DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What is the Ecological Vision of Myth? #September #blog #mythology #ecology #SundayMorning

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What is the Ecological Vision of Myth?

Production, development, growth, and consumption are all on the rise. We hate to imagine the economy behaving otherwise. And we pretend that this stage in the economic cycle is the norm. Why do we pretend?     -Dave Alber,  "The Sustainable Vision of Endangered Societies"

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s mythopoetry.com blog.

In previous blogs… I introduced the core grammar of myth and described the alchemical nature of myth… now lets consider the moral and philosophical implications of participating in a unified world recognized within the awareness-heart, empathy as a synthetic process of awareness connecting us all together.

How can we treat apparent “others” within a worldview that recognizes

1.) everything as divine and
2.) everything as an expression of a unified field of being.

It’s a quandary pondered in the essay “Guest Rituals”.

In The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, we see that across the globe, the polytheistic world has resolved the problem presented by the mystical revelation along ecological lines, because there are sustainable vision underlying the myths of indigenous people across many continents.

The 2nd day of Tihar festival is Kukur Tihar, a day when
dogs are celebrated as a manifestation of the divine.

[What follows is from The Heart of Myth.]

The Sustainable Vision
              of Endangered Societies

No economist, industrialist, or politician would ever suggest that the earth’s resources might be consumed indefinitely at their present rate. Yet, looking at the media, the compulsion to consume appears paramount, while the Classical virtue of temperance is nowhere to be seen. Production, development, growth, and consumption are all on the rise. We hate to imagine the economy behaving otherwise. And we pretend that this stage in the economic cycle is the norm. Why do we pretend? Perhaps at some deep level, Western Culture does not believe in limits. Perhaps that is its key virtue, inspiring discoverers and adventurers to push the envelope in all directions. That is the song we like to hear, is it not? It is the theme of the DVD we rent. All limits are surpassed; all conventions are broken; the young lovers escape the traditional values that confine them. Yet, limits are also what define and give context to every freedom.

Nevertheless, on realizing the dangers of the global civilization’s unsustainable economic vision, many people have looked to other models—other visions offering a more workable human future. Surprisingly, sustainable visions of human culture are in abundance. In seeking them, we find ourselves immediately upon the “red road” of plentitude. Many small societies have maintained sustainable modes of living for thousands of years. Historically, their vision has been the norm—ours the exception. As Jerry Mander states in Paradigm Wars: Indigenous People’s Resistance to Globalization:

. . . it is no small irony that the very reason that native peoples have become such prime targets for global corporations and their intrinsic drives is exactly because most indigenous peoples have been so very successful over millennia at maintaining cultures, economies, worldviews and practices that are not built upon some ideal of economic growth or short-term profit-seeking.[1]

Therefore, there is not only a moral imperative to protect the cultures threatened by economic shortsightedness, but also an imperative of ultimate practicality. “In more ways than one, indigenous issues are the frontier issues of our time.” Mander explains:

They deal with geographic frontier struggles where the larger, destructive globalization process attempts to suck up the last living domains on the planet—its life forms, its basic resources, its peoples—in the empty cause of short-term wealth accumulation. And it is also a frontier struggle in conceptual terms: What are the values that can sustain us for the future? What are the worldviews that can keep the earth alive? How are we to live on behalf of coming generations of human beings and the larger community of beings and creatures?[2]

For global civilization to “progress” on its present course, people must be exploited like “resources.” By contrast, the core mode of perception of polytheistic communities—the knowing of the heart—is a vigorous safeguard against such a systemic cultural imbalance. The knowing of the heart is congruent with the great traditions of Western Humanism and is the safest way for individuals within the system-driven civilization to sustain the fragile candle of their
fullest humanity.

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[1] Mander, Jerry and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006. p. 4.

[2] Ibid. p. 10.

The Organization of The Heart of Myth

Following some of the logic of Greenwood Press’s The Endangered Peoples of the World Series, the polytheistic cultures in The Heart of Myth are organized into six sections which align with a geographic region: North America, the Arctic, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The Heart of Myth describes several communities from within each region and relates their mythological narratives.

Choosing the Cultures in The Heart of Myth

In choosing the cultures of this book, diversity was of key interest. To use Africa as an example, oftentimes when discussing African mythology, the Yoruba mythology that made its way west to the American continents and Caribbean islands due to the slave trade is discussed as representing the varied mythologies of this vast continent. However, African culture and mythology is much more diverse. Speaking collectively of African mythology makes about as much sense as speaking collectively of Asian mythology: as though the mythologies of India’s Vedas, Puranas, epics, regional and folk traditions; Tibet’s Bonpo and Buddhism; Nepal’s syncretic spirituality; China’s Taoism; Japan’s Shinto; and South East Asia’s diverse mixture of indigenous traditions and most of the traditions mentioned above would so conveniently fit into a single category. The importance of highlighting this diversity is precisely because those communities that are the least recognized are those most endangered by their apparent invisibility.

In doing the research for this book, one of the delights of choosing this approach was in discovering, again and again, that the seeming invisibility of a culture in no way demonstrates a reduction of the beauty or sophistication of its mythology, life ways, or spiritual beliefs. The Karanga mythology of Zimbabwe, for example, reveals a biological sophistication comparable to Indian Ayurveda or China’s Taoist medicine. It is due precisely to its sophistication that Zimbabwe’s traditional healers are fighting against a Swiss University and a U.S. corporation, both of whom want to patent Zimbabwe’s snake bean tree.

The three types of diversity emphasized in the selection of narratives are geographic diversity, cultural diversity, and diversity of endangerment.

·         Geographic Diversity. All geographic regions in this book are represented by different geographic terrain and the cultures that have developed out of them.

·         Cultural Diversity. Africa, for example, is home to hunting and gathering, farming, fishing, and herding cultures as well as cultures whose life ways represent borrowed elements from overseas and mixtures of all of the above, often in increasingly modern urban areas. An emphasis is placed on the more unrepresented at-risk communities.

·         Diversity of endangerment. The world’s indigenous cultures are defending themselves from many corporations, universities, and political groups. The problems they face are many and varied. It is the intention of this book to present a clear picture of the diverse range of difficulties facing these traditional people.

Service To Endangered Polytheistic Peoples

Like the transformational alchemy described within so many of these myths, it is generally understood in the Orient that to know is to be transformed. According to this philosophy, to know something means to behave fundamentally different from before the acquisition of the new knowledge. Truly then, we have learned nothing at all about the often overlooked abuses of global civilization and the communities who are threatened by it, unless we, as individuals and as a greater community:

·         Alter our relationship to the corporations, nations, and institutions that are endangering or exterminating the living polytheistic communities, and

·         Extend our relationships outward—in the sympathetic recognition of the heart—to these endangered communities in action, financial support, or humanitarian service, and

·         Pressure the current administrators of the system of economic globalization to support a sustainable vision of the human future that does not depend on the exploitation or systematic extermination of others.

The Heart of Myth ends with a list of resources that offer service to endangered societies. In this collection of myths, all stories—as projections of the sympathetic heart—express a devotional worldview. Let this devotional vision of the absolute divinity of the “other” inspire us to new knowledge expressed in our individual and collective imagination, compassion, and action. May our hearts be awakened sympathetically within all our relationships, and may our behavior be consistent to the eternal values of myth.

In The Next Blog 

We explore how the grammar of the mystical function of myth and the ecological vision of myth relate to the myths of North America. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Alber is the author of To the Dawn, Myth & Medium, and Alien Sex in Silicon Valley. His book The Heart of Myth is a global anthology of living myth that unpacks the grammar of world mythology. His website is DaveAlber.com and his English learning products are at EasyAmericanAccent.com. 

DAVE ALBER  September Guest Blogs

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Alchemy Of Myth #FirstDayOfFall #FridayReads #September #blog

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WHAT IS THE ALCHEMY OF MYTH

From the perspective of the mystical function of myth, myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to. 
-Dave Alber 

INTRODUCTION

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetry.com blog.

I introduced the core grammar of myth in the last blog titled: “What Is The Core Grammar Of Mythology?”

In that last blog, I wrote about the grammar of myth from the perspective of the mystical function of myth. Myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to. From the perspective of this mystical function, myth is a way to communicate an experience that is also the essence of Taoism:

The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.

Nothingness is the Origin of Heaven and Earth.

Beingness is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.[1] 

In plain language, thought and ideation — giving things names and living in a worldview of things with names — is understood as a secondary process of the mind, whereas simply experiencing life directly uninfluenced by that secondary process — simply being aware without naming what comes into awareness — is a return to the primary level of experience. In this context, the lines above from the Tao te Ching are meditation instructions… as are myths functioning from the grammar of the mystical function of myth!

Myths often refer to the heart as an organ of awareness that opens one up to the primary experience of life. As stated in the previous blog: Sympathetic awareness, empathetic consciousness, or knowing experience directly through the heart of compassion is highly valued and cultivated as a primary truth. It is the truth not to be forgotten lying behind all arguments or apparent differences within the interconnected continuum of all beings. This fullness of difference (what in India is called maya or “that which can be measured”) is indeed more deeply recognized as a stream of pulsating energy within which we participate in harmony (as manifestations of maya-shakti) if we make the upward moving recognition of this unified field of simultaneous energy and consciousness. We will perceive this same experience as disharmony if we are fixated in the downward moving recognition of difference, distinction, and separateness. For in polytheistic cultures the contextual appreciation of reality is alchemical.

The word alchemical is used in the sense of being psychologically transformational, of being mobile among states of awareness, and especially of being mobile in the world of forms while remaining grounded in an experience of life’s unfiltered primacy.

The alchemical/transformational nature of the mythological worldview is used — all over the world — as a communication medium for humanity’s shared eternal values. This is important because it is genuinely not that difficult to experience moments of enlightenment or eternal values on the meditation cushion, however it requires a deft stabilization of awareness in daily life to remain grounded in enlightenment and eternal values while moving through a world defined by socially communal constructs and names.

The Himalayan bhava chakra depicts a wheel sliced
 like a pie into six sections.  Each section represents 
a different habitual trance state that people fall into.
 Thinking and ideation define one  of these habitual  
trance states.  This fresco is from the Potala Palace in Tibet.

We take the world of names and forms for granted, but when we access the primary level of our awareness and then look upon the world of things, we realize that the habitual — un-mystical — worldview of things and forms is a secondary trance state. (It’s one of the six trance states described in the Himalayan Buddhist bhava chakra.) 

notes

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[1] This is the first line of the Tao te Ching. Tao te Ching Daily. http://taotechingdaily.com/1-the-eternal-tao/. Accessed 08-31-2017.

The Inherent Alchemy of the Mythological Worldview
Excerpt taken from "The Heart Of Myth"

An alchemical recognition saturates the polytheistic mythological worldview. This recognition is of two movements: one upward toward unity and wholeness; its contrary force moving downward toward diversity, difference, and disintegration. These forces are represented in religious imagery in the Chinese Taijitu symbol of the yin and the yang and the Indian Shivite Hindu symbol of Shiva and Shakti represented as the upward and downward pointing triangles within the six-pointed star.

In polytheistic cultures, the alchemical model of these two simultaneous processes provides an accurate view of the transformations of life, wherewith one may experience the ephemera of one’s experience (whether animals, food, loved ones, and even oneself) transform from one process to another. It is also a model for recognizing and cultivating states of awareness while in this play of life.

In the alchemical model, states of awareness are appreciated as a regular, if not continuous, spiritual practice. The polytheistic community member “checks in” to recognize the state of his awareness in the moment. Is awareness and attention focused on selfish motivations that separate the community member from others (the downward movement)? Or is awareness and attention held in meditation on what would benefit the community (the upward movement)? In the later experience, the “community” can be as large as one’s worldview. Indeed, as large as imagination can make it.

The Eternal Values of Myth

In pan-Indian aesthetics food consists of rasas or “flavors”.  A
traditional meal is a mandala which contains all of the flavors of
life. It is a symbol of perfected “flavors” within the sphere of unity.

The eternal values (or virtues) of love, joy, truth, peace, freedom, heroism, loyalty, and compassion transcend culture styles. For example, in India an understanding of the rasas, or “flavors” of life, is used as a spiritual compass. It is understood that the flavors of love, joy, and peace, if fully embodied, manifest as expressions of a transcendent recognition of reality.

The eternal values are, in a way, mediating forces between human experience and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans[2], but as with the virtues in Dante’s Purgatorio, they lead to the Absolute in the Paradiso. Medieval Catholic Europe held that the seven virtues (chastity, abstinence, liberality, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility) represent unchanging values that give confidence to the spiritual aspirant seeking fixed truths. The fixed truths are not that this or that historical event occurred with such and such results. But rather, that kindness exists—that it exists as an eternal value and that the eternal value can be drawn from and embodied. The virtue is a transcendent form with recognizable temporal manifestations. An aspirant can halfheartedly seek to embody a virtue and in doing so he symbolizes ambivalence more than the virtue he seeks. For again, from the perspective of these worldviews with more time and experience than our own—everything symbolizes!

These Medieval virtues were Catholic elaborations on the cardinal virtues (temperance, prudence, courage, and justice) of the polytheistic Greek worldview. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that to practice any one virtue to perfection would be to have mastered them all, and Socrates himself contemplated the virtues in many of his dialogues. Furthermore, the word virtue itself comes from the Greek ethike arete, which means “habitual excellence” and, as such, “is something practiced at all times.”[3] The virtues were a second attention practice in the language of the Buddhists. A second attention practice keeps the practitioner awake and aware of his or her state of consciousness by keeping secondary awareness on a visualization, meditation, mantra, place in the body, or breath. It is a type of mindfulness meditation. For the Ancient Greeks then, the practice of habitual excellence allowed people to act from a continually maintained core experience of eternal values.

Some spiritual practices in Chinese Taoism are comparable. In Chuang Tzu’s story The Sign of Virtue Complete, the reader is asked to consider the element water as a spiritual example for balancing virtues within one’s life. “What do you mean when you say his virtue takes no form?” a seeker asks a sage. The sage replies:  The sage replies:

“Among level things, water at rest is the most perfect, and therefore it can serve  as a standard. It guards what is inside and shows no movement outside. Virtue is the establishment of perfect harmony. Though virtue takes no form, things cannot break away from it.”[4]

This Lakshmi mandala is placed in front of Nepalese houses on the 3^rd day of Tihar (Gai Tihar). Lakshmi (Laxmi) is the goddess of abundance. The tiny footprints are meant to lead abundance into the house. The holiday is a celebration of the abundance of life.

In polytheistic cultures, the meditation on eternal values, understood as a continual awareness practice, creates balance. The maintenance of personal harmony is the base experience of most people in these communities.

The deities of polytheistic cultures refer, express, and manifest these eternal values. They are vitalizing energies and expressions of consciousness that, for the balanced individual or community, model appropriate responses to the rhythms of life, whether reflected in seasonal festivals or the transformations of the body in age.

These eternal values are also what Plato called “forms” and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called “archetypes.” Jung states:

The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate to the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them “motifs”; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy-Bruhl’s concept of “representations collectives,” and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as “categories of the imagination.” Adolf Bastian long ago called them “elementary” or “primordial thoughts.” From these references, it should be clear enough that my idea of the archetype—literally a pre-existent form—does not stand alone, but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of knowledge.[5]

Eternal values are inherent to all humanity. Without the guidance of such values, people become ambivalent, attaching their values to petty fads, opinions, and comforts. For certainly, as well as maintaining eternal values, the concerns of an individual or an entire civilization may very well be petty or middling. A people may say they stand for freedom, but if their idea of “freeing” the people of the hour means conditioning that population to be subservient to an externally imposed economic system and/or the acquisition of their resources, then their actual understanding of freedom is suspect. If people fool themselves on this point then they will suffer quietly, or at least unintelligibly, because they will have lost touch with the eternal values and forever mistake false values, perhaps misshapen and monstrous values, for the virtues themselves. With the loss of eternal values, they will act out merely as beasts mimicking the actions of men. Their greatest triumphs will be the winning of wars, the economic domination of others, and the acquisition of profit, power, or comfort.

The global civilization, at times, denigrates the values or worldviews of “primitive” polytheistic people. People in the global civilization after all, have an impressive worldview that encompasses not only the economically quantifiable material world, but also, more subtle and often surprisingly beautiful aspects of the entire universe as explored through myriad sciences. Yet, this civilization’s mass marketing of triviality has shattered its people’s self-recognition with the eternal values of myth.

Re-experiencing these values with an open sympathetic heart reconnects us not only to the people who transmitted their wisdom through their stories, but to our own depth, height, and breadth. We are returned to our most fully human context and we are able to recognize our lives in relation to profound life-affirming values. Communion with these values allows us to be effective, not as automatons serving a system’s agenda, but as vigorous human beings serving the fuller profundity of a responsive life.

***********************************************

In the 4th and next guest blog in this series by cultural mythologer, Dave Alber he will explore the ecological and sustainable vision of living myth.  Look for it this coming Sunday!

notes

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[2] “Life’s awesome and fascinating mystery.” The Latin phrase was coined by Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford U.P., 1958. p. 12.

[3] Adler, Mortimer, J. and Charles Van Doren. Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1977. pp. 630, 634.

[4] Chuang Tzu. Basic Writings. Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia U. P., 1964. p. 70. 

notes

[5] Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New York: Princeton U.P., 1990. pp. 42-3.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Alber is the author of To the Dawn, Myth & Medium, and Alien Sex in Silicon Valley. His book The Heart of Myth is a global anthology of living myth that unpacks the grammar of world mythology. His website is DaveAlber.com and his English learning products are at EasyAmericanAccent.com.

DAVE ALBER  September Guest Blogs

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology? #mythology #TuesdayThoughts #September #blog

The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People

WHAT IS THE CORE GRAMMAR OF MYTHOLOGY?

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetics In Culture Blog.
I gave a short bio in the last blog: “What is myth?” 

In that last blog, I wrote about awareness states being primary to the grammar of myth. If myth, for example, is a sphere, then an awareness state is at the gravitational core of that sphere. This is the premise of my book The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, which is an anthology of living myth (meaning the myths of living polytheistic communities.) Unpacked section at a time… The Heart of Myth is an attempt to share with a wider audience the grammar of myth as a system for the transmission of profound states of awareness.

If Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces was Campbell’s attempt to teach people how to read a myth, then The Heart of Myth is my attempt to unpack the grammar of the mystical function of myth.

To this end, in this blog… we will take our first steps in our discovery — inward, ever inward — toward that foundational state of awareness from which myth emerges. 

What follows is from my book pictured above, The Heart Of Myth.

Introduction

Global Civilization and the Wisdom of Polytheistic Peoples

Since I was a boy, I spent many hours with my nose in a book while my imagination flew to other continents entirely. I was often entertained, and am still daily entertained, by the most direct manifestations of wonder I know—mythological tales from around the world! To me, myths always present an enigmatic, semi-recognizable, yet palpable beauty that defies logical explanation. Like riddles, Zen koans, poems, or pieces of music that bring unexpected tears or elation, myths communicate experiences that challenge the rational processes of the mind. Whether the story is a Crow myth of world creation or an Inuit tale of shamanic flight; a Maori story of the origin of knowledge or an Ainu tale of supernatural realms, the mythologies of the world present one vast and interconnected tapestry of timeless beauty and timely wisdom. Simultaneously, these stories refresh us with their eternal human values and shock us awake to our responsibility in both our living continuity and the present historical moment.

Perhaps because my enjoyment of mythology has too often been both bookish and escapist, it occurred to me with some shock that economic and political forces now endanger most of the world’s living polytheistic communities. Despite the importance of mythology for artists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and other professionals in the modern world (not to mention those people to whom the stories are still fluid emanations from spiritual realms), the contemporary inheritors of these primary stories find themselves threatened by voracious economic and social forces that know no bounds and, at present, no human restraint. As Barbara Rose Johnston states in the forward to the Endangered Peoples of the World series:

Human action and a history of social inequity leave some people more vulnerable than others. This vulnerability results in ethnocide (loss of a way of life), ecocide (destruction of the environment), and genocide (death of an entire group of people).[1]

The polytheistic communities visited in these pages are so imperiled. In popular usage, the word myth denotes an untruth—a lie. And although there is some truth to that, the truth of the lie exists in our own forgetfulness to myth as one of the foundational expressions of both human culture and spirituality. In Homeric Greece, the term mythos was understood as the mode of speech of the muses and poetic bards. However, it was also appreciated as “an unvarnished truth . . . a blunt and aggressive act of candor, uttered by powerful males in the heat of battle or agonistic assembly.”[2] In Ancient Greece, then, mythos was a mode of expression that was both radically complex and profoundly straightforward. Mythos was understood as expressing a direct form of knowledge. This direct form of knowledge is recognized in every corner of the globe as the heart’s way of knowing. “What does your heart tell you?” we still ask our friends and loved ones, when facing important decisions. We trust the heart implicitly with the understanding that it is incapable of lying. What the heart knows, it knows through a direct sympathetic relationship that defies the logic of the materialistic worldview.

The Heart’s Way of Knowing

Sympathetic knowledge is to know another’s experience directly by becoming the “other.” It is the source of empathy. It is knowledge of the heart. This knowledge of the heart is the principle way of knowing in polytheistic culture. To know an “other” is to become the other—to loose the false perception of separateness with the other—and to feel through the other’s world directly. In polytheistic cultures when people know the gods, they know them directly—sympathetically—through their hearts. It is the nature of the heart to know directly.

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell considers our historical moment in the late 20th century—the global crisis of the world’s people being unified by a technological economy. He ponders the question, “What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?”
He writes:  

One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight’s dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognitions of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a “thou” where there would have been otherwise only an “it.”[3]