I wanted to stay warm and cozy in my cocoon. I wanted to live in my box with everything so clearly defined and labelled; my box of comfort, security, and certainty with all of the answers I would ever need. Evangelical Christianity was my answer! I've been told that since I was a child. This was my story. This was my song. I did not ask for this unraveling, upending, uprooting, undoing! Rather it came to me like being broadsided by a semi, a train wreck, a
The Stories I Tell Myself
These micro and macro Narratives are Powerful and yet very Subtle like automatic downloads that install themselves and become virally integrated deep in our psyche.
They unavoidably alter our operating system and
due to their undetectability they can easily
become permanently embedded imperceptibly.
This undetectability is sustained through invisibility and familiarity.
These downloaded stories even come with
automatic updates that make them stronger and more resilient every time they are repeated.
The inner work it takes to simply
see our own narratives (myths*)
must not only be done daily but for a lifetime.
Because these narratives are installed so early in life,
they are nearly impossible to change without
powerful intention, years of hard work, and a very good reason.
This, I know, from experience.
The Stories we tell ourselves
form our identity and purpose.
The Stories we tell ourselves
form our values and beliefs.
The Stories we tell ourselves
become rooted deep in our psyche.
The Stories we tell ourselves
form the lens through which
we see everything.
Nothing can be seen that is seen
without first being distorted and colored,
exaggerated or diminished,
twisted and spun,
by this lens.
The Stories we tell ourselves are very personal.
Once we adopt a Story,
it becomes a part of who we are.
When someone denies or questions our Stories,
It feels like we are being attacked personally,
and we defend ourselves fiercely.
Because those Stories define us,
the attack feels like it is
a speer being thrust through the heart.
With the stories we tell ourselves,
we are Creating a World and Life View.
From that which We are Given
we create what works to survive.
But what happens when it no longer makes sense
and ceases to work or create meaning or feel real?
What if the framework through which we perceive the world crashes and we end up with the "blue screen of death"?
Once upon a time, I was happily and solidly settled into my world and life view. I could proudly proclaim that I built my house on a rock and not on sand so that I could endure the inevitable storms of life. As an Evangelical Christian for 50 years, I would look out from within and see a perfectly sensible world which came to be from a Creator God that wanted companionship and love and worship. So out of god's loneliness and discontent, first he fashioned, out of the chaos, the earth with the sea and the land. Then would come the plants and creatures of the sea, then plants and animals of the dry land. Last of all, he created man to rule over and care for the earth. Then, low and behold, the man became needy and lonely, just like God, and from man’s rib God created a helpmate, a woman to be his companion and helper to care for the earth. Then the man-god would say, "It is good."
As far as the story goes, it seems that this entire universe was created to compliment the story of God with mankind sitting at the center of it all as he fawns over them like prized possessions, a collection of artisan chess pieces. It reminds me of the Aristotelian system with the spherical Earth at the center of the universe. Seems like a waste of space if it is all about us. (Did you know that there are 10,000 stars for each grain of sand on earth?) Also, “me in the middle” or “all about me” is a common human thing that we usually grow out of as we grow up, just like we did when we thought our world was the center. But that’s another story.
Not only was man prone to being lonely even when he had God as his companion, the best companion possible, he was also prone to wander, make his own way, and make his own decisions. Knowing full well that humans had this strong propensity to rebel, God tempted Adam and Eve with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, again knowing full well that they would fail, for this is an inevitable part of the story; also knowing full well God would lose his fellowship with mankind which is supposedly the reason for creation. After all of that work creating a beautiful world, it seems that things quickly became really intentionally self defeating. All of that could have been thought out and planned a whole lot better with god being omniscient and could have been corrected or avoided with god being omnipotent. We are still crying out, “the game is rigged!” So of course they ate the forbidden fruit, of course it destroyed their relationship with God, of course it caused them to feel naked and unclothed, and of course it caused God to turn his back on them (like when Jesus was forsaken on the cross, “my God, my God, wherefore hast thou forsaken me?”) and no longer walk and talk with them in the garden. In fact, God kicked them out of the garden, this beautiful place that God made to be very special for mankind on earth, making them toil and till the ground for food, hoping someday to return to the Garden of Eden. Again, what a waste of space and beauty and love due to vindictiveness. (Why couldn't it have been a teachable moment to make mankind more wise, especially since the tree they ate from is the tree of knowledge! What is wrong with gaining the knowledge of right and wrong, good and bad???) I wonder how he kept them out. Being rebellious like they are, why didn’t they return in defiance of the rules that they already broke. And why did God create them to be rebellious. Or if he created them to have a weakness for rebellion, then why did he tempt them and why were the stakes so high? It seems there was probably a much better way to give free will to mankind which an omniscient God could have thought up. He had plenty of time, an eternity, to plan and get innovative and more creative. I wonder and wonder about the flawed design at the core of our stories.
I've realized that the probable reason that we have a sin story in which we call ourselves born in sin and totally depraved ("such a worm as I") is so that we would need a savior. If we believed that there is a basic goodness that is sacred at the core of every person, then we live a good and moral life unhindered by the self fulfilling prophecy of total depravity, while living life to our greatest potential. Even as a kid, I knew my heart was good and that I always tried to do good. I've always been able to trust the intentions of my heart. Why would I allow some story to change who I know that I am?
So in summary, the primary story is quite a whopper that I've been rooting out for 10 years. The three gods (father, son, spirit) became needy and lonely among themselves even though they were each others' perfect companions, and decided that what they had wasn't good enough. So they created a very flawed creature that they knew (due to omniscience) would "fail" and "fall" and become totally depraved, losing so quickly the "fellowship" between men and the gods because even though the gods proclaimed creation to be good by saying, "It is good" and then taking a well deserved break on the Sabbath, their first stab at creation lacked proper foresight and strategic planning and they were left with nothing but depravity. The gods realized that this is not meeting their need for fellowship and so at one point, because it had gotten so bad, the gods wiped out all of creation with a flood and started over, not realizing that "total depravity" would be left fully untouched by the flood; yet another design flaw. So anyway, they started over only to end up in the same place they were before the flood. So then there was this interesting "fix" where the gods (father, son, and spirit) decided to sacrifice one of them (the son) in order to somehow make mankind good again; again forgetting that the cross and death of a god left mankind's total depravity completely untouched and even though true gods can't die. And look at the mess the gods have left us with now! Then there was one last attempt to "fix" the world. The gods sent Donald Trump, the narcissistic man-boy bully to fix America and hence fix the world by osmosis or brainwashing Evangelical Christians and filling them up with all kinds of conspiracy theories. This brings us current in our story of the gods, as we wonder what's next. Nuclear annihilation? But will that affect total depravity??? Oops. Then there is heaven and hell. Maybe these solutions will finally fix this mess. Or will those in hell and heaven still be totally depraved and in constant rebellion???
But anyway, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I held onto my world and life view because it was a rosy lens from which to see the world and live my life. Who DOESN'T want rosy? Who DOESN'T want happy? And back then, for 50 years, I had no reason to question it or look at it from the outside. I had no idea or intention of letting that go. All of my questions had answers. Those stories were fed to me. All of my fears were comforted. Those stories were plentiful. And death could have no victory because we are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. And besides, God sent his only begotten son to earth to die 2000 years ago, for me. I'm still not sure how changing a culture from animal sacrifice (which cannot affect total depravity or sin) to a culture and religion of human sacrifice fixed anything. Like I said, there were stories galore. And stories are only as believable as our worldview allows them to be. Thinking back, it is incredible how strong the skeptic filter was for me, meaning the filter that blocked out my questioning. All the things I could have questioned, I never did. I didn’t even see them, like blinders on a race horse. Now I call it being very gullible and naive. Sort of reminds me of cult-like behavior like we've seen in religious sects for centuries and like we are seeing in politics today, a personality cult. Believe even if it makes no sense and has no basis in reality. But it was more subtle than that since it was in the air that we breathe; my family, my peer group, my friends, and my church social group. This virus of the mind seems to me to start with the zip code and then sustain itself through the family unit that all thinks the same, using and abusing our most trusted relationships.
Did I ask for this uprooting?
Was I hoping for this unraveling?
Did I wish for this hurricane?
Did I pray for this earthquake?
NO! NEVER! Why would I?
I’d be crazy to turn my back on
family, friends, social groups,
and my settled life.
Who would do that???
I could not turn back to the old, for it had disintegrated.
I could not rebuild my box, for there was nothing left.
I could not go back, for the way back was no more,
leaving me with nothing but the way forward that I knew not.
Battered and bruised, torn and tattered.
I knew I had to just live the next moment.
I knew then that I had to just take the next step.
And if that didn't work, just take the next breath,
and just breathe.
No idea how to do this thing called life.
No idea what to do next.
No idea where to go.
Having let go, there was nothing to know,
nothing to do, nobody to be, nowhere to go.
Except to climb little by little out of the hole
of darkness where I found myself.
Nothing left to hang on to.
Nothing left but letting go.
Of this black hole, this dark night of the soul
Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968) has this to say:
“If nothing that can be seen
can either be God or represent Him to us as He is,
then to find God we must pass beyond everything
that can be seen and enter into darkness.
Since nothing that can be heard is God,
to find Him we must enter into silence.”
(Seeds of Contemplation, p. 131)
For three years, I was in darkness and silence internally and often externally.
Before, it was this nice world and life view of Evangelical Christianity for 50 years, so full of comfort, security, certainty, right, wrong, and answers; answers everywhere. Looking out at life through that lens was wonderful. I was so fortunate, so privileged to be raised in a loving family that lived what they believed and treated us kids with the patience and compassion of their savior Jesus. It was that foundation of love that kept me alive through both divorces and this dark night of the soul. Why would I ever give that up? I would not. I could not.
I would be a fool to turn away!
What's a fool to do?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.”
Daniel C. Dennett
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And yet, I began to see that none of these things
I wanted to go back to ever existed.
They were stories I had been telling myself.
They were stories that I had been told all of my life.
But they were nothing but stories in my head.
As my 26 year old son said when he was 13,
referring to going to church,
"Dad, we hear the same old stories
and nothing ever changes"
... implying, what's the point?
That rocked my world.
All of this is not only about me
but also about my children (11 and 13 years old)
that I was raising alone during this time of turmoil.
There are numerous other narratives that drive us,
downloaded from our culture.
The American Dream is a story
that defined my life until it didn't;
God, family, marriage to a life partner
that becomes a best friend to grow old with,
country, career, retirement of ease,
homeownership paid for before retirement.
Life insurance
House insurance
Car insurance
Assurance insurance!
A life full of comfort, security, and certainty.
These stories were taught to me by the examples
that I saw before my eyes, day after day, year after year.
My parents and both grandparents grew old as best buddies.
They all had secure and plentiful retirements
with homes that were paid for after living a full life
of fulfilling their American Dream.
All of these were huge drivers in my life until one by one those possibilities and options disappeared
into silence, invisibility, and impossibility.
Gradually, letting go became a way of life
until my last bastion of stability,
my religion faded into nothingness.
This last one, losing my religion, was by far the hardest
and ended up being the one that I held on to the longest.
Even when I knew down deep it no longer worked for me,
I kept working and striving and longing
until it all turned to ashes, dust in the wind.
The loss of each and every story is a story in itself.
Some were so painful that I am amazed I survived
and am still alive to tell the story.
Others were almost expected
as life's storms continued to raise havok,
tear me down, and unravel the very fabric of my life.
As I said, letting go became a way of life.
Holding on became tentative, knowing that
there is no certainty, nothing solid to hang on to,
no guarantees, no promises; hopes and dreams.
These became counterproductive to
living a life of love, joy, and peace.
These were powerful stories
deeply rooted in my bones,
in my heart, in my soul.
As a child, my formative years
guided me to these stories.
My family kept showing us the stories
by both words and deeds.
My church furthered that education.
And then I graduated from a bible college
with a degree in religion, bible, and new testament greek.
I taught bible studies for college students.
I had a weekly bible study at my home.
Religion and the Bible had become my lifelong learning and love.
These were all stories I had learned from my grandma
who taught us in a high school bible study at her home at age 80ish.
Those stories were getting stronger and louder.
I knew what was right and I was quick
to judge those that I deemed wrong,
the mark of a good evangelical christian.
Then I went over a cliff…
My divorce was finalized after 14 years
which meant I lost my kids half-time,
my job downsized, foreclosure on my home of 13 years,
I lost my mental health to clinical depression,
and I turned 50 all in the spring of 2008.
“There comes a time when both body and soul
enter into such a vast darkness
that one loses light and consciousness
and knows nothing more of God’s intimacy.
At such a time, when the light in the lantern burns out
the beauty of the lantern can no longer be seen.
With longing and distress we are reminded of our nothingness.”
(Mechtild of Magdeburg)
https://ronirvine.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/ground-of-being/
“Years ago, someone told me that humility is central to the spiritual life. That made sense to me: I was proud to think of myself as humble! But this person did not tell me that the path to humility, for some of us at least, goes through humiliation, where we are brought low, rendered powerless, stripped of pretenses and defenses, and left feeling fraudulent, empty, and useless – a humiliation that allows us to regrow our lives from the ground up, from the humus of common ground.”
(Parker Palmer in “Let Your Life Speak” p. 70)
Nothing left but silence and darkness
What if I found that through silence and reflection, my perspective ascended above the old old story so that I could look from a bird’s eye view through alien eyes? I became the Observer. Looking down at something that seemed to be like a fantasy chess game where I was merely a pawn. What if the story became, from my perspective, a form of entertainment for the gods; both human gods and divine gods, good gods and evil gods? A way to control the masses, an opium of the people, creating the herd for all to follow? After all, this is the history of Christianity and the way it was established and has dominated a huge part of culture, the system, and many empires.
No longer having a world and life view that I was taught, a story that I could live by, I sought and sought for something to make sense again. Something real. Something that might listen. I miss that imaginary friend in the sky that I used to talk to. Sometimes I still do pray, knowing that the answer would be as it always has been, silence and invisibility… nothing, nobody, no one. Nothing more than my own echo in the vast dark emptiness; the voice of me talking to me.
We need our stories.
They give us our sanity and hope.
They give us direction and purpose.
They give us courage and security.
They give us strength for another day.
But they must progress and grow, evolve and mature.In silence for years, I listened and called out and listened and called out, hoping to hear that still small voice or see that glimmer of light that my imaginary stories told me about for 50 years.
Nothing. Nothingness. Emptiness. Groundlessness.
AND YET EXACTLY WHERE I NEEDED TO BE.
TO SEE, NOT WHAT I WANTED TO SEE, BUT WHAT I NEEDED TO SEE.
TO HEAR, NOT WHAT I WANTED TO HEAR, BUT WHAT I NEEDED TO HEAR.
I sure didn't know that then though.
No more illusions. No more magical thinking.
No more imaginary friend or eye in the sky.
No need to be saved. Just life as it is.
Oppenheimer said that any mistake that takes 10 years to correct is quite a thing.
It has been 15 years for me and I’m only at the point of beginning to understand what I thought I knew only to find that I know nothing.
“A great challenge of life: Knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know that you are wrong.” Neil deGrasse Tyson.
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing" - Socrates.
Through alien eyes, I saw myself when I was younger, so safe and secure, in a bubble of belief. I could see and hear nothing but what was within my little bubble or distortedly through the bubble to this mysterious outside world. I could see my mind always wandering and wondering, wanting to know if there is more, if life is bigger, if the mysteries of the universe were available to me; yet firmly denying my doubts and questions as a lack of faith. From within that bubble, I was sheltered and safe and secure. So I did not venture out. But when my life crashed, my stories disintegrated, and my bubble burst; I was struck by how big this world is and how much there is to learn and love, experience and explore. The freedom was inexplicable. And I was struck by how limiting dogma really is. Systematically getting rid of dogma has totally opened up my life; conversations, lifelong learning, the wonders of science (both quantum and cosmological), my understanding and compassion and unconditional love for all people. I feel like a new person no longer confined to my bubble but seeing all things from a fresh and vast and expansive perspective from a newly spacious heart. Then I knew that I am exactly where I’m meant to be. I’m able to see and hear and understand more than ever before. A new story is emerging for me. What it is, I don’t know. But isn’t that what it is all about?
Silence and Invisibility
Then, from these alien eyes, I began to see that the God I knew was real, never was heard or seen, but lived in my head. My concept of God was just that, an image, a concept that was very different from other people’s concepts because we all see things differently. Actually the concept of God wasn’t even from my head, it was someone else’s concept that I was told is true, a group composite of many people's gods made in their image. Wow! What if this God was nothing more than that, a concept that we all needed in order to survive, to keep going, to get up each day, to keep doing good, to have hope, to send our wishes to? What if I refused to believe this and kept on calling out and calling out, year after year, and yet nothing except silence and invisibility?
It hit like a ton of bricks when I realized that the only attributes of God that I’ve been able to verify are these: SILENCE AND INVISIBILITY.
And yet this was supposed to be a religion of relationship, companionship, love, and communication.
And yet, nothing but SILENCE AND INVISIBILITY?!?!
I’m expected to build my whole life on faith and trust and trustworthiness and love and hope. And yet, nothing but SILENCE AND INVISIBILITY?!?!
I felt like I had suddenly become deaf and blind.
This had become a total contradiction, an oxymoron.
What if the one thing I longed for was something familiar and stable that I could go back to, that I could hang on to, that I could continue to believe in?
What do you do when you want your story back but that old old story has crumbled and eroded and decayed into nothingness and silence and invisibility? Unbearable, unhearable, and unseeable nothingness.
What do you do when you cry out in such pain and all you want is something, anything besides unhearable and unseeable nothingness?
Eventually, after several years, you give up, let go, and move on. But then it is in the silence and the darkness that the burning questions come; along with the tears... those neverending searing tears.
“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 heros, 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 stories we tell ourselves are the lives we live.
Often we tell ourselves stories that are not even true,
But we keep telling ourselves these stories
because that is what we want to believe,
our hopeful self-fulfilling prophecies.
We don’t want truth or reality.
We want our illusion of comfort.
We want our illusion of security.
We want our illusion of certainty.
A perfect example of this is Trump.
He speaks of a world that he thinks is true,
that he wants to be true.
Even though those stories have no context in reality,
he keeps repeating them until the followers believe him.
Eventually, he believes it, too.
Or maybe he believed it first, and then the followers did.
Chicken or the egg? What comes first?
His world is completely made up of
what he wants his world to be.
He creates monsters so that he can come riding in,
the strongman, the savior of the poor pitiful masses;
to slay the monsters in our heads.
That is his superpower!
Anything that contradicts his story of the world
gets dubbed Fake News or the Enemy of the People
because his fragility will not, cannot, stand for any
contradiction, conflict, or criticism.
That is the tyrannical way of a cult; and fascism.
But that also is our superpower as humans.
We use stories or “fictions”* to organize and
control masses of people.
This is how humans have taken over and control the world.
It was not because of our great physical strength.
It was our cultures, societies, and organizations; which are all stories we tell ourselves, our grand organizational narratives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notice in Michelangelo’s painting what he is showing us, hidden in plain sight. God is being cradled within the shape of the human brain. Could it be that the divine gift does not come from a higher power, but from the human mind?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We just keep repeating
the stories in our heads
that we want to be true.
Sometimes it is religion or politics.
Sometimes it is cultural conditioning
like what is beauty, wisdom, success?
These stories enter our minds through
social media, news media, politicians,
preachers, teachers, priests, and mentors.
The more we hear the story,
the more it becomes part of us.
It becomes personal,
it begins to define our identity.
When our world view is attacked
we react strongly and defensively.
We have become our story,
we are our world view.
That story becomes the lens
through which we see the world.
So often, our values and beliefs,
religious and political,
are pre-determined by our zip code.
Isn’t that convenient?
When we are born, we do not get to choose
what to value, what to believe.
It is told to us at a young age.
It is drilled into us over and over
and we are expected to “get it right.”
Society and culture, along with peers and family
put tremendous pressure on us to “get it right.”
In schools, we are educated that we must be right.
And we do. We get it right whether we like it or not.
This happens on a collective level
And also on an individual level.
Self-fulfilling prophecies shape
our ideas about ourselves,
our self-esteem, our confidence,
and whether we think we are good or bad.
What we are told about ourselves
predetermines who we are and who we become.
And yet, how often do we sit back and deeply examine
our thoughts, values, beliefs, all formed and reinforced
by the continual stories we are told,
those stories we in turn keep telling ourselves?
We are automatons. We are sheep.
We are the herd. We are brainwashed.
AND WE ARE OK WITH THAT?!?!?!?!?
I'm not. My story is continuing to evolve but one thing I know for sure, which is the very first step; I am not stuck; thinking I know, thinking I have the answers, grasping an old old story that has become irrelevant and obsolete. I'm done with stagnancy. I've broken open the dam to allow the fresh and new to revive me as I see all things through new eyes.
If I already know . . . I can no longer learn.
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
(Soren Kierkegaard)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Below is a bit of context regarding what I mean by “fictions” and “myths”.*
What is a fiction*?
"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. Thought does not tolerate what it does not know or understand. We are storytelling, sense-making creatures. It is thought that we use in order to create an organizing drama.
Stories are foundational to culture and society.
Stories are foundational to countries and governments.
Stories are foundational to business and the free market.
Stories are foundational to religion and spirituality.
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.
Actually, money is one of the most prevalent fictions in this world.
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.
So what is a fiction*?
It is that which is not real.
We cannot touch it, pick it up,
step on it, or eat it.
Reality is tangible and concrete.
A fiction 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.
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 is a 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, bully, 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 and the good of all (macro-narrative)?
