This post is an appendix to The Next Great Revolution in Reality. Also, please read the first part of this post for more thoughts on the role myth has to play on forward-looking thinkers:
Since this post was originally written I have come to realise the true significance of the two main modes of thought expressed therein. The mythos of religious belief has, over the past few centuries, become prey to the savage logos of scientific rationalism.
I come to the words of Karen Armstrong, in her epic, pocket-sized title 'A Short History of Myth' to elaborate this point further:
Uniting these two modes of thought is akin to solving the mind/body problem, combining modernism with postmodernism and making the Newtonian and Quantum universes compatiable all at once! Yet, who can deny that there is something fundamental missing from a completely rational understanding of reality?
Of course the obvious answers that surface are usually:
or
But these responses kind of miss the point. The role of myth is as a mode of thinking. Mythos and Logos represent the two ways we interact with the universe. At the moment many of us seem to be missing half the picture, and even those who do aspire to having a spiritual aspect to their thought end up viewing their 'myth' with Logos tinted spectacles. For example, being convinced that Jesus actually rose to heaven misses the mythological component of his story - again, in the words of Karen Armstrong:
Jesus as mythos is a constant affirmation of the cycles of death and rebirth which occur in each one of us every day of our lives. Surely a much more significant truth than any historically understood figure who got crucified for saying nice things about people.
How can we reclaim our mythos?

I come to the words of Karen Armstrong, in her epic, pocket-sized title 'A Short History of Myth' to elaborate this point further:
Scientific logos and myth were becoming incompatible. Hitherto science had been conducted within a comprehensive mythology that explained its significance. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62), a deeply religious man, was filled with horror when he contemplated the 'eternal silence' of the infinite universe opened up by modern science.
When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as thought lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, now what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does no drive people to despair.
This type of alienation has also been part of the modern experience...
...Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this discipline, it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The Twentieth Century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false...
...Logos has in many ways transformed our lives for the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologised world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Our societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation, with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology. There is a moving and even heroic asceticism in the current rejection of myth. But purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live the unacceptable.
We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths... We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexercised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

Of course the obvious answers that surface are usually:
"A scientific view of the world is my spirituality."
or
"Buddhist meditation is compatiable with science."
But these responses kind of miss the point. The role of myth is as a mode of thinking. Mythos and Logos represent the two ways we interact with the universe. At the moment many of us seem to be missing half the picture, and even those who do aspire to having a spiritual aspect to their thought end up viewing their 'myth' with Logos tinted spectacles. For example, being convinced that Jesus actually rose to heaven misses the mythological component of his story - again, in the words of Karen Armstrong:
A myth was an event which in some sense had happened once, but which also happened all the time.
Jesus as mythos is a constant affirmation of the cycles of death and rebirth which occur in each one of us every day of our lives. Surely a much more significant truth than any historically understood figure who got crucified for saying nice things about people.
How can we reclaim our mythos?
Sun, Jan 13, 2008 Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history, mythos, logos
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history, mythos, logos
![]() |
RSS for this post |


Rourke


Rourke


Rourke


ParanoidMystic


Huffameg


Rourke