Daily Reprieve

Someone whose voice I hear deeply challenged my understanding and usage of the word MYTHOLOGY.  In her mind,  it is akin to a fairy tale, a contrived fiction, or a cultural fantasy.  Its denotation does not allow it to be presented as reality or have any real relationship to fact.

The dictionary seems to be in full agreement with her.   Yet when I explore quotes about mythology, there are connotations of something far more significant.  Oliver Taplin, in comparing Freud and Jung, said the following;

Freud was, in effect, trying to take the mystery out of myth. Once it was decoded as a history of the unconscious, all was explain ed. As Anthony Storr put it: “he was only happy when he was reducing things to the lowest common factor; and he did regard the unconscious as primarily the repository of bits of oneself that one couldn’t accept.” A very different way of looking at the psychology of myth was developed by Freud’s one-time friend and colleague Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The fundamental difference between the two is immediately apparent in Jung’s dictum that modern man is faced with “the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit.” Jung, who was very interested in archaeology and thought of himself as excavating the mind, took myths to represent the inmost thoughts and feelings of the human race, patterns which are the product of inherited brain patterns

It is important to me that I am as clear as possible in my communication, and so I wish for those who read to understand what I am saying.

For me, when I use the word mythology, I am incorporating the following ideas;

1.  Creative Story Writing to capture elusive or paradoxical concepts and express them with the simplest clarity possible.

2.  Spiritual Hypothesis Testing to explore incoming evidence and ongoing experience with life beyond the organic veil.

3.  Establishes a Peace Treaty with the swirling chaos and mystery of our environment.

4.  Pragmatic Inspiration for the living of our individual mortal lives.

Gomu is a God of my understanding.  For me, my working mythology as I have defined it here supports my connection with Gomu.

This entry was posted on June 21, 2014 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.