Precious Myths

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that “poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.” All the fiction of the Middle Ages explain themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the elements of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding the voices of the birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in the right direction.

The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the like, are alike the endeavor of the human spirit “to bend the show of things to the desires of the mind.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay History points our thoughts to a target that seems to vacillate within the corners of the mind. All the myths and stories of the past tell us what we already know, but have forgotten. Various aspects of consciousness merge in this temporal reality, and we perceive an individual reality we call our own. We develop a language of symbols as a substitute for direct cognition in this time-space world. Words and symbols created from our thoughts express our choices, probabilities, and experiences, and they act as protectors as well as communicators. Thoughts are non-physical energy that continues to move endlessly through the stream of consciousness.

Objects are symbols and visual perceptions. They give us a sense of realness in the outside world of learning. There are gaps in our awareness, and they are filled with data, but we ignore those messages in order to focus on our separated reality which is filled with metaphors. We try to find the self that is embedded in the myths of God in this world, but all we find are manmade laws that separate, control, and limit our beliefs about the nature of the self.

We take the existence of the psyche on the same faith as we take God, and continue to try and find the ‘self’ that is buried deep in the crevices of our sub-consciousness. But,consciousness is never ‘sub,’ and it is always conscious of itself. Consciousness is energy that manifests in order to expand.

That energy is filled with regions and patterns as well as qualities that interact with each other. All these qualities form myths from the distinct aspects of the limitless nature of consciousness. Our psyche forms our personal myths from other regions of our consciousness. The psyche and God are unknowns in our language because they do not conform to our temporal limits and restrictions. Our language imitates in a very limited way the realities that exist within our psyche myths.

We do sense the qualities and patterns that make us who we are, as well as the sheer unutterable uniqueness that makes us a part as well as the whole in the stream of consciousness. The psyche and the self are in a constant state of expansion, and are always becoming as our awareness of self manifests. We are always becoming more than we are, but we can’t keep up with this psychic and psychological activity in this physical life since our focus is experiencing our individual desires tangibly.

Our precious myths are painted with the paint of the psyche, and the nectar of consciousness, and we live them in our physical experiences in one way or another. We live the myth of God, and become an aspect of that belief. God runs through our psyche like water runs through this world; ever-changing and limitless in the quest to be. The energy of the psyche is always in motion and has no time limits.