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Back to the Forum 2006
Archives Many months ago I expressed my spiritual philosophy as it was at the time in a series of essays. Since then I have had time to grow and reflect on that writing. Because of that, I have rewritten this and the three following essays, to reflect my current thinking on the major myth of Western man. This myth issue has been an ongoing problem for me. I do not believe the problem is unique to me. So far as I can tell it is a dilemma for all of Western man. The Problem, in its simplest form, is we have lost our mythical roots. What is missing from my life and from the lives of modern man is a believable myth. In its place we have a somewhat sterile rational science and hedonism. What in the world am I talking about? I hope to make myself clear. Let me begin that by giving my notion of what a myth is. From Microsoft Bookshelf, here is a definition. Myth: So, in my words, a myth is a believable story which explains who we are and why we are here. Notice it does not have to be provable. It must only be believable. It must answer the questions, "Whence came man and to what purpose?" It must satisfy our longing for meaningful spiritual roots. To discuss this, I will need to speak of spiritual concepts. I will be talking about a divinity. In this discussion I will use the word God to speak of the spiritual mystery. I could as easily have used Yahweh, Allah, Ram, or the Super-Conscious. The name is just a handle we use to talk about the mystery. Humankind once had a myth which arose at almost the same time in many different places. It was the myth of creation. Most other myths grew out of that one. Although there were differences in the window dressing due to cultural differences, the versions were remarkably similar in the basic structure and form. For this essay, I will look at the one with which I am most familiar. That is the Judean Christian myth of creation which reveals the origin of man. The details of the story may vary slightly, depending on which version of the Christian bible you grab. However, the essence of the story is the same. In the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis we find the outline of the story of creation. We find that God created heaven and earth and night and day. He also separated the heavens from the earth and further separated dry land from the oceans of earth. After that, God made all the various kinds of flora and fauna on the earth. Finally, God made man in his own image and in two forms, male and female. Then he told them to go and breed. What is really wrong with modern organized religion is it has lost that myth along with all of the others. As Christians we give lip service to our myths but we do not live them. They are no longer believable. That is tantamount to religion losing its value to man. The myth is the soul of spirituality. For people in this condition, God is indeed dead. We need a satisfying myth to be complete and to become whole within God's universe. A satisfying myth must be believable. It need not be scientifically complete or scientifically provable. It must be believable and spiritually complete in that it fulfills our spiritual needs. Organized religion, in cooperation with science has destroyed the original myth of creation. They have rendered it unbelievable. They were partners in an unnecessary adversarial relationship wherein the myth was debunked. It got very serious with Darwin's theory of evolution, but the myth was under attack long before that. The church was in retreat following the revelations of the early European and English scientists. There was no attempt by organized religion to reconcile their myths with the realities of science which overtook them. This could easily have been done, but the church choose denial. That left them with no ground to stand on and resulted in full retreat. Some see that as a triumph of science. I see it as the tragedy and dilemma of modern man. In modern organized religion, the myth has been trivialized and reduced to a once a week ritual with little or no spiritual content. People are threshing around and searching everywhere for satisfaction and fulfillment because there is none in that ritual. We no longer live the myth. Hedonism, we have discovered, is a dangerous substitute. Ultimately, it leads to despair followed by sociopathic disorders and further tragedy, often suicide. Still some people choose it. Most of the rest of us avoid the conflict simply by keeping our spiritual world in a very small separate compartment. We don't bother it and, usually, it does not bother us. We live our temporal life as a separate entity. Once a week we open the small compartment and give a few moments of lip service. Then we quickly close it lest its contents spill out and get in our way. We no longer allow the myth to enter into our regular life. That has been and still is unacceptable to me. I have been troubled all of my life because I cannot keep these things separate. My spiritual self simply will not stay in the box. My conscience will not shut up. Therefore, I must resolve this conflict. Therein is my struggle. I must reconcile these two seemingly diabolically opposed worlds. My difficult task, which has thwarted me until now, has been to reconcile the apparent dichotomy between science and spirituality. One of the great tasks in traveling toward God Awareness is the hope of being able to reconcile the scientific universe with the spiritual universe. Neither is good or evil in itself. The evil is in the apparent dichotomy between the two. Recently, I feel I have made some progress in my understanding.
I feel I have resolved enough of my confusion to be able to share
some of my thinking. In my next essay, I will begin to outline
my understanding of the story of creation. I will begin my attempt
to answer those pesky questions, "Whence came man and to
what purpose?" It is a piece which I entitle, The Myth.
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