A New Myth For Our Times
We Have Lost Our Myth
Jungian Edward F. Edinger wrote a book called The Creation of Consciousness, Jung’s Myth for Modern Man.
In it he said, “Jung was the first to formulate the problem of modern man as mythlessness.”
America’s old myth was based on: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. Our rights come from God would seem to imply this nation is guided by a Judeo-Christian ethical system.
But while our Elite still mouth those words, their actions tell a different story – killing who they will with drone strikes, labeling innocent dead collateral damage, Gang Stalking average citizens with An American Stasi – first responders, security guards, Neighborhood Watch groups.
When a myth is lost says Jungian Edinger, “Differentiated values disappear and are replaced by the elemental motivations of power and pleasure.”
People are killed in drone strikes at the pleasure of the President; God’s creation with unalienable rights are dismissed as collateral damage. The power of the state arbitrarily without due process bears down on average citizens in Government Gang Stalking.
“Meaning is lost,” said Edinger when a Myth no longer inspires the behavior of people. “in its place, primitive and atavistic contents are reactivated,” – think of people acting like mobbing animals.
When God is Dead, said a clinical psychologist, we are left with either nihilism or the State becomes God.
In Police State America – where a President decides who lives or dies by drone strikes, where the Government decides who shall be Gang Stalked by an American Stasi for their lifetime – the State is now God.
Creating A New Myth
What do we do? We construct a new myth.
Science is helping us out. Our universe it seems is now believed to have been started, not by a big bang, but by a big bounce. What is being proposed is something that sounds very similar to Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence with the universe alternating between periods of expansion and contraction in a never ending dance.
The Big Bounce is derived from Quantum Mechanics. Physicist David Bohm who talked about Quantum Mechanics may also give us insights into the New Myth For Man.
With classical physics, Bohm said, the world was thought to be composed of constituent parts. What relativity and quantum theory did was give us a view of the world as undivided wholeness where the observer and what was observed are no longer considered as existing separately from each other.
The universe since quantum theory and relativity theory, Bohm says, must be regarded “as an undivided and unbroken whole.”
In psychoanalysis a similar conclusion was being reached. The idea of the isolated mind, intersubjective psychoanalysts were saying, is a myth. The myth of the isolated mind ascribes to man a mode of being in which the individual exists separately from the world of physical nature and engagement with others.
What Bohm and the intersubjectivists were describing was a field, an unbroken, undivided whole where individual things are just abstracted from the whole.
The Holomovement
What is primary said Bohm is the idea of unbroken undivided movement. Bohm calls it the holomovement. Sounds a bit like a constantly expanding and contracting universe of the Big Bounce.
In the New Myth For Our Age ideas of isolated entities are replaced with ideas of ongoing processes.
The I-Process
Psychoanalyst B.F.T. Bugental calls the person an I-Process, saying, “I am the crest of the wave that has always moved on by the time it can be identified.” My true identify is not found identifying with this or that subpersonality, but in awaring.
The idea we each posses a portion of being, participate in a holomovement and process it according to our own nature could be the stuff of a New Myth For Our Age.
The Self As An Activity
The idea of Agency as Erich Fromm calls it or the-self-as-doer as Bugental calls it could be an integral part of the New Myth, too.
Myths answer the question what is the meaning of life? We effect others, Erich Fromm, tells us through our activity, our ability to love, to express ourselves, to change things, through productive work. “I am because I effect.” Our love of life, Erich Fromm said, is nurtured when we do things that are genuinely interesting. It’s when we do what we love that we feel a surging sense of vitality. Then our actions come from the essence of who we are and we actualize our individuality. If we are concerned with a person’s growth, Fromm said, we allow him to grow and unfold “as he is” and “in his own way.” Meaning in life, Fromm said, comes from the very act of living – from doing what genuinely interests us, from saying what we genuinely feel and think. It’s when we live with such integrity, expressing ourselves in what we do, that we develop a strong sense of identity. A person with such a strong sense of self, Fromm said, is capable of affirmation of others, living with them on the basis of equality.
Our New Myth can agree with Fromm the unfolding of man’s essential powers is the purpose of life. Then man is one with himself, Fromm said, at one with nature, and with his fellowman. It’s in a society where that doesn’t happen that destructiveness abounds, said Fromm.
The Inner-Directed Person
“To the extent that my sense of existence is authentic,” says Rollo May, “it is precisely not what others have told me I should be, but is the one Archimedes point I have to stand on from which to judge what parents and other authorities demand. Indeed, compulsive and rigid moralism…” Think of the destructive fundamentalism in our time: “arises in given persons precisely as the result of a lack of a sense of being. Rigid moralism is a compensatory mechanism by which the individual persuades himself to take over the external sanctions because he has no fundamental assurance that his own choices have any sanction of their own.”
“For if your self-esteem must rest in the long run on social validation, you have not self-esteem but a more sophisticated form of social conformity,” said Rollo May.
The person of the New Myth would not assume identities based on the truth claims of others. Michel Foucault, like Rollo May, like B.F.T. Bugental said he/she would be a person of constant becoming, like the holomovement, itself.
A Life of Constant Becoming
The person of the New Myth wouldn’t get caught up in any ism – no static view of the universe. The person of the New Myth would dedicate him/herself to their own becoming, his own self-formation, and determine for herself what she wanted her being to be about. She would see the self as a task that needed her attention. His potential would be found in assessing the limits imposed on him and transgressing them.
While we can never escape our historical situation, Foucault said, we could strive to increase our freedom within it. Freedom, Fromm said, “is the fundamental condition for any growth.” The suppression of freedom, he said, is always accompanied by hatred.
Foucault like May, like Fromm, tells us fulfillment would be found in the actualization of our possibilities.
Like so many of the thinkers I have read, Foucault believed, there were no universal prescriptions: what worked for you might be a disaster for me. In order to get out of the box of thinking and acting as we should, we have to find the words for that which has no words in us, Foucault said.
Formulating Unformulated Experience
Psychoanalyst Donnel Sterm calls it formulating the unformulated. Hand Loewald calls it the continuous communication between conscious and unconscious which characterizes the mentally healthy person.
The unformulated Stern says is composed of “thoughts not yet thought, connections not yet made, memories one does not yet have the resources or the willingness to construct.”
Experience, Stern said, is only lucid once it is spelled out. Before then, our experience consists of “vague tendencies’ that haven’t coalesced into a form we can reflect on.
Body-Centered Consciousness – The Eros Self
The person of the New Myth possesses a body-centered consciousness as Jungian Remo Roth calls it, the ascendance of an Eros Self.
Our Thinking is programmed thought said David Bohm. It is fragmented. We fragment reality when we look at things as existing separately from the broader context, in which they originate, are sustained, dissolve. Fragmentation is the result of imposing “divisions in an arbitrary fashion without regard to the wider context, ignoring essential connections to the rest of the world.”
Our maps are not the territory, said Alfred Korzybski. We are confused about reality because the language we use to speak about it has a different structure than our world of ever-changing processes.
“Everything in this world is strictly interrelated with everything else,” Korzybski said, “and so we must make efforts to discard primitive elementalistic terms which imply structurally a non-existing isolation.”
Encounter – Being is in-the-between
What the holomovement calls for is to see being as in-the-between. Encounter or what Martin Buber calls an I-thou mode of relating is the only way we dwell in reality that is not constructed in our minds with thought. Bohm tells us we must replace programmed thought with the ongoing thinking of dialogue.
The problem Bohm said is our thought is mechanical. Automatic. It operates like a reflex, one thought automatically unfolding another. Our thought, our presuppositions can be a barrier to the free flow of stream, of flux, which is the true nature of reality. Each construction we make is an abstraction, lifted out of holomovement, of the whole. Thought, each narrative, can capture enough of the holomovement to guide our action, but partiality works only part of the time, under certain conditions, in certain contexts. The holomovement can’t be captured in a fixed concept.
The Creative Holomovement
It is creativity that is inherent in the holomovement, “something unfolds and has significance and as a result something else unfolds.”
Rigidity, fixed assumptions, fixed thought, is antithetical to creativity, to the natural flow, free play of the mind. Our mind, like our universe, works best in a state of undivided wholeness. A person does evil when he doesn’t realize how his thought is programming him to act in the way he does, said Bohm.
Thinking, Bohm said, is different from thought. Thinking is a movement or activity of the bodily self, the body as information, the body as meaning. It involves electrical and chemical and muscular changes. Fixed thought doesn’t belong to any particular person or place or time or group of people. Your thought is partly a product of your culture, your family, your environment, the past, the thought of countless dead.
The antidote to this reflexive thought, our conditioning, our preconceptions is dialogue. We can have dialogue with ourselves or others. In dialogue no point of view is allowed to escape scrutiny. No point of view can be dismissed out of hand. Dialogue gives us a way to look at our thoughts. Dialogue can’t exist in an atmosphere where we struggle to have our ideas dominate. It is a process of searching for truth together in a spirit of openness.
Inner Searching
In the same way that we can search for truth together in dialogue, we can partake of inner searching for truth, too. We can attune our ear to what Mark Solm called “the experiencing me.”
Emotions are the signals from the viscera of our body that tell us what has worked from our evolutionary past. They are, Solm’s believes, like instincts, the tendencies for action that worked in the phylogenetic history of the human race for survival. Learning to be ourselves involves learning to identify our emotions, becoming sensitive to the feelings in our body that are our reactions to situations in our life.
We recover our inner sense of things by asking ourselves what is most important to us at the present time, said J.F.T. Bugental. We look at our memories, physical sensations, feelings and emotions, anticipations, apprehensions, fantasies, dreams. With an attitude of curiosity we watch what is going on inside us. Bugental calls it inner searching. In this way we get in touch with our ongoing – I-process. Bugental calls the I-process, feelingful awareness of what goes on inside us. We experience our I-ness in wanting and desiring and feeling and imagining and thinking and fantasizing and dreaming and perceiving.
To understand the self-as subject, which is different than the self-as-object – created from our self-representations – we have to get back inside ourselves and experience the stream of being that we are. “My true identity,” Bugental wrote, “is awaring. I am not the product of these processes. I am the process.”
Building The New Myth On The Foundation of The Old
When asked which of the commandments was the most important, Jesus said, “is this: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. With those words I think Jesus gave us the key to inner peace, to peace on Earth, the greatest ethical system one could have. Our logical minds tell us A is different than B, the world is made up of separate, individual things. Human beings have evolved/survived because we could fight for our self-interest. A goal of psychoanalysis, psychology is a strong ego. But Jesus exhortation said, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it.” I interpret that as whosoever shall lose his ego, lose his focus on self, self-interest, and identify with the Whole, shall gain it, eternal life. The self is an illusion, a “tale told by an idiot”, only the Whole exists, to understand our participation in the Whole is to gain eternal life.
Our New Myth can be built on the foundation of the Old.