Growing pains

 We don't learn as fast as people do on television. Life isn't as glamorous. At least not yet. lol. I am awed by the miscalculation of my expectations. The degree to which what I believed is real is not. The degree to which my decision making is irrational and ungrounded. I find this incredible. How confident we are in such floof. Our societies are full of myth and campfire stories that hold us together, but don't often pan out the way we expect. I think there is so much truth in these traditions, but they are really removed from the exactness of what is actually happening. They are apart of our soul's quest to understand and make its place here, and are truly important, but most useful when they are understood in the right context. Great things can happen. They do all the time. I think if we are too removed from the ground, what is great loses significance because we can't function well enough as a human being. We are stuck in our heads in imagination land. I think working with broad social and cultural myths is profoundly powerful, even in ways that empower us to be more reasonable and skillful. If these myths get out of hand, you have the disease of corporate America. They are hijacked by unfeeling corporations and elites and turned against the populace. The populace then turns against itself. I think if you can get down to the bottom of all of this noise, you can find mythos that is healthy. It seems that as individuals, we find different strands of cultural mythos that fit our current circumstances, so much of our struggles and activities are fused with ancient sentiment and imagination. It's like, in some degree, still cavemen struggling to light the first fire and fend off ferocious beasts. We still have to conquer the same primal fears that our ancient ancestors did, and much of the same mythos and imagination remains active in our psychology. Choosing greed, choosing selfishness, giving in to fear, giving into hate, choosing to belong, to join the tribe or people. Choosing to learn, to discover, to set out. The context has dramatically changed, but the relationships seem very similar. I think today we can take these myths further. Even if we can, the furthest limits depend upon a firm grasp of the fundamental forces of myth that our personal and interpersonal psychologies depend on. I think our culture and our society depend on them as well. I think our culture is vibrant and our society is healthy if our myths are good. If they are poisoned, people tend to be poisoned. It seems to be largely psychologically driven. Psychology which governs will, choices, and thus physiology and environment. If our myth degrades to selfish survival, how can community thrive? If the myth goes away, people go away. Our spirit becomes devoted to food and we become beasts. I think the myth of the world is poisoned in many ways. Many serious ways. I think this is obvious. I think the core myth of the world that is good is also evolving and very alive. Myth will always encounter dark challengers who threaten the stability of the light. Myth will be compromised, wounded. This is a part of the breadth of the myth. Myth is variable and can respond to all kinds of environments. There is a living myth now for dealing with this intense enemy that is the unique chaos or monster of our times. There are heroes waiting to be born, being born, and being defined in new ways by new circumstances. Finding strength to do what hasn't been done before. What hasn't been possible before. This myth lives inside us. We can learn to channel it. To be empowered and inspired by it. It is rooted in our bones, our nerves, and our guts. We can succeed here, in many different ways, we just have to find the right story. Deep enough there is a story which unravels all other stories and sets our consciousness aside from all entanglements of this world. This is the story of stories, the secret story woven into the world that appears for a brief sublime moment before being swept away in whatever threads we find ourselves most concerned with or caught up in now. This is the story I am most interested in unraveling...