes diverse experiences of a person or a community into a single story.
“But in the same measure the myth gives us security and identity, it also creates selective blindness, narrowness, and rigidity because it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow the Faith of our Fathers, to hold to the time-honored truth, to imitate the way of the heroes, to repeat the formulas and rituals in exactly the same way that they were done in the good old days. As long as no radical change is necessary for survival, the status quo remains sacred, the myth and ritual are unquestioned, and the patterns of life, like the seasons of the year, repeat themselves. But when crisis comes -- a natural catastrophe, the military defeat, the introduction of a new technology -- the mythic mind is at a loss to deal with novelty. As Marshall McLuhan said, it tries to “walk into the future looking through a rear view mirror.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiii)
“The entire legacy and burden of culture and family myth comes to rest on the individual. Each person is a repository of stories. To the degree that any of us reaches toward autonomy, we must begin a process of sorting through the trash and treasures you have been given, keeping some and rejecting others. We gain the full dignity and power of our persons only when we create a narrative account of our lives, dramatize our existence, and forge a coherent personal myth that combines elements of our cultural myth and family myth with unique stories that come from our experience. As my friend David Steere once pointed out to me, the common root of ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’ tells us a great deal about power. Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions. We gain personal authority and power in the measure that we question the myth that is upheld by ‘the authorities’ and discover and create a personal myth that illuminates and informs us.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiv)
Our 2000 year old foundational narrative
There is a lot of good in western culture that comes from the Christian narrative. But our culture seems to have gotten caught up in a 2000+ year old narrative that insists on being right and making others wrong, excluding (hatred) instead of including (unconditional love). Judging people with the threat of heaven or hell. The Christian narrative makes us think that this life is low priority because what really matters is death, that which is after death, eternal bliss. Therefore we live for death!?!?! But what about life? Each moment that we miss or deny is gone forever. Even the teacher that this narrative is founded on says that he came that we might have life and life more abundantly. His message is to bring alive the dead religions of the day, not to start a new religion. Based on this narrative, 2000 years later, our words and actions are quite meaningless. We even have modified the message over time with theology that says it is not our works (our fruit), how we live our lives, that matters, it is only our faith that matters and gets us out of this mess into some sort of heavenly choir singing praises forever, leaving many Christians free to adopt a lifestyle and a political stance and praxis that treats people very badly.Collectively, we must again ask ourselves each day; are we static and folded or are we dynamic, unfolding, progressing forward, reaching toward our full potential and deeper understanding of the universe, of the Earth, and of life on earth?
Individually and collectively, we each have an underlying, foundational narrative that defines and informs our lives. Is this narrative something that is fresh and new each day? Or is this narrative old and dry and cracking? Are we constantly defending it in our own minds and/or with others?
A culture’s organizing myth is the cultural DNA, the building blocks of society.
DNA must sustain itself or go extinct. But at what point does sustainability become destructive? When what is carried on no longer gives meaning or gives life to a person or a society.
“The organizing myth of any culture functions in ways that may be either creative or destructive, healthful or pathological. By providing a world picture and a set of stories that explain why things are as they are, it creates consensus, sanctifies the social order, and gives the individual an authorized map of the path of life. A myth creates the plotline that organizes diverse experiences of a person or a community into a single story.
“But in the same measure the myth gives us security and identity, it also creates selective blindness, narrowness, and rigidity because it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow the Faith of our Fathers, to hold to the time-honored truth, to imitate the way of the heroes, to repeat the formulas and rituals in exactly the same way that they were done in the good old days. As long as no radical change is necessary for survival, the status quo remains sacred, the myth and ritual are unquestioned, and the patterns of life, like the seasons of the year, repeat themselves. But when crisis comes -- a natural catastrophe, the military defeat, the introduction of a new technology -- the mythic mind is at a loss to deal with novelty. As Marshall McLuhan said, it tries to “walk into the future looking through a rear view mirror.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiii)
“The entire legacy and burden of culture and family myth comes to rest on the individual. Each person is a repository of stories. To the degree that any of us reaches toward autonomy, we must begin a process of sorting through the trash and treasures you have been given, keeping some and rejecting others. We gain the full dignity and power of our persons only when we create a narrative account of our lives, dramatize our existence, and forge a coherent personal myth that combines elements of our cultural myth and family myth with unique stories that come from our experience. As my friend David Steere once pointed out to me, the common root of ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’ tells us a great deal about power. Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions. We gain personal authority and power in the measure that we question the myth that is upheld by ‘the authorities’ and discover and create a personal myth that illuminates and informs us.” (Sam Keen, Your Mythic Journey, p. xiv)
Our 2000 year old foundational narrative
It is no wonder that people are fleeing from churches. There is no relevance.
It is no wonder there is no moral backbone left in a county that says it is Christian.
It is no wonder that abortion is the flagship issue (a cop-out issue used for political gain). (Please see Episode 17: What Does the Bible Say About Abortion? http://po.st/mVDWJq) What easier issue is there? It is an issue that is superficial and risk free, demanding nothing of our lives; all words, no action. We become allies to those that we never see or meet claiming that we are fighting alongside those that are merely ghosts to us. We don’t have to live out good lives, we just need to say a few right words and maybe put down a bit of money and we have done our part for the unborn. It doesn’t matter how we treat others, especially the poor and downtrodden, the orphans and widows, the “least of these.” We can keep our hands clean from the dirty work of compassion; completely ignoring the founder of Christianity and his teaching. What happened to pro-life in the sense of being pro-all-of-life? The most insidious truth about abortion is that the only reason it became a Christian issue to fight for was because they were being played by powerful political operatives that used it as a handle to manipulate and control evangelicals (please see the above link for more on this).
How do we breathe life back into them dry bones?
Pouring new life into old wineskins? Old wineskins are static. New life is dynamic… and the old wineskins burst wide open.
Campbell: “There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated cliches. This has to be done with all traditions.”
Moyers: But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is seduced to a code, to a creed.”
Campbell: “That is the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.”
(Joseph Campbell as interviewed by Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth)
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Industrialization of the educational system is an example of objectifying and standardizing processes that create efficiency and effectiveness for objects and widgets, products and services. The education system was designed to standardize people, make us good doobies that do what we are told. As long as we are good employees, staying in line, doing what we are told, then we have value. This stifles creativity and innovation and leadership. https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/education/
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Consumer Society commoditized the things we need but also the things that used to be done “in community” and “by community”; healthcare, education, companionship, meals, etc.
Power and Oppression underlies the very foundations of this country beginning with slavery and continuing with voting rights, taking lands from First People, and waging war for our own selfish interests as a country. See, https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/oppression-power-and-privilege/
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
“Living as if the world out there were somehow separate from us opens the door to the belief system of judgement and the chemical expressions of that judgment in our bodies. Thus we tend to see our world in terms of good germs and bad germs, and use words such as toxins and waste to describe the by-products of the very functions that give us life. It is in such a world that our bodies may become a combat zone for forces at odds with one another, creating the biological battlegrounds that play out.” (Gregg Braden)
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/633191
But what if evolution is not the whole story behind the human? What if there is more? Even though it does show how much of life evolved, there is also so much we do not understand. Through the ideas and teachings of Darwin, we were taught that nature is built on conflict, competition, struggle, and scarcity. But does that really define us as human beings? Is that really the whole story? Or are we still leaning?
We are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time -- it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.” (Thomas Berry)
“We are trying to solve our problems based on theories of science that are obsolete. 150 years ago through the ideas in the teachings of Charles Darwin, I’m just using this as an example of how this plays out in the real world. We were taught that nature is based upon competition, conflict, struggle, and scarcity in the late 1800s. And that’s important because our society, our economic model, the corporate model they were all developed during that time. They are all based on competition, conflict, separation, scarcity because they are no longer true. The best science in the modern world is now telling us that nature is based upon cooperation not competition. Nature is based upon what is called “mutual aid” in biological circles. It doesn’t mean that competition does not exist. We all see it. But here’s the thing, the more violence, the more competition, the more conflict we see in any population, whether it is humans or species in Yellowstone National Park; the more of that we see, it tells us how far we have strayed from the truth and nature of our existence. And if we want to successfully solve our problems, this is an invitation to go back and find harmony with the natural laws rather than trying to impose these false assumptions about what we think about ourselves in the actual world. So that's one example. Every problem in the world today is playing out in the global stage; in the Middle East, North Africa, United States, in our families, with our loved ones or husbands, our wives, our partners or spouses, our kids. It is all based upon how we answer the question “who am I?” and for 150 years we have been taught we are powerless, separate from one another, separate from the world, and that thinking leads to fear and the more we fear, the more we lash out. And you're seeing this play out on the global stage as well as in our society; with the hate crimes, the hate of religions that are different, the hate of the racial diversity and sexual diversity. So this is an opportunity. As we learn to redefine the truth of ‘who we are’ the less we fear. The less we fear, the less we fear the change of a new world, the less we fear one another; and till we can get to that point, anything we do to try to solve the problems in our lives is nothing more than a bandaid.” (Gregg Braden talking about his book, Humanity by Design) https://youtu.be/OZz_ssh7f4w
Our present system "perpetuates itself not only by its self perpetuating structures but also by the countless number of people that have been conditioned into blindly and thoughtlessly upholding these structures therefore becoming self appointed guardians of the status quo. Sheep which no longer need a sheep dog to control them for they control each other by ostracizing those who step out of the norm. This tendency to resist change and uphold existing institutions for the sake of identity, comfort, power, and profit is completely unsustainable and will only produce further imbalance, fragmentation, distortion, and invariably destruction. It's time to change." (Peter Joseph, Zeitgeist: Addendum)
Pouring new life into old wineskins? Old wineskins are static. New life is dynamic… and the old wineskins burst wide open.
Campbell: “There is a kind of secondary hero to revitalize the tradition. This hero reinterprets the tradition and makes it valid as a living experience today instead of a lot of outdated cliches. This has to be done with all traditions.”
Moyers: But that’s the transformation of religion to theology. Religion begins with the sense of wonder and awe and the attempt to tell stories that will connect us to God. Then it becomes a set of theological works in which everything is seduced to a code, to a creed.”
Campbell: “That is the reduction of mythology to theology. Mythology is very fluid. Most of the myths are self-contradictory. You may even find four or five myths in a given culture, all giving different versions of the same mystery. Then theology comes along and says it has got to be just this way. Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose. God is literally up there, and this is literally what he thinks, and this is the way you’ve got to behave to get into proper relationship with that god up there.”
(Joseph Campbell as interviewed by Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth)
Our 250 year old foundational narrative
Capitalism is a great economic strategy motivated by greed and competition,maximizing the profits of a few. Will capitalism ever uphold issues that require the public trust? A country’s value is determined by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens, not its most powerful.Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Industrialization of the educational system is an example of objectifying and standardizing processes that create efficiency and effectiveness for objects and widgets, products and services. The education system was designed to standardize people, make us good doobies that do what we are told. As long as we are good employees, staying in line, doing what we are told, then we have value. This stifles creativity and innovation and leadership. https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/education/
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Consumer Society commoditized the things we need but also the things that used to be done “in community” and “by community”; healthcare, education, companionship, meals, etc.
Consume… Consume… Consume… for tomorrow we die???
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Rugged individualism is how this country was established. Pioneers explored and settled what and where they wanted no matter who they displaced; whether it was Native Americans or the buffalo. But “no man is an island.” And loneliness is literally killing us.
Malignancy: https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/malignancy/ (a personal view from the belly of the beast written April 23, 2009). A story of the Religious Industrial Complex.
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Malignancy: https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2009/04/23/malignancy/ (a personal view from the belly of the beast written April 23, 2009). A story of the Religious Industrial Complex.
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
Power and Oppression underlies the very foundations of this country beginning with slavery and continuing with voting rights, taking lands from First People, and waging war for our own selfish interests as a country. See, https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/oppression-power-and-privilege/
Is this sustainable; empowering us to create a world that works for ALL???
All of the above-mentioned things continue to play out in so many ways:
Military Industrial Complex
Food industrial complex
Fashion industrial complex
Health Care industrial complex
Education industrial complex
Retail industrial complex
Political industrial complex
Religious industrial complex
See “On Empire”
Our 150 year old foundational narrative
The other foundational narrative we live under is more like 150 years old. It states that every form of life is in competition with every other form of life. It is only the fittest that survive. It says that the whole world operates on competition, for life and for limited resources. It tells us that we are all separate and selfish with our own survival the main priority. And yet, newer science is showing us day by day that we are all connected and that the survival of one is as important as the survival of all. Instead of defeating the “other” we are seeing that there is a deep underlying connection between us all. Instead of scarcity, we live in a world of abundance. Instead of competing for a meaningless life, we create the world in which we live. And we create meaning in our lives individually and collectively. Evolution has a lot of truth but it fell far short of the full picture and left us with emptiness instead the fullness and wonder of the universe.“Living as if the world out there were somehow separate from us opens the door to the belief system of judgement and the chemical expressions of that judgment in our bodies. Thus we tend to see our world in terms of good germs and bad germs, and use words such as toxins and waste to describe the by-products of the very functions that give us life. It is in such a world that our bodies may become a combat zone for forces at odds with one another, creating the biological battlegrounds that play out.” (Gregg Braden)
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/633191
But what if evolution is not the whole story behind the human? What if there is more? Even though it does show how much of life evolved, there is also so much we do not understand. Through the ideas and teachings of Darwin, we were taught that nature is built on conflict, competition, struggle, and scarcity. But does that really define us as human beings? Is that really the whole story? Or are we still leaning?
We are in trouble now “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time -- it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new.” (Thomas Berry)
“We are trying to solve our problems based on theories of science that are obsolete. 150 years ago through the ideas in the teachings of Charles Darwin, I’m just using this as an example of how this plays out in the real world. We were taught that nature is based upon competition, conflict, struggle, and scarcity in the late 1800s. And that’s important because our society, our economic model, the corporate model they were all developed during that time. They are all based on competition, conflict, separation, scarcity because they are no longer true. The best science in the modern world is now telling us that nature is based upon cooperation not competition. Nature is based upon what is called “mutual aid” in biological circles. It doesn’t mean that competition does not exist. We all see it. But here’s the thing, the more violence, the more competition, the more conflict we see in any population, whether it is humans or species in Yellowstone National Park; the more of that we see, it tells us how far we have strayed from the truth and nature of our existence. And if we want to successfully solve our problems, this is an invitation to go back and find harmony with the natural laws rather than trying to impose these false assumptions about what we think about ourselves in the actual world. So that's one example. Every problem in the world today is playing out in the global stage; in the Middle East, North Africa, United States, in our families, with our loved ones or husbands, our wives, our partners or spouses, our kids. It is all based upon how we answer the question “who am I?” and for 150 years we have been taught we are powerless, separate from one another, separate from the world, and that thinking leads to fear and the more we fear, the more we lash out. And you're seeing this play out on the global stage as well as in our society; with the hate crimes, the hate of religions that are different, the hate of the racial diversity and sexual diversity. So this is an opportunity. As we learn to redefine the truth of ‘who we are’ the less we fear. The less we fear, the less we fear the change of a new world, the less we fear one another; and till we can get to that point, anything we do to try to solve the problems in our lives is nothing more than a bandaid.” (Gregg Braden talking about his book, Humanity by Design) https://youtu.be/OZz_ssh7f4w
"Self appointed guardians of the status quo"
Our present system "perpetuates itself not only by its self perpetuating structures but also by the countless number of people that have been conditioned into blindly and thoughtlessly upholding these structures therefore becoming self appointed guardians of the status quo. Sheep which no longer need a sheep dog to control them for they control each other by ostracizing those who step out of the norm. This tendency to resist change and uphold existing institutions for the sake of identity, comfort, power, and profit is completely unsustainable and will only produce further imbalance, fragmentation, distortion, and invariably destruction. It's time to change." (Peter Joseph, Zeitgeist: Addendum)
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