Speculative Understandings About Joy and Mythology

Our paradox is that joy, human joy, is based on a myth. A myth is a vision and feeling that we hold of a reality that is not yet real. Our joy, and almost all joy, is an expectation of something that is not now, but that we experience in the now which says something about the future, which has all the makings of a myth.

A myth is something that does not exist, and since the future does not yet exist, it is a myth. Joy is when we are most harmonious with our myths of what is yet to be. Our experience of the present in a joyful moment is that of complete harmony with what we want to be.

Mythology is a need that we have to be joyful. We are happiest in our mythology because our myths gives us harmony with our wants and desires. Creating myths helps us to be joyful and to move towards harmony with our world.

I created the mythological character of Wuh because I realized the joy that a harmonious character of a highly destructive history could bring.

In the ancient world, there was a tremendous clash of cultures as the Romans' vision and philosophy broke into the harmony of peoples innocent to the coming reality of Roman rule. It is often said that the Romans went about civilizing the communities they conquered. My understanding is very different.

The Roman story as told by the Romans is a form of escapism and a sort of mythology. Caesar was made into a hero by a destructive mythology. Similar mythologies are created by those building empires. They are frequently used when awful people justify their conquest and wide spread damage and once they have destroyed joyful communities. Examples are the Britons, the communities of Gaul, the peoples of Africa, the native communities of North and South America. The so-called conquering heros may not have made our world better, but like those that kill animals in the name of the hunt, perpetuate myths that excuse them from their evil acts and free them from conscience about the massive pain they have caused.

My anti-hero is Julius Caesar himself, a monster. We all know he was a monster because Shakespeare put him as the lead character in one of his most famous plays. The problem is that Shakespeare gave Julius a form that we have grown to love. While everyone around Caesar hated him, the modern reader has fallen in love with Caesar. Caesar is the hero of the modern age. Caesar, who destroyed so much that was harmonious and full of joy, is to be seen because of Shakespeare as a modern hero, and a good guy.

He was nothing of the sort. Caesar was a dispicable individual in debt, a lothsome man with a sickness. Caesar was a truly evil individual, who would stop at nothing for his joyful vision of civilized harmony. Our problem is that we identify Caesar with harmony and joy rather than what he actually represented and the massive pain and subjugation that he caused. The myth of the wicked Gaulite is in and the myth of the conquering hero continues. There were heros is Caesar's time, but he was not one of them. That is why I tell the story of Wuh, the mythological hero that gets the history closer to a joyful harmony.

Genocide would be a kind word for what Caesar did. He was guilty of creating the staging post for multiple genocides. More people died than in all our subsequent history books. Caesar ended the futures of billions of people who might have lived on earth, had he not existed. He is not to be worshipped. He was not a god. He was awful scum, a blight on human life, a sore of human history. The reality of Julius Caesar is that he was probably the darkest most wicked personality in history, yet has become the most loved. Yes! The modern myth of hero worship is complete. Caesar is the hero that kid's worship to their own disgrace. He, nevertheless, was a vile murdering bastard.

What Direction Are You Heading?

Its something that we often forget. Where am I heading? Do I even know where I am going? Why am I going anywhere? Heh! Stop! I want to get off. I don't want to move, do, think, experience, be, act, play, feel, sort, help, hinder, break, build, touch, see. I want to rest.

Within us, we have a heart that, hopefully, pumps and pumps. We get up in the morning, have a feed, do things, have another feed, do things, have another feed, do things and go back to bed. What does it all add up to? It seems that we are going in circles. Our lives are spent moving in endless circles. The one thing we know about where we are going is that we are going where we once went, at least, that is mostly where we are going.

Our world is a world of moving things. Everywhere, there is motion. Even nowhere there is motion even though we cannot sense it. Our sense are based on motion. We could not sense without motion, and so we move in order to sense. Were we to stop moving, we would not sense anything. Once we crash out of life, we stop moving, but everything about us moves. All our being as it once was continues to moving. The difference is that we are not guiding this movement.

When we go for a walk, we are guiding our walk. We have to will ourselves to take each step, and sometimes taking each step is a major accomplishment. When we stop moving, we pass away into a world in which we are no longer in charge of matter. We move to a non-material world. The world we go to is the world where light has gone to, and it is the world in which we have no control over ordinary matter. We may find that we have control over light, which I think is matter. Isn't it matter. Well, it doesn't matter since we have no control over whether we go there or not, or whether the world of light really exists. I am sure it does, but we will never see it in this lifetime.

Merging Reality with Unreality to Produce Novelty

It seems unfair that people have much shorter lives that trees, especially the yew tree. What does man do about that?

Man's reality is his mortality. Man's unreality is his having a life at all. Man's desire is to make life fair and even. Man's actions are to destroy that which reminds him of his own mortality.

Perhaps there is another possibility which is to see one's mortality as immortality since one was never supposed to exist at all, if one thought logically. The inability to think more fully about our existence happens because we have this emotion within us to destroy. Were we instead to think in terms of the preservation of all things, we would not be faced so continuously with the forces of destruction. We can capture the forces of creativity and build novelty into our life and approach to death.

What is missing from man's psyche is the desire to be creatively novel by combining reality with unreality. Novelty that brings the real and unreal together is nevertheless at the heart of our experience. We continuously have feelings and visions of things thrown at us that we cannot deny and yet which are in a very importance sense novel. Combining our feelings with our other sensations allows us to get beyond our traditional habits of thinking. Setting thoughts aside, we can have a doorway to understanding that is neither real nor spiritual, but novel, a combining of both aspects of our passage through time. Novelty can enthrall us and comfort us as well as enlighten us.

Cornerstones of a Healthy Attitude

Its easy to slide into a modern attitude. One of the difficulties is that we are often lazy when it comes to searching for the meaning of life. If we try to put ourselves into the world of our ancestors, we may find that we can escape the three modern attitudes of realism, spiritualism, and perplexism.

What one does is accept that there are many realities and unrealies, that the physical and non-physical worlds really do exist, and that it is also possible to enjoy both without being confused or perplexed. We have been placed into a world that has many facits and attributes. The world is to be enjoyed for what it is, a place that is being revealled to us and one that we can reveal for ourselves.

Our world is a universe of opportunities for self enlightenment about many aspects of an interesting place to be and in which we can continuously grow and develop in wisdom and in appreciation of meaning. Our world is communicating to us and we need to have the insight to accept that we are part of an tremendous exploration of nuances, flavours, motions, feelings, trepedations, understandings, entrallments, excitements, and tragedies. We can experience all the flavours without feeling guilty about how we feel. This alone, however, does not guarantee our morality or whether we live ethically. We can, nevertheless, use the experience of older attitudes to gain an understanding of what it means to be human on a planet circling the sun, in a solar system that is part of the milky way, which is part of a galaxy amidst billions of galaxies that form part of a universe that is part of a world that we will wonder and marvel at.

Modern Myths

In the modern world, we have an attitude. We don't see that we have an attitude, and that is the problem. The attitude comes in three flavours: the realist, the spiritual, and the perplexed.

The realist everyone will recognize because it is the attitude of those that have attended the great universities, taken social science classes, and survived. The survival, however, means that the graduate has an attitude. The attitude is that man will continue to make progress technologically and this will lead to improvements in society and economies. If the world is to be successful, then people need an education that will enable them to see it as it is. Successful people are people who see the world in all its cause and effect glory.

The attitude of the spiritual person, we think that we will all recognize, but its not that easy. The spiritual attitude is one that holds that our world is not inhabited by physical things alone, but that there are forces and realities that we cannot see, hear or touch that occupy our world alongside of our physical reality. An attitude is adopted when the spiritual thinks that awareness of the spiritual world makes a person somewhat special and above those that do not recognize this world. The attitude is that there is something missing from the person who is not party to the spiritual enlightments offered to the person of the 'way', the spiritual way, a way that is not open to all persons.

The third attitude is that of 'the perplexed' individual, perplexism. Such a modern person regards the realist and the spiritualist as somewhat strange beings. The 'perplexist' thinks that it is normal to be confused and to not take sides with either of the realist or spiritualist camps. This attitude is that there is not enough information to decide on the merits of realism or spiritualism, so it is best to just observe and not take either position. The perplexed attitude is that somehow its not an either or proposition. The real and unreal exist, but the attitude is that it is possible to sit on the sidelines and just understand without commitment. The vast majority of people have the perplexed attitude of modern society. They will sometimes be confused with realists or spiritualists, but their world is a world of 'mugwump.'

Art, Mythology, and Novelling

I consider myself rather fortunate to be able to endulge in a world that has all the elements of being real while at the same time is well position in the reality of mythology. To understand my world, read the writing of Karen Armstrong who created a wonderful contribution to our understanding of religion, science or logic, and mythology in history.

My awareness of the importance of myth comes with an experience that I had in an elevator. I was reading a book and heading to the main level when the elevator stopped. I was so interested in the book that I continued to read it, only glancing up when a new passenger coughed. I looked up and there before me was my head of department looking all very serious. He remarked to me, "What is the name of your book?" In surprise, I blurted out, "It is called ' I captured the castle'." The man was silent for only a moment and then said, "I don't read fiction." The elevator landed and he stepped out and quickly disappeared.

The True Myth

Such a phrase seems entirely contradictory, but it has meaning nevertheless. In our Western culture, we are wrapped up in a thought world that tells us to disregard certain aspects of our reality. These aspects have been pushed into a mental box that we label 'unreal.' Because the things and concepts in the thought box are unreal, we think that we can ignore them.

Our problem is that the two worlds of the real and unreal are actually one, and it is increasingly difficult to separate the two.

When we examine why this is so, we find that the more one tries to isolate the 'unreal' world, and put it into a mental box, the more imbalanced our mentation becomes. Rather than embracing the unacceptable, we feel that we can meditate it into nothingness. Rather than dealing with the unreal, we sense that the unreal is something else.

The attempts to box away things as unreal can lead to insanity and as the mind disintegrates the world it sees is all real, but the realness is a delusion. Insanity and realism cannot co-exist because they are at opposite ends of our mind which we have artificially segmented thinking that this somehow allows us to deal with our realities more effectively.

We do not see that the unreal and the real are not separated in reality.