Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

Myth is a mode of communication, developing simultaneously alongside ordinary language in our prehistoric ancestors more than 20,000 years ago. According to some thinkers it may even predate our species.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Myth doesn't necessarily refer back to an objective reality. But Myth will almost always refer to an internal, invisible reality in which the dreamworld has far more meaning and significance than the material world.

 

 

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The mythical experience is a language of symbols, of metaphors.

 

 

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Yet it may feel real to us in a way that our daily lives do not.

 

 

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But our myths, according to Joseph Campbell, are seriously outdated.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Materialism is no adequate substitute for a sense of meaningful connection to something greater than ourselves, though materialism has undoubtedly obscured the trail that led us here.

 

 

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In the absence of a compellingly believable inherited myth, in that silence, are we compelled to create our own?

 

 

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“How do I deal with immensity in a measured world?

Where life is kept in a thermos?”

Marina Tsvetiyeva

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Some argue that we have forsaken God.

 

 

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Some that God has forsaken us.

 

 

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Some tell us that science has sufficiency, that the hypothesized multiverse is eternal and infinite, and does not need God to explain it.

 

 

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Others that we and the universe are a random accident leading back to entropy.

 

 

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Still others that most of the matter and energy in the universe is dark, and ultimately beyond our reach.

 

 

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Yet in the realm of quantum physics, even science can no longer lay claim to objective reality.

 

For we cannot exclude ourselves from what we observe.

 

 

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The classic example of this “confirmation bias” is the 1903 discovery of “N-rays” a completely new form of radiation announced by Prosper-René Blondlot. At the time, dozens of other scientists confirmed the existence of N-rays in their own laboratories.

 

But further tests showed that N-rays don’t exist at all.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

How could so many scientists be wrong? They deceived themselves into thinking they were seeing something with their instruments that in fact was not there.

 

This came on the heels of Wilhelm Rontgen’s discovery of X-rays and Paul Ulrich Villard’s discovery of gamma rays in the early 1900s.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In addition to our innate suggestibility we have also evolved with a predisposition to interpret and interact with reality in certain specific reflexive ways over which we exercise little or no conscious control. A new born chick will freeze if a shadow in the shape of a hawk passes overhead. If the same shadow passes backwards, the chick will ignore it. This is known as an innate releasing mechanism(IRM).

 

 

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Similarly a newborn infant is predisposed to hold it’s breath underwater, hang by its hands from the branch of a tree – and to recognize the pattern of it’s mother’s face and smile.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Perhaps the typical appearance of the alien manifests an innate desire to return to the comfort and uniformity of the womb.

 

 

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Carl Jung

"At a time when the world is divided by an iron curtain...we might expect all sorts of funny things, since when such a thing happens in an individual it means a complete dissociation, which is instantly compensated by symbols of wholeness and unity."

Carl Jung