I am born into living patterns // Out of nothing, narration makes World
Infra #4
Strata
When most people hear “the gods,” they picture something like a superhero—a person with a body straight out of a Marvel movie, with powers to match. Zeus as a jacked old man in the sky, lightning bolts in hand. Mercury flying lithely through the air, wings on his ankles. Freyja casting primordial spells out among the fjords.
Even many pagans who actually worship these pantheons seem to have a primarily anthropomorphic view of them.
I use this language pretty often, so I want to clarify how I use the word “gods” (and how I hear it).
Gods, archetypes, transpersonal drives, mythopoetic currents, inner stories, infranarratives, vows, values, virtues—these don’t all mean the same thing, but they do all overlap more than they don’t.
Having all these frames available clarifies things. It can be helpful, for example, to anthropomorphize certain values (courage, hope, intelligence…), to imagine them as essentially human. It allows me to sense into what they want, what their personalities are, and how to approach and coax them.
At the same time, viewing them only as persons is limiting; it leaves out other aspects.
If I can also view them as an inner story, I can recognize the ways that their dynamics stretch backward and forward in time, implying origins and fulfillments of their being.
If I can also view them as a vow I took before I was born, I can see the ways I’m implicated in living from the values at play.
If I can view them as transpersonal drives, it becomes clearer how these values, stories, vows, and personalities aren’t unique to me—they weave their way in and out of cultures, civilizations, social scenes, and relationships between individuals.
At their core, the things I’m pointing at are mythopoetic currents—dynamic movements beneath our level of perception. All the other frames I’ve mentioned are just the ripples they cast off, the ones with enough substance that we can begin to grasp and perceive them.
In the beginning, there is the Ineffable Current Underlying Existence; following that, emanating from it, we can see the shapes of things like gods and values and vows and archetypes.
When I say the gods are with us, this is what I mean. When I say each of us is a handful of gods stacked on top of each other in a trench coat, this is what I’m pointing at.
I am born into dynamic currents of meaning that I spend my life navigating; I am born into living patterns of myth that I spend my life embodying; I am born to gods who I spend my life expressing.
Encounter
The mythical world is full of meaning. Gods are nothing but eternal bearers of meaning. They make the world meaningful and significant, let it make sense. They tell us about the way things and events are related to each other, and these narrated connections create sense. Out of nothing, narration makes world. Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture. You need only let your gaze move here, move there, in order to read the sense, the meaningful order, off it.
- Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time
Artifact
I spent most of the past couple years in various places around the peak of this graph—coalescing, seeing clearly, and writing down what I was seeing in somatic resonance, the unconscious, and imaginal integration.
Nowadays, all of that has slipped down the right side of the graph, seeming too obvious to bother writing about.
At the same time, I’m starting up a new arc on the left side of the graph, following interesting clues around a vaguely-defined study I’m calling mythodynamics or developmental mythopoetics—or maybe a subset of what Jeffrey Kripal calls the superhumanities. (This newsletter is mostly an expression of that new study, and the Strata section above is the kernel at the center of it.)
There’s a lot of upside to both ends of the graph, but I do miss the electric high of the middle; that feeling of everything falling into place as quickly as I can write it down; the sense in meditation of my body-mind restructuring itself in real time, removing interference and bringing the Whole into clearer and clearer focus.
I’m looking forward to recapturing that sense as my mythodynamic studies take shape.