Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Gordian Synapses

When attempting to write creatively, I like to have dry, academic research materials concerning mythology handy. I grew up more in tune with the myths of Herakles, Rama and Thor than I did with Snake Eyes, Lion-O and Leonardo. That said, I, once again, have frustrations on this matter.

While I do identify with a pagan religious system myself, I find the pagan community rather lacking in understanding, in many circumstances. Many works seem to view the deities themselves as deserving admiration, rather than the processes the deities represent. I feel like this view perpetuates the very anthropic bias that has put our species, and our ecosystem, in its current bind. Our most successful adaptation has been the utilization of our environment, and yet this adaptation does need curtailing. Along with this utilization, or perhaps the very reason this utilization is so successful, we have a crippling sense of separation from the environment. This sense of separation has led us to travel all over the Earth, to trade foods, genes and philosophies, and to discover more and more facets of a strange and exciting universe.

A cat can only interact with its environment by its senses, by immersion in its territory and routing this information through its instincts. We, however, can bypass these instincts by accessing other mindsets and conditions we have experienced prior as a conscious act. This adaptation, I feel, encompasses what we call memories, sentiment, and emotion in different circumstances (This seems very reductionist and Darwinist, but I'm at a lack of better explanation.) Of course, these prior conditions must make themselves known to us through un-conscious means in order for us to gain awareness of them as simple facets of an uncharacterized psyche. (I could talk for days on how we ignore this in order to maintain a given state, regardless of its detriment to ourselves, to maintain a sense of continuity, but I digress) Once accepted, we can change our view of the environment, and then react with new combinations of prior experiences, in effect making new worlds in our mindset.

In our efforts to understand, the limits of what we could comprehend became subject to our self-awareness, and thus we made these forces friendly by giving them our face, our virtues and vices, our communicative skills, and our sense of time in order that we make the incomprehensible at least something with which we could empathize. In our weakest moments, our minds will reinforce this sensation as well, permitting what could best be described as a numinous experience. (For instance, when in the throes of near-suicidal depression feeling bolstered by a universal sense of Motherhood, of womb-like succor and unconditional love when one's actual experience with the biological mother was absent or destructive) I'd go as far as to call it archetypal, but without formal training in depth psychology I feel a little goofy doing so.

While I see the value in merging our incomprehensible notions of the universe with our archetypal human experience, I also see this as a transitional state, wherein we see our own place as a mere cog in a universal schematic that changes as we work along with it, and that our very human senses and sense of humanity need not find itself as axiomatically possessing divinity greater than that of our surroundings from which we find ourselves separate, but that our sense of separation acts as a simple function in spite of the axiomatic divinity inherent in the universe itself.

Long story short: I want more dry, academic articles about myths and gods on the internet, and fewer fluffy bunny and beardy Thelemic paeans crossing my path.

Yeah. I can feel the bullshit just peeling off of me as I type.

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