From my blog:

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In Personal Mythology, the first post I wrote for this blog, I suggested that we live trapped in worlds of our own limited creation, believing the words and symbols to be our reality rather than merely signifying a path to reality, because we are uncertain about who we are. As a result we tend to demand answers to the Uncomfortable Questions. But there are no real answers to these questions aside from the arbitrary answers we settle on, mostly as a result of social pressure. We feel an obligation to be what our family, our Church or Temple or Synagogue, our friends and our teachers project upon us. We grow up immersed in the concrete symbols of religion and morality and letting go of that imagined certainty to explore ourselves and connect directly with the human creative experience is a daunting task.

The result of clinging to the illusion of certainty in the face of uncomfortable questions is that the concrete language we use to divide up and organize the world makes it increasingly more difficult to perceive our individual self and others as anything other than the labels we craft to organize the world of our experiences and our relationship to it. We cease to see ourselves reflected in those we perceive as different from us, and in so doing erect the very wall that makes it impossible to communicate with those others. When we have the courage to tear down those walls and learn to listen and understand, we soon hear that people who seemed different are singing the same songs we are, just in another language. And like us, they too are building walls of concrete symbols to protect their certainty.

It is a vicious circle. Huddling within our walled gardens, reinforced by institutional groupthink, each day assuring us that the answers we've settled on are the "right" ones, we subtly and imperceptibly create the violence and fear that drives production of these concrete walls in the first place. To embrace uncertainty rather than fear it, however, is to be able to move beyond the wall and listen to the songs of "others" for their meaning and find yourself within them. It is the only path to atonement with the Divine. Giving up one's self in non-violence to assuage the fears of others is indeed, the Truth, the Life and Way.

It's little wonder that we feel "a separation from God." We judge all creation with every noun, and therefore we judge God in us for creating a fallen world full of fallen people. And every one of those judgments is the source of our own condemnation, because every judgment reflects the world as we have perceived it, organized and shaped it to try to bring order out of chaos in furtherance of our own power. So indeed, "judge not lest ye be judged," is not true because Jesus said it. It's true because it's true.

We tend to view our culturally inherited myths in concrete terms because this is how they are taught to us as children. Unfortunately, that means they don't function very well as vehicles to truth so long as we remain culturally immersed in them. One has to find the strange in creative mythology and follow it to the truth. To paraphrase Novalis, the first function of great art is to make the strange into the familiar and the familiar into the strange. That requires the courage to escape the safety of a the bulwark we construct against a reality riddled with enemies trying to destroy us.

To that end we create imaginary gods to protect us, give our lives meaning and reinforce our decisions to root ourselves in the illusory world of language and division rather than listen to the still small voice of compassion, that "law of love" written on our hearts. We imagine these gods as beings "out there" (even though every mythology tells us they are "in here"). These gods can then be misappropriated by human social institutions to control our thoughts and behavior. Sometimes these gods go by ungodly names - "Communism," "Patriotism," "Democracy," "American," "Iranian" - but that doesn't change that they are idols we have created with our own art and now have chosen to worship - to subjugate our connection to divinity to in our fear and folly.

To deny these idols is to regain one's courage and awaken the creative Logos, the Word of God, within in each of us to redeem the world. That Word is Love, as in compassion, and it cannot be heard over the clamoring of praise we serve up to our idols. But that requires overcoming our fear, stepping out in the name of love and compassion, and risking that those who still live huddled behind their walls will destroy us because we threaten their illusions of being and their sense of power and entitlement. This journey beyond the life of comfortable illusions, into the valley of the shadow of death to emerge a new person with new eyes to experience the Kingdom of God in the here and now.

That requires a quest. And people who imagine they already have what they want don't go on quests. As Joseph Campbell explained, the myths are the starting point for an individual journey of self discovery and growing up into and claiming responsibility for one's creative power. When the myths themselves become the end, and the purpose becomes belief and certainty rather than uncertainty and growth, the myths meant to help us find the Way become just another brick in the wall that keeps us in - and prevents the development of spiritual character. From Thou Art That:

Why should anyone go questing for the Grail in Gothic Europe when the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was being celebrated in every church? The reason was that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was a general sacrament that did not depend on the recipient's or the priest's personal character for its effect. It was a miraculous, magically working conduit of the grace of the Crucifixion of Christ which pours into those who received it. All one had to do was abide by the laws of the Church and examine one's conscience and resolve not to sin again. It was not in itself, however, a test of character.

"This mythological Grail was not inside any Church and only the person who had a certain character could find it. The Grail was carried by absolutely virtuous maidens and it represented an integrity of character and life rather than a sacramental system.

Sir Gawain"Sir Gawain, Arthur's nephew, proposes a vow, since they thought it a disgrace to go forth in a group, each should enter the forest at that point where he found it darkest, and where no other path existed. This is the absolute opposite to the Oriental guru system, in which you accept the direction of a guru who knows what is best for you. But it is you and your potential character, which has never been seen and which can be brought into being by no one else, that is the life quest in the Western sense. Each individual pursues it in his or her own way. The problem in our society and in our schools is to inculcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere - to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. Spiritually, then, we must all seek the Grail by entering that part of the forest where nobody else has cut a path for us.

In other words, one must lose one's self to find one's self. I must give up family, nationality, "religion," and all the other things that I cling to with certainty that "I am this," in order to discovery my connection with the Divine.

Once we have embraced enough uncertainty to let go of the world of appearances, and accepted not knowing so as to take the quest, we can accelerate toward enough escape velocity to soar above the atmosphere and glimpse the world from the divine perspective. With practice one can even learn to transcend this world of appearances using any culture's mythological signs, or even just through direct and un-mediated experience of a great poem, a novel, a work of philosophy, the wonders of science and mathematics, a great painting or a song.

Eventually we can learn to see angels in the architecture everywhere we look, no matter how strange our immediate surroundings may seem to our conventional sight. And indeed, all the world of appearances shall come ever more to look equally strange and equally wondrous to such a traveler.

A man walks down the street,
It's a street in a strange world.
Maybe it's the Third World.
Maybe it's his first time around.
He doesn't speak the language,
He holds no currency.
He is a foreign man,
He is surrounded by the sound, sound ....
Cattle in the marketplace.
Scatterlings and orphanages.
He looks around, around .....
He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
He says, Amen! and Hallelujah!

- Paul Simon, "You Can Call Me Al"  

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