Over the last few years I’ve observed many players in different arenas speaking on the creation of a new mythos. Has the drive to create the new mythos become a multipolar trap?
What is Mythos and why is it important to conceive of a new one? Have we always talked about it with the same frequency throughout history? Is it meant to improve the way we interact with each other? Is it meant to improve the way we interact with the natural environment? Is it the way we shape the future? Does it change our perception of the past? These are a few questions we can ask ourselves when contemplating it’s purpose, but I’m sure you will come up with many more important questions.
Let’s break it down…
The word Mythos itself was “borrowed from Greek mŷthos “utterance, speech, discourse, tale, narrative, fiction, legend,” of obscure origin.”
Myth vs Mythos
“As nouns the difference between myth and mythos is that myth is a traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, and in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified; a sacred narrative regarding a god, a hero, the origin of the world or of a people, etc while mythos is a story or set of stories relevant to or having a significant truth or meaning for a particular culture, religion, society, or other group.” web source
As humans began to increase their awareness of self. Asking the question “Who am I?”, led them to studying their ancestors to understand their cultural norms and traditions. In other words, how and why they experienced themselves and life as they did. Before the 30th century BCE all knowledge was passed down orally. After this time, more evolved written texts started to emerge as the medium of transmission for our mythos.
We have to acknowledge this transition to understand when and how our experience of the mythos began to evolve. We did not create a separate word to differentiate between, Mythos as spoken word and Mythos as written word. Why not? From a multi-dimensional perspective we can understand the ramifications on our cultural evolution. Just a small example of such would be that our mythos went from adaptable to fixed in an important way.
As stories were shared during the time of only oral transmission it was quite easy to change a few words in the tale at any given time to completely change its meanings. Even if its basic tenets stayed the same, slight alterations to tonality and descriptive words for example would alter the information encoded. The feeling information received, thus the interpretation.
Whereas with written transmission, what was engraved in stone became immovable. The words written therein would never change over time despite the change of territory, climate of the times and involvement of unforeseen events. I propose what stayed adaptable through written transmission of the mythos can be identified as our agreed or disagreed upon interpretations of those texts.
Our own personal subjective interpretations of the mythos depends on many factors. Including experience, education, our specific neurobiology; the way we process information and what our cultural and societal lenses are, to name just a few. With written transmission though, we are all reading very specific words to come to our unique interpretations of them from a source that is fixed. We then integrate that interpretation and continue to develop our relationship to process.
The influence of our subjective interpretations on oral transmission in 30th century BCE existed equally to our subjective interpretations on written transmission of various information in the 21st Century. Our subjective experience, that which is always changing and adapting can not be separated from anything we perceive really.
I suggest another big influence on how a story might be interpreted comes from the state of being of the person performing the oral transmission or the written transmission of any given mythos during any given time. Here we are sliding into unknown territory again. How can we measure the state of one person to the state of another. There are too many variables to take into consideration but perhaps we can all agree that another’s state of being can only be experienced through a felt sense.
We should make a distinction between whether someone’s neurobiology supports oral or written transmissions to a greater degree as well. Do you understand a teaching more when it’s share orally or when you read it from a book? Or do you truly only learn experientially, while in process with practice?
Mythos and Innate Knowing
It has been proposed that a difference in biology (DNA) would make a person more or less predisposed to extracting the underlying wisdom and knowledge being shared through their particular ancestral myths. How do we know this to be true or false? One thing that comes to mind, although not widely accepted yet, but a few scientific studies have proven, trauma has been shown to be passed down through cellular memory up to three generations. This can imply that many other things are also past down that affect the way in which we perceive and process information.
If this is the case, which I believe it is, as DNA mixes over time our ability to extract underlying meaning through the various cultural myths from our mixed ancestral lineages would be affected. It proses that we’d be able to extract a greater amount of encoded information from a wider variety of cultural myths allowing us to create a natural synthesis of many to produce a more expanded expression of wisdom and knowledge.
If a person of xy DNA can not extract underlying knowledge and wisdom from mythos produced by xz DNA ancestors, is it still possible to adopt their belief systems to produce similar results of being in process with what that mythos offers? Would they then produce similar relationships to them despite differences in cellular memory?
Renewing Mythos through Process rather than through Belief System
What if our relationship to any given practice played a greater role than the mythos itself? Perhaps our relationship to process is what allows us to deepen our relationship with the unseen forces at play in the universe. The natural surrounding world, including our bodies, our emotions, our minds and those of the people we are in contact with. At the end of the day are we chasing a state of being that allows us to stay open to people, experiences, life, learning and the universe at large? To become complex enough to act in such a way that increases the wellbeing of the whole as it uplifts the wellbeing of the individual?
If we don’t have a relationship to process we only have a relationship to ideas and beliefs. A relationship to process on the other hand creates an unseen force between what is seen and unseen, to what is material but also to what is in motion. To the numinous, the archetypes, and the journey.
Mythos Under Fire
From modern day eugenists to behavioural scientists we have seen a renewed trend towards changing the landscape within in order to change perception without. Through eliminating or altering certain gene pools whether directly at the cellular level or by altering cognition from an external mechanism, they strive to favour certain behaviours and alter subjective interpretations of information in natural and artificial environments. Thus attempting to change the type of relationship and responses to various mythos within specific cultures and geographical locations. Which in turn would prevent various interpretations of selectiive mythos from expanding and evolving in their own right.
The collective mythos of our times not only requires us to stay in relationship with process itself but to understand the relationship to process others have and why some have relationships to process that lead them to create beliefs that propose one singular mythos is the way to create a brighter future.