Connecting Cosmos and Consciousness

Instead of narrative method, we may now use mythical method.  It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art…”

(T. S. Eliot: Ulysses, Order and Myth)

Myth is more than an early and discarded stage in the odyssey of the human mind.  Neither is myth today just strange stories set long ago or in an imaginative world of Avatars populated with beings that think and act remarkably like ourselves, whatever their physical appearance.  Myths are the founding and perennial stories.  No doubt, myth is humanity’s earliest consciousness, one bearing the closest likeness to the world, so close to it as to be separated from it by only a thin and porous membrane of objectivity.  It is pre-rational rather than irrational, for one must first be rational before irrationality is a possibility.  But what myth most definitely is NOT is a fiction.  Why?  As Cassirer writes: “Myth is not a fiction, for that is the work of individuals who abandon themselves to the free activities of fancy.  On the contrary, everything in it is a necessity imposed on us not from without, by the existence of ‘things’, but from within, through the nature of consciousness.  This consciousness is the real ‘active subject’ of mythology.” (The Problem of Knowledge v. 4: 298) 

But today myth is also an artful method of telling stories that is different from narrative. It is a way of coordinating our levels of understanding.  That is its importance for the adult world.  In a seminal 1923 essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, which examined James Joyce’s “novel” Ulysses, T. S Eliot wrote: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. [....] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”  This new method of coordinating the panorama of human experience, of ordering and giving shape to a perspective, had, as Eliot remarks, “the importance of a scientific discovery.”  Joyce did for literature what Freud and Jung did for psychology, and at about the same time, namely, open up and illuminate the labyrinth of past human thought for retrieval and renewal by modern thought. 

Myth as a literary form overrules narrative in favor of symbolic structures, making past and present, particular and cultural, part and whole aspects of a single vision.  Joyce’s book, with its continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, between Bloom’s daily wanderings in early twentieth-century Dublin and Ulysses travels and trials through the ancient Mediterranean, drew together past and present narratives as manifestations of a single, trans-historical consciousness that demonstrated how “myth” is a perennial part of the human situation. The mythic method refuses to resolve into a single focused point of view, or even a single narrative line. Rather it moves continuously between conscious and unconscious points of view.  That is, it is symbolic.

For humanity’s mental odyssey, the basic principle of mythical structure and coordination is ontogeny sort of recapitulates phylogeny; that is, the individual human being repeats in his or her own mental forms of experience what the whole race has already passed through, much as the growing fetus in the womb is supposed to pass through the forms and stages of the lower kingdoms before being born in human form.  But there is this difference.  The mind returns to those forms that best fit its situation, for all past forms remain accessible, both subjectively in the mind and objectively in culture and often spontaneously manifest in both “places.”  This process of accumulation as one passes through stages of growth is, for me, the various stages of the unfolding rational faculty, the sedimenting of the layers of subjectivity which, said another way, is the expanding world of human subjectivity and increasing self-knowledge as it accumulates knowledge of the world and itself. 

Myths represent human consciousness in continual change and transformation, undergoing strange and dramatic metamorphoses and instant happenings.  As such they are an essential part of education because: “Perhaps the oldest of educational ideas is that of the dramatic transformation of the mind, the sudden entry into a new plane of reality.” (Northrop Frye: On Education: 151)  But transformation can occur because any new manifest plane of reality was already within the essential human reality. 

Myth makes things happen via  imaginative causality, which is very close, both psychologically and physically, to the kind of non-local causality science is now exploring in Chaos Theory and Complexity science, and popularized in productions like The Secret and What the Bleep.  This should not surprise us.  As Oswald Spengler wrote:  "Every physics is a psychology."  These new sciences are sciences of process not of state, of becoming not being, as is myth an imaginative statement of process and metamorphosis.  Sciences like Systems Theory are also sciences of the global nature of things, the universal behavior of complexity, the fractal patterns that appear and reappear on different scales at the same time because of the inescapable consequence of the way that small scales intertwine with large ones, where change often occurs from a sensitive dependence on initial conditions which can end in catastrophic consequences, as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends as the typhoon ravaging Japan.  These are sciences where nonlinear equations rule, where seemingly divergent movements actually circle around vibrating patterns called strange attractors, those bizarre, infinitely tangled abstractions, those goblins of the mind, that nevertheless yield simple, structural patterns at their core.  The appearance of an attractor signals on one level pure disorder because no point ever recurs, but this disorder is the entry to a new kind of order, like breaking the sound barrier in a plane.  These are sciences where infinite instability ends in stability and randomness morphs into order through a sort of self-organization.  Non-periodicity is unpredictability, but the whole is still there, because both chaos and order spontaneously arise in systems.   

But, perhaps, these are sciences of process and not state, because we are in the process of moving out of one state of humanity into another, and the sciences and arts, poets and philosophers, are all simply registering in their respective domains the stages of this universal process that moves from cosmos through chaos into a new creation, a new cosmos generating a new cosmology: a process accelerating by several orders of magnitude and complexity every decade, as the effects of a new revelation pass through them.  It is the universal birth of humanity into the spiritual state, and new forms of being always birth new ways of thinking.  Once we get better grounding in our new state, then sciences of that state will start to appear.  But it is, too, the old way in new form—the strange juxtaposition of twilight with the dawn’s early light without any intervening night.  A new ratio is everywhere emerging.  But the past myths, arts, and sciences in their respective though smaller transitions provide useful analogies and examples to this “organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (World Order of Baha’u’llah:43)  .