HOW MYTHS CAN HELP US FIND MEANING

1. HOW MYTHS CAN HELP US FIND MEANING • 1. What is a myth? • 2. Examples of common myths. • 3. What is the problem of loss of meaning? • 4. Developing your own myth.

2. HOW MYTHS CAN HELP US FIND MEANING WHEN MEANINGLESSNESS ABOUNDS "Meaning makes a great many things endurable - perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man." Memories, Dreams, and Reflections- Jung "Follow your bliss. If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time." — Joseph Campbell

3. MYTHS AND MEANING Michael Meade: “Nature is the breath of spirit,” he says, “and when one finds one’s inner nature, one finds the connection, the umbilical cord to Nature.” he says this world as Mythos, a radical, constantly invented story saying, “ myth fills in the spaces of what’s missing.” He encourages us to “live our own life, the words written on the soul, to sing the song that’s written on our soul!” He reminds us that Jung taught: when we don’t deal with what’s on the inside, those issues appear on the outside as fate.

4. MYTHS AND MEANING • ANCIENT MYTHS: CHAOS-Chaos - in one ancient Greek myth of creation, the dark, silent abyss from which all things came into existence. According to the Theogony of Hesiod, Chaos generated the solid mass of Earth, from which arose the starry, cloud-filled Heaven. Mother Earth and Father Heaven, personified respectively as Gaea and her offspring Uranus, were the parents of the Titans. In a later theory, Chaos is the formless matter from which the cosmos, or harmonious order, was created. MAYAN CREATION MYTH: The four gods.

5. MAYAN CREATION MYTH

6. MAYAN CREATION MYTH

7. CHRIST MASS • CHRISTMAS originated from the word "Christ-Mass" which is a Roman Catholic tradition, a special mass performed in celebration of Christ's birth. • Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Christian Church. It was not celebrated, commemorated, or observed, neither by the apostles nor in the apostolic church -- not for at least the first 300 years of church history, after Catholicism took over the first church of Rome which was originally established by Apostle Paul. It was in the year 350 A.D. that Pope Julius-I declared that Christ’s birth should be celebrated on “December 25”. History reveals that the Church at Jerusalem commenced the celebration of Christmas only during 440 A.D., following the leadings of Roman Catholicism.

8. CHRIST MASS • Specifically, December 25th was the Victory Festival of the “SUN-God" in the pagan Babylonian world. In the ancient Roman Empire, the same celebration can be traced back to the Roman Festival called “Saturnalia”, which honored Saturn, the harvest god, and Mithras, the god of light. They held the circus during this time of the year. Both festivals were celebrated during or shortly after the winter solstice, between the 17th and 23rd of December.

9. CHRIST MASS • Ancient history reveals that in past ancient pagan civilizations, it is no coincidence that December 25th was also the birthday of their pagan gods. All of BABYLONIAN and ROMAN FESTIVALS were characterized by 5-7 day celebration periods of unrestrained or orgiastic revelry and licentiousness held between the 17th and the 23rd of December. December is the time of year when days began to lengthen and ancient man was blessed with a "regeneration of nature" and held an annual celebration for it.

10. MYTH AND MEANING • There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games. TheMyth of Sisyphus, ALBERT CAMUS

11. MYTH OF SISYPHUS

12. MYTH AND MEANING • Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. • What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. • I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive. Joseph Campbell

13. MYTH AND MEANING • BOB DYLAN-TOO MUCH OF NOTHING • Too much of nothing Can make a man ill at ease- • One man's temper might rise • -While another man's temper might freeze • In the day of confession • We cannot mock a soul • Oh, when there's too much of nothing No one has control. • When there's too much of nothing It can cause a man to weep • He can walk the streets and boast like Of what he'd like to keep • But it's all been done before It's all been written in the book • And where there's too much of nothing Nobody should look. • And too much of nothing can make a man a liar. • It can cause one man to sleep on nails It can cause others to eat fire. • Everybody's doin' somethin' I heard it in a dream, • But when there's too much of nothing It just makes a fella mean.

14. MYTH AND MEANING

15. MYTH AND MEANIING • A loss of meaning in life can mean an inability to find metaphor, the symbolic, the ability to create, to dream and to feel a part of life. • Depression and anxiety often interfere with these functions. • When life becomes concrete, when the psyche flat lines and interprets life as black and white, we can assume one has lost his or her mythology/meaning. • When there is no numinosity-a back light to normal objects-there is no depth or quality to all the “things” of life.

16. MYTH AND MEANING • When we have a difficult time holding the tension of the opposites and we collapse to one side of the question, we lose the ability to create a third possibility-the one that comes from the unconscious and often has the wisdom of the 2 million year old self. • When we lose the empathic connection to others we lose the meaningful aspect of what it means to be uniquely human. • When the “other” becomes the repository of our projections we lose the slender thread that binds together. • Meaninglessness needs a place to grow, to take root and when we reduce the world to concreteness, black and whiteness, people to objects we offer fertile ground for nihilism, entropy and ultimate destruction.

17. MYTH AND MEANING

18. MYTH AND MEANING • HOW THE UNIVERSE PROVIDES MEANING: • Synchronicity- acausal events • Complex systems theory • Archetypal theory • Living myths • Fate • Images produced by the psyche-especially in dreams

19. MYTH AND MEANING • THE SYMBOLIC STORY OF CHRIST ON THE CROSS. • A living myth if taken metaphorically. • Something to access in the here and now rather than the there and then.