My Mythic Guideposts

What is it that guides and drives my life?

What is the story at the core of my life?

What is my organizing narrative?

Do I know? If not, why?

My Mythic Learning Journey

How I got here.

"I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So... I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me." (Carl Jung)

"It’s hard being a human being. Not only is our external world often demanding, but inside we’re a confusing mix of conflicting emotions and competing desires.

"Complicated creatures, we are each a mix of light and dark. For those of us on a spiritual path, it is essential that we explore this inner territory, for what lies outside our awareness exerts a powerful control over it."
(Leia Marie Faith)

I’ve been contemplating this for the last 15 years. Who am I? Why do I do what I do? Why do I think what I think? Why do I want what I want? When will it be good enough? When will I reach what I’m reaching for? Or is this life just an endless striving after the wind with no purpose, no drives, no guides; a never ending floundering adrift in an endless sea? Wanting and waiting and groping and gripping and grasping… without even knowing that what we want and need is what we already have. We are creatures so restess and unsatisfied. If only . . .

Or is life driven by a balled up fury of intense emotions like fear and desire so that we can be forced by external motivation to do what we are told and go to some kind of heaven-ish place or do we follow our deepest impulses, rejecting all external authority and motivation and end up in some hell-ish place? What kind of god does that? Requires that? Forces us into that? Playing games with eternal consequences with billions of souls? I feel like I'm a pawn in an eternal chess game that never should have started. Throwing away its precious creations. Who does that? Sounds and feels like addiction to me. Addiction to attention, praise, worship, winning, manipulation, busy-ness. OR if it is not addiction, then it must be driven by boredom and a lack of imagination and creativity; a restless and unsatisfied god made in our image.

I’m not necessarily talking about creeds or dogma, doctrine or theology from ancient societies. Sometimes we fool ourselves into believing that right belief in right dogma and right gods is what drives us. But how can right belief hold the hope of all eternity when no one can agree on what is right belief and which of a thousand gods are right. Hell, we don't even know what we know. I’m sure this is why most religions have some sort of holy book, a way to control the narrative, keeping it stuck and unquestionable with ancient teachers and their narratives for that time. Control the narrative, control the people.

The holy book is often a stagnant pond of rehearsed, required, and regulated thinking that by its nature forbids any new inspiration or any fresh water from entering by labeling it heresy or apostasy; an idolized unchangeable venerable monument to conservativeness, fossilization, preservation, petrification, and hence putrification.

 But it is not head knowledge or intellectual thinking that shapes our lives, it is the knowledge or wisdom of the heart. I have no interest in being a second hand person, believing what I am told by other men or adopting a system of belief that is nothing more than another human construct. I can’t follow that. I need something that is alive and real, new and fresh. I hear it and feel it as Bruce Cockburn sings, “Oh love that fires the sun, keep me burning.” Clearly defined belief in books is not the answer but clearly refined passion is what “fires” my life. There is no other way. And when that passion is renewed over and over, forever progressing and expanding, it is like new wine being put into old wineskins. They will burst. In the same way, I must also redefine and realign my outer self with my inner self as I come alive, continually expanding within a context of new wineskins in an ever changing world... forever growing and progressing, evolving and expanding.

Looking at all of life and all of the universe, although sometimes it seems chaotic, as one digs deeper and understands more, there seems to be an order that emerges from chaos. Look at nature, volcanoes, earthquakes, or storms, for instance, when in the middle of it, it may seem chaotic and scary but through the eyes of a volcanologist, seismologist, or meteorologist there is a grand order guiding nature through cause and effect even though it is not immediately apparent or predictable from within. We must learn to see things through the eyes of nature, the natural way of all things. Human beings are not excluded from the natural way of all creation. Sometimes we forget. But with nature, all we need is stillness to remember what we already know. As far as I know, none of nature is sent to hell for falling short of the mark.

The inner creates the outer. The outer reflects the inner. I think this is very true in the lives of human beings also. It is the essence of integrity.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”(Carl Jung)

. 

What is beneath the surface as we take the plunge?

It is not just comfort, security, and certainty.
It is not just love, joy, peace.
It is not just happy, happy, happy.
Because it is more…
It is both light and dark.
It is both joy and sorrow.
It is both pleasure and pain.
It is both dancing and mourning.
It is both happiness and sadness.
The whole circle of life.

There is as much beauty in the darkness as in the light.

There is as much ugliness in the light as in the darkness. 

Beauty defines ugliness. Ugliness defines beauty.

Darkness defines light. Light defines darkness.

It all comes forth from the same place.

It is both easy and hard.
We need each opposite in order to live life fully and deeply and honestly.
It is in darkness that light shines brightest.

It is in paradox that we live the questions.
It is in mystery that we live in awe and wonder.

“To be conscious today is to be in a constant state of silent sorrow.”
“To be conscious today is to be in a constant state of confusion.”
“To be conscious today is to be in a constant state of rage.”
(Teju Cole)

And it is all good and necessary and essential; the natural way of things.

"We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To us [symbols] are part of nature, part of ourselves, even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us meaning."
—John Fire Lame Deer, (died 1976) Miniconjou Lakota, Storyteller, rebel, medicine man 

“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea,
never regains its original dimensions.”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

My Mythic Guideposts

What I do know... for now

As I drill down to see what it is that drives and guides me, I see some very clear patterns and symbols that emerge. These are analogies or myths, keeping in mind the true meaning of a myth*, that have meaning and deep impact on my life. These guideposts are truths that have shown themselves to be non-negotiable, an ancient wisdom that I must remember.

"We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not [one of] hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light." (Hildegard of Bingen 1098-1179)

Most of life is remembering what we already know.

1. Living with Open Hands

• Living with open hands is the original metaphor that rang true in my life over and over. Its contrast with clenched fists makes it ring even more true for me.
• Open hands are an expression of an open mind, open heart, and an open will.
• Part of the process of opening up is “letting go”. Maybe that’s the first step. We can't really open up until we let go of what we are clinging to.
• The purpose and result of living “open” is going beyond and beneath the surface, the barriers, the boundaries, exploring the inner landscape individually and culturally. With new eyes and renewed sight, we see in brand new ways.

Go Deeper: The Open Hand

2. Facing Our Gods of Comfort, Security, and Certainty

“... for what we are worshiping we are becoming."

"That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

god of comfort
god of security
god of certainty
(An All American Trinity)

We all worship and serve someone or something. Where do YOU focus YOUR time and effort?

The theologian, Francis Schaeffer, described the things that we tend to strive after as Personal Peace and Affluence. For some it is power and success. If we do not identify our gods, then they will determine our lives.

Go deeper: Comfort, Security, Certainty

3. Freedom from the Known

• If I already know, I can no longer learn. This is also one of the first stops on my revolutionary mythic journey. Once this started to take hold within, it kept going deeper and showing up around every turn.
• All learning begins only when we come to the place of saying, “I don’t know.”
• All wisdom begins only when we come to the place of “letting go” of what we think we know.
• All of those things I think I know are mostly things that I have downloaded
  
  from culture or that I have been told are true by those that think they know and think they are right and spend their lives making others wrong.
• Everything must be evaluated, re-evaluated, and questioned through discernment; sorting through the trash and treasures that have been accumulated and hoarded within; our subconscious addictions. 
• Most of what we think we know is simply something we were told either by another person claiming some sort of authority over us or by our culture, including politics and religion; i.e. conditioning.
• Conditioning is mostly invisible and unconscious. It sustains itself through its own invisibility and undetectibility. Therefore, our life's task must be to make the unconscious conscious so that it can no longer dictate our lives for us.
• If I already know... I can no longer learn.
• Also, most of life is remembering what I already know but have so quickly forgotten.

Go Deeper: How Do We Know That We Know What We Know, Opinionation

4. Honor and Respect All People Without Judgement

• Being right means that I make others wrong. This is no way to live. I have no right to tell others what to think, how to believe, or how to live their lives.
• I am responsible only for my own values and beliefs, and actions, reactions, and interactions. No one else’s.
• A person’s values and beliefs are deeply personal. Do not mess with them because the person’s identity and integrity are bound up in them. Honor and respect is the only human response to others.
• Every time we encounter another person, we both walk away changed; for the better or for the worse.
• Anytime we violate the identity and integrity of another person, this is a form of violence.

Go Deeper: What is This Drive to Convince? … to be right., My Sacred Path of the Amoeba

5. The Fire of Inner Discernment

•  What is our source of truth? 1) inner discernment? or 2) external, second hand opinions?
• Inner discernment is a critical part of this process. We are stuffed so full of “truth” that we have no way of sorting through it all, no way of knowing what is really true or false, right or wrong. Only I can do that within.
• If I do not do the hard work of inner discernment, then I am nothing more than a second-hand person.
• We've been gaslit; told what to think, what to believe, and what is real.
• But Truth is in our bones or at least always resonates in our bones.
• Within each of us is an inner teacher, inner Light.
• Most of life is remembering what we already know.
• We do this by spending time within our sacred, silent center.
• It is from silence that all things come forth; wisdom and understanding, the sacred and the true ... reality.
• Stripping away and sorting out the treasures from the trash.

Go Deeper: My Path of the Amoeba: digesting and discerning truth, Dogma, A Shift of Authority

6. Here and Now is All There Is

"Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the soil of freedom, spontaneity and love." (Thomas Merton 1915-1968)

• All we have is this present moment, and then it is gone into the past while at the same time the future slips into your present now and if we aren’t paying attention, it slips on by so quickly, never to be retrieved.
• We can do nothing about the past, it is gone.
• We can do nothing about the future, it is not here yet.
• All we have is the present moment.
• NOW is where life happens.
• NOW is the only thing we have control over.
• If we pay attention to our thoughts, we find that each thought is either caught up in the regrets of the past or the worries and fears of the future. Count them on each hand, left for past and right for future. Where are the thoughts that are focused on NOW, this present moment? There are none. It is only in silence and stillness, awareness and attention that we experience NOW.
• Proprioception of thought is the skill and practice of paying attention to our thoughts, observing them, and then letting them go so that we can go back to stillness HERE and NOW.

"We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive." (David Bohm)

Go Deeper: From Dissonance to Wholeness

7. The Sacred and the Profane

• As I delve further beneath the surface of life, the words sacred and profane broaden and deepen, giving more and more guidance for daily living.
• Every person is sacred as well as the connections we have between all people. Therefore we must mind our interactions with care because any time we do not honor and respect the other, this is a form of profanity. Anytime we violate the identity and integrity of another person, this is violence.
• I suggest this understanding.
• A Sacred Life = making the ordinary (in all of life’s present moments) sacred. (mindfulness, awareness, appreciation, wonder, awe)
• A Profane Life = making the sacred (in all of life’s present moments) ordinary. (thoughtlessness, apathy, mundane, familiar, taken for granted)

Go Deeper: The Sacred and the Profane

8. Creation of Meaning

“Am I living the life that wants to live in me???”
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it,
listen for what it intends to do with you.”
(Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak)

• Only by identifying and using our gifts with people and in places where they are accepted and appreciated can we create meaning in life. And then we find that for every gift there is a place or a person that needs that gift.
• More and more I can see the gifts that are born with and in me, lying innate within, often dormant, until I break out of my bubble of familiarity. It is through "silencing the familiar and welcoming the strange" that I begin to See. And through learning to See, I begin to perceive my gifts, so often through the eyes of the "other" like a mirror reflecting back to me who I am. As I use my gifts, a synchronicity often emerges bringing together people and events in very amazing ways. 
• Meaning in life comes from answering these three questions: 
• Who Am I? (my Identity)
• Why Am I here? (my Purpose)
• What Am I going to do about it? (my Mission)
• The truth for your life can only come from within.

Go Deeper: Truth, Wisdom, Meaning

9. Unconditional Love for all

• We need to create a world that works for all.
• Unconditional love requires that we love without condition; no strings attached, no judgment, no exclusion, no pre-conditions, no expectations, no hidden agendas.
• Learning to express, in word and deed, a language of peace, inclusion, tolerance, understanding, and acceptance versus a language of divisiveness, exclusion, and judgment.
• Honor and respect all people and their values and beliefs.
• Quakers have what they call testimonies that are visible manifestations of the Light within: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship.
• My religion is kindness and compassion, love and peace. This is what is at the true core of any religion rightly understood. Otherwise it is not worth its weight in dirt.
• Bottom line, at the ground level, I believe that we must create a world that works for ALL.

Go Deeper: From Dissonance to Wholeness, Being Human Together

10. Basic Goodness versus Total Depravity

Just like any self fulfilling prophecy, if we are constantly told that we are depraved or sinful or naturally evil, that is exactly how we will believe, become, and begin to act. In order for us to "need" a savior, we will need to feel like we need to be saved. It is sort of like marketing. People don't want things unless they think they need things. It is a self-deceptive story that first conjures up a nonexistent need, convinces us of our dire need, and then rides in on a horse to save the day. It is sort of like a superhero that rides in as a strong man or as a wonderful savior to save us. But instead of real danger or real evil, we get saved from something we didn't even know we needed to be saved from until we were convinced of how bad we are. We've seen this in politics also where a candidate bases their propaganda on the fears of the people, drums up the need to be saved by a strongman, dictator, or tyrant, then presents their great hero to meet a need they never had. Our core characteristic as humans is the same as with nature. It is good! There's a basic goodness that can be found within each person. If a person acts depraved or evil, it is only because he was nurtured to feel that way. As with any bad habits, we can learn to be better by embracing our basic goodness. By going back to our roots, our foundation, our source.

Another way I look at it is through the eyes and lives of children. We have all heard the idea that kids are not born as racists, we are taught to be racists. 
Not nature but nurture in a very bad way. 
Children have eyes of wonder and awe. 
Then they grow up to be skeptical and closed minded. 
Children naturally are caring and loving. 
Then they grow up to be hostile and hateful. 
Children are naturally accepting and inclusive of all people. 
Then they grow up to be judgemental and exclusive.

Children are born with basic goodness and therefore that is what they live out in the world. The poisonous and toxic self-fulfilling prophecy of total depravity transforms us into exactly what it predicts; creatures full of fighting, hostility, divisiveness, hatred, and fearfulness. Why??? To subvert the truth of basic goodness and force us to see that we need a savior. Not just a religious savior but also a political savior. We are not worthy to have inner authority and truth and light. We must get it from a religious authority, a political authority, a reality authority. Believe what you are told! Do what you are told! Because the powerful are afraid of We the People sharing their power and riches.

It is an awesome and powerful thing to see a child growing up seeing their own basic goodness being reflected back to them by the ones that love them most. Unconditional love is not just second nature, it is your true nature that exudes from deep within.

Our Micro-Narrative (Myth) Emerges from Our Story

"I believe that, far from being arrogant, prideful, or egotistic, the autobiographical path of seeking the sacred through the intimate experience of our own personal history is the essence of humility. All human beings have in common our uniqueness. Each of us can create an autobiography. It is our gift and task to explore our particular moment in history, the ground on which we dwell.

"When I pay attention to the particulars of my life, I discover that there is no ready-made blueprint for the specific type of life that would be fulfilling for me. I need to discover how I have been wounded and blessed by my family and my culture, how I have been twisted and strengthened by the experiences I have endured. I need to learn about the gifts I have to offer." (Sam Keen)

“Only by exploring and sharing my autobiography can I witness my discoveries of the sacred. My story is not normative. I am under no illusions that I am a saint, a hero, or a model for anyone. I do not write in order to say: Here is the map for you to follow. I only share some of the twists and turns of my journey in order to encourage you to take your own story seriously. Examine the sacred text of your own experience, reconstruct the events and relationships that went into the creation of your being, re-collect memories, and form them into a narrative that makes your life a once-told tale.” (Sam Keen)

“Even the longest, most detailed, and most expressive obituaries always omit the essence of a life: the history of a person’s heart. How many of us wish we had asked more questions of someone we loved, not about what happened and when but about the inner experience of being that person? About hopes and fulfillments, failures and regrets? About moments of despair and moments of meaning?” (Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy)

"Thought creates the world and then says, 'I didn't do it!'" (David Bohm)

Thought creates stories and myths to make sense of things that don't make sense to us.

We are storytelling, sense-making creatures. It is thought that we use to create an organizing drama.

Stories are foundational to culture and society.

Stories are foundational to countries and government.

Stories are foundational to business and the free market.

Stories are foundational to religion and spirituality.

And yet stories are always suspect...

There is reality.

Then there are fictions (stories).

We create and believe fictions to facilitate us working together for the common good.
We create and believe fictions to mitigate the fear of death.
We create and believe fictions to overcome our limitations as human beings.
We create and believe fictions to garnish power over others.
We create and believe fictions to dominate (preserve or destroy) the earth.
We create and believe fictions to give us our civil and human rights.
We create and believe fictions to find meaning and purpose.
We create and believe fictions to become, in our minds, eternal beings.

What is a fiction?
It is that which is not real.
It exists only in our heads.
It is a story we tell ourselves
About what we think is real.
Fiction is created by thought.
Thought creates our world.
… and we believe it.

If we wonder if something is fiction or real, simply ask, "can it suffer?"

A uniquely human phenomenon:
~ “How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

~ “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

~ “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”

~ “Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens have no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind*  

What Do I Mean by Myth

• “All religions have been true for their time. If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you’ve got it… Myths grab you somewhere down inside. As a boy, you go at it one way, as I did reading my Indian stories. Later on, myths tell you more, and more, and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learn them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in their revelation.” (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
• "I asked myself, 'What is the myth you are living?' and found that I did not know. So... I took it upon myself to get to know my myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks... I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me." (Carl Jung)
• A Myth is a story about a person, event, or our origins that has shown to have significant impact on the lives of people, both individually and collectively. The point of a myth is not whether it is true or not, but rather it is the significance of its impact. A myth is what drives us, whether individually (my micro-narrative) or collectively (our macro-narrative), whether conscious, preconscious, or unconscious, as Jung states above. 
• Whether we are aware of it or not, we all have some sort of myth(s) at our core telling us that we are invaluable or unvaluable, worthy or worthless, tough guy or weakling, hero, superhero, or antihero, gods or beggars, or that life has meaning or that it is meaningless. A self fulfilling prophecy is when someone like a child is told that he is worthless (or something) and they then begin to act worthless (or something). Those memes or seeds that were planted in the kid’s mind started to grow into his myth and shape who he is. This is how we as humans are built. The question is, what will we do about it? 
• Will we conform to the collective myth of society or will we forge forward to create and “know my myth… the task of (all) tasks” and then shape society's collective, macro-narrative into that which serves my micro-narrative?

More newly discovered and developing guideposts

Let BE... Let GO... Let COME...

Non-Judgment (Let BE)

Non-Attachment (Let GO)

Non-Resistance (Let COME)

“If good happens, good. If bad happens, good.” (Lao Tzu)

“Mastery of the world is achieved by letting things take their natural course. You cannot master the world by changing the natural way.” (Lao Tzu)

"Unfinished Poem: I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding." — John O'Donohue

“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura Naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and of joy.” (Thomas Merton)

A Perspective of Brokenheartedness

I'm discovering that in order to Live with Open Hands; mind, heart, will,

I must open my eyes and look differently at this world.

Of course, this is the essence of all of the above Guideposts.

As my understanding deepens,

I'm seeing this one as being second in priority

only to the first Guidepost (Living with Open Hands):

Seeing with new eyes meaning seeing the world more and more in two ways.
1. Seeing this world through the eyes of the brokenhearted.
2. Seeing this world through our own eyes of brokenheartedness.

Check out the blog post where I more fully develop the depth and the necessity of this latest Guidepost.