Mythicallity can be an explicit mode, set off by as-if markers. But I think it's also a kind of pervasive thing, that is, we are always telling stories about ourselves in the course of mundane activity, and those stories have roots in myth, taken broadly. This is the opposite of Galen Strawson, call it "pervasive narrativity".
You actually say pretty much exactly this, so I'm not disagreeing with anything (hard to believe I know). So what is my point? Not sure, maybe that myth is present to us in two different ways – explicitly and implicitly – and I'd like to understand the relationship better. (Also reminded that this is sort of the meta-theme of Joyce's Ulysses).
Two: there is a dark side of myth that is evident in politics and war. Politics runs on mythicallity more than most human activity; and those myths often involve conflict, enmity, and violence. Nationalisms are weaponized myths. Fascism also runs on mythologies, but its really a human universal. Myths are weapons of war, perhaps the most important ones, the motivating forces.
The suppression of myth in modernity, its replacement with more rational or utilitarian values – everybody hates that, but perhaps those old stories were stuffed into a box for good reason, they are dangerous as hell. Of course, they don't stay suppressed – Pandora always opens the box. Speaking of myths.
Would love if you should analyze the Mythopoetic Men's Movement from this perspective; as a vanished gathering that I enjoyed in times past, would be interested how you sort out (to the best of your memory), when it hit the nail on the head or went astray.
Related: Criticisms and laudations you might have for the generation of Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Michael Meade, Huston Smith, Thomas Moore, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, and Robert Bly.
Once again as a more abstract question:
You say: "Depth psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung, dominates popular conceptual understanding of the mode. Although that’s valuable, it’s also distorting. Thinking and feeling are aspects of all the modes, but so are perception and action—and they are at least as important."
In so far as some neo-Jungians DO emphasize perception and action...would love to hear more precise critique.
Yes, I was involved (as a MOP) in the Mythopoetic Men's Movement too. My series of essays inspired by Robert Bly's work is unfinished; the most recent (March 1st, 2017) episode (https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/drinking-the-sun) promises two more, both of which are partly about what the movement got right and what it got wrong. ("A genial criminal" and "Between zero and two wise old men.")
I hope to finish those... someday, somewhere, somehow... "Drinking the sun" ends with "To tell the tales of Chekov’s Gunmen, I have to go meta to everything you have just read, to discuss it in quite a different style. And that is better done elsewhere."
> Criticisms and laudations you might have for [various people]
I've read all of those (except Tomas Moore). With the exception of Bly, who I find inspiring despite faults, they disappointed me. There's too little reality-checking in that stuff, imo.
(I'm curious: What do you think of them?)
> some neo-Jungians DO emphasize perception and action
Circa 2006-2012 I was part of a small (2 men 1 woman) archetypal psychology exploration group (in the James Hillman sense) that gave each other challenges to interact with the world in mythic ways (in very concrete and specific ways).
The resource from the Jungian tradition that we found most useful was Michael Meade, because he most explored visions of the world as opposed to visions of the self...this is a matter of relative weighting, but, for example, you could talk about "Poseidon’s Domain", the world through the vision of "world as chaotic but appeasable", or "going beyond the Pillars of Heracles" (exploring past the known world) as opposed to talking about personal archetypes.
The axis of interest here could be called introspective to extrospective rather than ([thinking & feeling] vs. [perception & action])...there are many neo-Jungians who consider embodying archetypes through movement and theater, but in many cases, this is embodied introspection: action as an expression of feeling, and visionary perception of one's own body; compare extrospection as acting-in-the-world that arises from seeing the world with a visionary gaze.
That's funny; when I wrote the bit you are replying to, I was actually thinking of Michael Meade as the most plausible exception. I was on a retreat with him and Robert Bly, at Harbin Hot Springs, once. Perhaps you were there too!
That said, while doing a web search for something entirely different, I just found this:
> What we don’t necessarily get from the mythopoetic movement of the 90’s is a sense that there is something for us to do with myth. Weekend retreats run by Robert Bly, Michael Meade, and James Hillman were noted for being impactful for what they were, but perhaps not empowering their attendees with skills and practices to take into their lives. They also did not seed communities that could share in the insights and shifts of perspective they gained. These weekend experiences were perhaps simply not capable of making a considerable impact on the indoctrination imposed by western culture.
This is my take also.
I like other parts of the article too, particularly this:
> What lies in the space between these two approaches is the task of working with mythic images, stories, and themes to shape our lives into a tale of mythic beauty and import. By this we don’t mean imposing the narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey on your life to make sense of it. There’s something much more intricate, nuanced, and participatory here. There’s something that is much more preoccupied with beauty, grief, longing, and love, than with making sense of things. This is a way of opening ourselves to the most grand and harrowing experiences of life, because that is the nature of myth.
Separately, I would also be interested to hear your own reflections on what the movement got right, and not so right, and why it fizzled. I've thought about that a fair amount, and hope to write something "someday."
I last saw Michael Meade in 2011 in Mill Valley. Haven't seen him since. Never saw him at Harbin.
Mythopoetics came alive for me because I had a small intimate circle of unconstrained challengers who saw what visions I could enter beyond what my self-imposed limits.
How could that success story break down?
1. Not having a mythopoetic community. Mere reading/listening often does not create a circumstance to push a person beyond their current patterns.
2. The community does not you personally, and so cannot help envision what it means to fit the grand myths of mythopoetics to the individual case, and so practice is a "one size fits all" approach.
3. The community is constrained, trying to be "grand" or "noble" or such. It is thanks to my community I spent many fruitful nights talking to crackheads and people on meth.
In summary, the three key words are "Community", "Intimate", "Unconstrained".
This is not that different than what is useful for spiritual practice in general. But, having no theory of Unconstrained Intimate Community, the Mythopoetic movement generally failed generate such.
Thank you very much! (I was involved in the mid-90s, in the wake of _Iron John_.)
Thinking out loud (partly about our conversations elsewhere), your analysis reminds me of two things. One was my time (mid-80s) in a coven (intimate community, 3-12 people) of bisexual sadomasochist (unconstrained) witches. That was transformational for me at the time, probably with some changes persisting to the present.
The other is Evolving Ground. It's a largish community, with a nebulous (unboundaried, undefined) core group. To me, as a MOP, that group seems intimate in a way similar to successful neopagan covens in the 1980s. And it seems pretty unconstrained, and seriously transformational.
This is remarkable to watch from my peculiar stance at the edge of it. I see individuals changing radically over the course of 2-3 years, and "unconstrained intimate community" seems to be a big part of that. Another is Evolving Ground's emphasis on "making it real," so Vajrayana isn't Esoteric Ancient Wisdom, it's doing whatever works to transform your life right now. (This resonates with a theme of my next post, scheduled for Thursday morning, about "bringing stuff back" from the visionary realm and making it relevant and effective in actuality.)
That is the way vajra sangha is *supposed* to work, but I have not seen it do so elsewhere. Vajrayana, for most people, is either an interest/hobby, or they are serious mostly-solo practitioners who "go to Church on Sundays" because it's socially necessary. There are probably other successful vajra sanghas I don't know about!
I love how you frame the mythic mode as a kind of dual vision. As-if worlds that are both real and not, playful and serious at once. It feels like myth is where semantic fidelity begins, because it holds meaning across contradictory frames without collapsing into either/or. In a culture obsessed with rational control, the mythic mode reminds us that drift, ambiguity, and symbolic play aren’t failures of clarity but generative sources of purpose.
Loved this post. Another good way to emphasise the essentially of bistable perception in our consciousness is letters themselves. We are only really conscious of the shapes themselves in moments of confusion, we see them primarily as units of meaning
My experience points at something a little different than how its presented here.
I think really young children do have this "as-if" mythic way of looking at things, but it's not equivalent to the adult. I'm pretty sure for kids, its much more of a mess of concepts, they almost don't know what a fork vs a spaceship is. They are pre "as-if" in a sense.
And once they figure out how to discriminate and become rational {5-8yo?} (it's a fork, not a spaceship, and you are just pretending) their "as-if" play is symbolic, not mythical. They know the fork is actually more like a drawing of a spaceship rather than a spaceship. They can manipulate or imagine it as a symbol, not as-if the way a toddler playing house is actually a mommy.
And after that, once that's been cleared up and the rational world makes sense, something about the "as-if" world becomes possible.
One way to think about this is the difference between improv and clowning. Rationalists can do improv easily. You pretend to be somebody else. Clowning requires feeling your real emotions, but relating to them in ridiculous proportions and responding in exaggerated ways. (It's not just composing a fantasy world, it's living as if you were ridiculous)
I'm not sure if this distinction I'm making has any significant impact on your presentation. My only thought is that it creates two modes of "mythic" thinking (and this may be hinted at by your denying it being metaphysical). I think sometimes we encounter mythic thinking in people, and it's actually sub-rational thinking. They can talk that it's both, but that's because they either have really skewed visions of reality, OR they have yet to apply basic rationality of excluded middle to their thinking. This is tricky--- it makes mythic objects appealing to both post-rational and subrational at once, and creates lots of confusion. I bet in many contexts the subrational outnumber the postrational by A LOT (insert vague ratio here).
The only consistent way to check this that I've discovered is to see if the person is capable of high level, critical rational talk in the domain that they are talking about mythically. if so, their mythic thinking is "as-if" even if spoken literally.
But this is high effort, and I wish there was a better way to figure it out.
I'm taking this as: if we're going to overlay an understanding of the world, why constrain ourselves to understandings that feel reasonable/rational? Especially when there are possibilities outside those bounds may be more interesting, effective, and valuable.
I don't know QAnon well, but does seem a mythic mode phenomenon, at least partly.
One thing I've read about it is that for many participants it is (was?) largely a creative, playful make-believe game. Apparently its creators designed it that way, or at least understood it as an emerging dynamic that they exploited.
As adults, we get to choose what we "bring back from the world of as-if." Figuring out what will be beneficial in the actual world, and how, is difficult. It requires meta-systematic insight and exploration and experimentation.
The problem with QAnon was mostly with that, rather than with having political fantasies in general.
Given that we seem currently to be at a political dead end in actuality, some skillful exploration of political fantasies to find new ways forward seems among the most valuable activities we could choose now!
Interesting question! I suspect different teachers/lineages would have different answers to that. Also, the answer might be "yes," but they'd want to get into the specifics of "this/how." (My post is pretty vague about that!)
> Rationalism insists that every possible proposition is either absolutely true or absolutely false
I’ve read your work and know what you mean by that. But it might be fun to write about some things that, if not actually contradictory, are in tension with that statement:
Even mathematical proofs entertain hypotheses, if only to prove them true or false. Also, do infinite numbers exist? How about the axiom of choice? Mathematicians choose different axiom systems and play around them, often without taking a position on their truth. Logic systems cannot handle contradiction *locally* but you can always create another system, and it’s fine as long as they remain separate.
Another way to maintain separation is to have multiple interpretations of the same logic system. Something could be true or false depending on your level of interpretation, and that’s fine. Unless it’s twisted back on itself like Gödel did.
It seems hard to see these hypothetical assumptions as absolute truth. Aren’t they more of a game?
Meanwhile, computer games exist. There are large companies building extremely elaborate storytelling systems heavily based on myth, including gods and reincarnation. The uses of Chinese mythology in Genshin Impact are quite striking. These games are fundamentally built on logic, but the data being processed doesn’t have to be “true” and the system doesn’t *care* whether it’s true. There are millions of kids playing Minecraft and other games and they’re clearly relating to it in mythic mode, understanding both that nothing in the game is real and yet it’s very important to them.
More prosaically, millions of office workers use spreadsheets to run what-if scenarios. Financial modeling builds castles in the air with fictional future dollars. In financial markets, enormous bets are made by proponents of competing visions of the future. Most of the value of financial assets is based on future projections and sometimes these assets disappear in a puff of smoke. Oops, you thought you were rich for a while, but I guess that was only a model!
Nowadays there are financial assets that are explicitly based on having no fundamental value at all. Many crash and burn, and yet Bitcoin is astonishingly persistent, apparently based on nothing other than fame and speculation. Nothing on a blockchain is real, and yet, it seems to have value. It seems to be a sort of myth that remains true because hundreds of millions believe in it, and never mind the skeptics.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people talk to fictional characters in their computer via AI chat. Hopefully most of them understand that it’s not real? Sometimes people seem to be confused about whether the “helpful, harmless” computer assistant is a fictional character, though. There are horror stories in the news. But I remember when an eight year old child would use Character.AI to ask God provocative questions for fun, and she didn’t seem confused about this.
Maybe having such experiences at an early age helps to maintain a healthy understanding of what entertainment is. But it doesn’t seem to help at all for avoiding addiction to entertainment.
Just thinking... If author provided a sample of one's own voice reading a piece of own text, so that one could listen the audio in a semblance of author's voice... is that feasible?
This turned out to be very time-consuming, although fun. With more practice, I might be able to do it more efficiently. Currently, I’m able to work only occasionally, so audio/video version don’t seem the best use of time.
I'm thinking of the play button at the top of article, text-to-speech. Substack gives male and female voices to choose from. It'd ve cool to have the author's voice. Not sure it's technically feasible.
Great post! I explore this too in my storyverse ethos and the three paradoxes of desire that form a (possibly universal) grammar of desire. What you might find particularly interesting is that I figured this out by breaking g down how sexual fantasies work. A place where mythic mode is definitely needed!
Thanks! Yes, Egan's chapter "Mythic Understanding" was a major influence on this post. I hope to publish some follow-on posts; the next one is drafted, and has a "further reading" section in which that's item #1.
Aaaugh, I hate it; this post was incredibly uncomfortable to read; please tell me more.
I suspect I tried as a young child to stamp the mythic mode out of myself entirely, and actually succeeded as far as I could then perceive. It is likely crucial for me to recover.
Any chance you could post your "further reading" section quite soon?
Sorry about that! (And I love your first paragraph :)
"Further reading" is coming Thursday morning (post completed and scheduled). It may be disappointing; if it doesn't address your interests, let me know and I'll see if I can think of something more relevant.
Thursday's post is actually about reclaiming the mythic mode as an adult. It's not a how-to guide, though, so maybe not what you are looking for...
I'm down with this! Two points though:
Mythicallity can be an explicit mode, set off by as-if markers. But I think it's also a kind of pervasive thing, that is, we are always telling stories about ourselves in the course of mundane activity, and those stories have roots in myth, taken broadly. This is the opposite of Galen Strawson, call it "pervasive narrativity".
You actually say pretty much exactly this, so I'm not disagreeing with anything (hard to believe I know). So what is my point? Not sure, maybe that myth is present to us in two different ways – explicitly and implicitly – and I'd like to understand the relationship better. (Also reminded that this is sort of the meta-theme of Joyce's Ulysses).
Two: there is a dark side of myth that is evident in politics and war. Politics runs on mythicallity more than most human activity; and those myths often involve conflict, enmity, and violence. Nationalisms are weaponized myths. Fascism also runs on mythologies, but its really a human universal. Myths are weapons of war, perhaps the most important ones, the motivating forces.
The suppression of myth in modernity, its replacement with more rational or utilitarian values – everybody hates that, but perhaps those old stories were stuffed into a box for good reason, they are dangerous as hell. Of course, they don't stay suppressed – Pandora always opens the box. Speaking of myths.
We seem to be in violent agreement here :)
Would love if you should analyze the Mythopoetic Men's Movement from this perspective; as a vanished gathering that I enjoyed in times past, would be interested how you sort out (to the best of your memory), when it hit the nail on the head or went astray.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement
Related: Criticisms and laudations you might have for the generation of Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Michael Meade, Huston Smith, Thomas Moore, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, and Robert Bly.
Once again as a more abstract question:
You say: "Depth psychology, particularly the work of Carl Jung, dominates popular conceptual understanding of the mode. Although that’s valuable, it’s also distorting. Thinking and feeling are aspects of all the modes, but so are perception and action—and they are at least as important."
In so far as some neo-Jungians DO emphasize perception and action...would love to hear more precise critique.
All interesting questions, thank you!
Yes, I was involved (as a MOP) in the Mythopoetic Men's Movement too. My series of essays inspired by Robert Bly's work is unfinished; the most recent (March 1st, 2017) episode (https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/drinking-the-sun) promises two more, both of which are partly about what the movement got right and what it got wrong. ("A genial criminal" and "Between zero and two wise old men.")
I hope to finish those... someday, somewhere, somehow... "Drinking the sun" ends with "To tell the tales of Chekov’s Gunmen, I have to go meta to everything you have just read, to discuss it in quite a different style. And that is better done elsewhere."
> Criticisms and laudations you might have for [various people]
I've read all of those (except Tomas Moore). With the exception of Bly, who I find inspiring despite faults, they disappointed me. There's too little reality-checking in that stuff, imo.
(I'm curious: What do you think of them?)
> some neo-Jungians DO emphasize perception and action
Oh, who?
Circa 2006-2012 I was part of a small (2 men 1 woman) archetypal psychology exploration group (in the James Hillman sense) that gave each other challenges to interact with the world in mythic ways (in very concrete and specific ways).
The resource from the Jungian tradition that we found most useful was Michael Meade, because he most explored visions of the world as opposed to visions of the self...this is a matter of relative weighting, but, for example, you could talk about "Poseidon’s Domain", the world through the vision of "world as chaotic but appeasable", or "going beyond the Pillars of Heracles" (exploring past the known world) as opposed to talking about personal archetypes.
The axis of interest here could be called introspective to extrospective rather than ([thinking & feeling] vs. [perception & action])...there are many neo-Jungians who consider embodying archetypes through movement and theater, but in many cases, this is embodied introspection: action as an expression of feeling, and visionary perception of one's own body; compare extrospection as acting-in-the-world that arises from seeing the world with a visionary gaze.
That's funny; when I wrote the bit you are replying to, I was actually thinking of Michael Meade as the most plausible exception. I was on a retreat with him and Robert Bly, at Harbin Hot Springs, once. Perhaps you were there too!
That said, while doing a web search for something entirely different, I just found this:
> What we don’t necessarily get from the mythopoetic movement of the 90’s is a sense that there is something for us to do with myth. Weekend retreats run by Robert Bly, Michael Meade, and James Hillman were noted for being impactful for what they were, but perhaps not empowering their attendees with skills and practices to take into their lives. They also did not seed communities that could share in the insights and shifts of perspective they gained. These weekend experiences were perhaps simply not capable of making a considerable impact on the indoctrination imposed by western culture.
This is my take also.
I like other parts of the article too, particularly this:
> What lies in the space between these two approaches is the task of working with mythic images, stories, and themes to shape our lives into a tale of mythic beauty and import. By this we don’t mean imposing the narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey on your life to make sense of it. There’s something much more intricate, nuanced, and participatory here. There’s something that is much more preoccupied with beauty, grief, longing, and love, than with making sense of things. This is a way of opening ourselves to the most grand and harrowing experiences of life, because that is the nature of myth.
It's https://rainerbaumorr.substack.com/p/what-we-mean-when-we-say-mythopoetics .
Separately, I would also be interested to hear your own reflections on what the movement got right, and not so right, and why it fizzled. I've thought about that a fair amount, and hope to write something "someday."
I last saw Michael Meade in 2011 in Mill Valley. Haven't seen him since. Never saw him at Harbin.
Mythopoetics came alive for me because I had a small intimate circle of unconstrained challengers who saw what visions I could enter beyond what my self-imposed limits.
How could that success story break down?
1. Not having a mythopoetic community. Mere reading/listening often does not create a circumstance to push a person beyond their current patterns.
2. The community does not you personally, and so cannot help envision what it means to fit the grand myths of mythopoetics to the individual case, and so practice is a "one size fits all" approach.
3. The community is constrained, trying to be "grand" or "noble" or such. It is thanks to my community I spent many fruitful nights talking to crackheads and people on meth.
In summary, the three key words are "Community", "Intimate", "Unconstrained".
This is not that different than what is useful for spiritual practice in general. But, having no theory of Unconstrained Intimate Community, the Mythopoetic movement generally failed generate such.
Thank you very much! (I was involved in the mid-90s, in the wake of _Iron John_.)
Thinking out loud (partly about our conversations elsewhere), your analysis reminds me of two things. One was my time (mid-80s) in a coven (intimate community, 3-12 people) of bisexual sadomasochist (unconstrained) witches. That was transformational for me at the time, probably with some changes persisting to the present.
The other is Evolving Ground. It's a largish community, with a nebulous (unboundaried, undefined) core group. To me, as a MOP, that group seems intimate in a way similar to successful neopagan covens in the 1980s. And it seems pretty unconstrained, and seriously transformational.
This is remarkable to watch from my peculiar stance at the edge of it. I see individuals changing radically over the course of 2-3 years, and "unconstrained intimate community" seems to be a big part of that. Another is Evolving Ground's emphasis on "making it real," so Vajrayana isn't Esoteric Ancient Wisdom, it's doing whatever works to transform your life right now. (This resonates with a theme of my next post, scheduled for Thursday morning, about "bringing stuff back" from the visionary realm and making it relevant and effective in actuality.)
That is the way vajra sangha is *supposed* to work, but I have not seen it do so elsewhere. Vajrayana, for most people, is either an interest/hobby, or they are serious mostly-solo practitioners who "go to Church on Sundays" because it's socially necessary. There are probably other successful vajra sanghas I don't know about!
I love how you frame the mythic mode as a kind of dual vision. As-if worlds that are both real and not, playful and serious at once. It feels like myth is where semantic fidelity begins, because it holds meaning across contradictory frames without collapsing into either/or. In a culture obsessed with rational control, the mythic mode reminds us that drift, ambiguity, and symbolic play aren’t failures of clarity but generative sources of purpose.
Loved this post. Another good way to emphasise the essentially of bistable perception in our consciousness is letters themselves. We are only really conscious of the shapes themselves in moments of confusion, we see them primarily as units of meaning
My experience points at something a little different than how its presented here.
I think really young children do have this "as-if" mythic way of looking at things, but it's not equivalent to the adult. I'm pretty sure for kids, its much more of a mess of concepts, they almost don't know what a fork vs a spaceship is. They are pre "as-if" in a sense.
And once they figure out how to discriminate and become rational {5-8yo?} (it's a fork, not a spaceship, and you are just pretending) their "as-if" play is symbolic, not mythical. They know the fork is actually more like a drawing of a spaceship rather than a spaceship. They can manipulate or imagine it as a symbol, not as-if the way a toddler playing house is actually a mommy.
And after that, once that's been cleared up and the rational world makes sense, something about the "as-if" world becomes possible.
One way to think about this is the difference between improv and clowning. Rationalists can do improv easily. You pretend to be somebody else. Clowning requires feeling your real emotions, but relating to them in ridiculous proportions and responding in exaggerated ways. (It's not just composing a fantasy world, it's living as if you were ridiculous)
I'm not sure if this distinction I'm making has any significant impact on your presentation. My only thought is that it creates two modes of "mythic" thinking (and this may be hinted at by your denying it being metaphysical). I think sometimes we encounter mythic thinking in people, and it's actually sub-rational thinking. They can talk that it's both, but that's because they either have really skewed visions of reality, OR they have yet to apply basic rationality of excluded middle to their thinking. This is tricky--- it makes mythic objects appealing to both post-rational and subrational at once, and creates lots of confusion. I bet in many contexts the subrational outnumber the postrational by A LOT (insert vague ratio here).
The only consistent way to check this that I've discovered is to see if the person is capable of high level, critical rational talk in the domain that they are talking about mythically. if so, their mythic thinking is "as-if" even if spoken literally.
But this is high effort, and I wish there was a better way to figure it out.
Thanks! Hmm, I think the next post (finished and scheduled for Thursday morning) is kind of about this. I’ll be interested to read your reaction then!
I'm taking this as: if we're going to overlay an understanding of the world, why constrain ourselves to understandings that feel reasonable/rational? Especially when there are possibilities outside those bounds may be more interesting, effective, and valuable.
Loved this piece
I love this, and am REALLY looking forward to the rest of this series.
I also feel like there is overlap here with John Vervaeke's work on the Imaginal, like you're both touching on the same or a similar underlying thing.
This is the part of your worldview that I understand the least, so further explanations would be most welcome.
A somewhat provocative question: what's your take on QAnon? Do people that apparently take it seriously do "mythic mode" wrong (or correctly, even)?
Yes, more coming, gods willing!
I don't know QAnon well, but does seem a mythic mode phenomenon, at least partly.
One thing I've read about it is that for many participants it is (was?) largely a creative, playful make-believe game. Apparently its creators designed it that way, or at least understood it as an emerging dynamic that they exploited.
As adults, we get to choose what we "bring back from the world of as-if." Figuring out what will be beneficial in the actual world, and how, is difficult. It requires meta-systematic insight and exploration and experimentation.
The problem with QAnon was mostly with that, rather than with having political fantasies in general.
Given that we seem currently to be at a political dead end in actuality, some skillful exploration of political fantasies to find new ways forward seems among the most valuable activities we could choose now!
Is this how one should utilize deity yoga?
Interesting question! I suspect different teachers/lineages would have different answers to that. Also, the answer might be "yes," but they'd want to get into the specifics of "this/how." (My post is pretty vague about that!)
“After it is over, which aspects of the “other world” follow us into everyday life?”
More of this please!
> Rationalism insists that every possible proposition is either absolutely true or absolutely false
I’ve read your work and know what you mean by that. But it might be fun to write about some things that, if not actually contradictory, are in tension with that statement:
Even mathematical proofs entertain hypotheses, if only to prove them true or false. Also, do infinite numbers exist? How about the axiom of choice? Mathematicians choose different axiom systems and play around them, often without taking a position on their truth. Logic systems cannot handle contradiction *locally* but you can always create another system, and it’s fine as long as they remain separate.
Another way to maintain separation is to have multiple interpretations of the same logic system. Something could be true or false depending on your level of interpretation, and that’s fine. Unless it’s twisted back on itself like Gödel did.
It seems hard to see these hypothetical assumptions as absolute truth. Aren’t they more of a game?
Meanwhile, computer games exist. There are large companies building extremely elaborate storytelling systems heavily based on myth, including gods and reincarnation. The uses of Chinese mythology in Genshin Impact are quite striking. These games are fundamentally built on logic, but the data being processed doesn’t have to be “true” and the system doesn’t *care* whether it’s true. There are millions of kids playing Minecraft and other games and they’re clearly relating to it in mythic mode, understanding both that nothing in the game is real and yet it’s very important to them.
More prosaically, millions of office workers use spreadsheets to run what-if scenarios. Financial modeling builds castles in the air with fictional future dollars. In financial markets, enormous bets are made by proponents of competing visions of the future. Most of the value of financial assets is based on future projections and sometimes these assets disappear in a puff of smoke. Oops, you thought you were rich for a while, but I guess that was only a model!
Nowadays there are financial assets that are explicitly based on having no fundamental value at all. Many crash and burn, and yet Bitcoin is astonishingly persistent, apparently based on nothing other than fame and speculation. Nothing on a blockchain is real, and yet, it seems to have value. It seems to be a sort of myth that remains true because hundreds of millions believe in it, and never mind the skeptics.
Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people talk to fictional characters in their computer via AI chat. Hopefully most of them understand that it’s not real? Sometimes people seem to be confused about whether the “helpful, harmless” computer assistant is a fictional character, though. There are horror stories in the news. But I remember when an eight year old child would use Character.AI to ask God provocative questions for fun, and she didn’t seem confused about this.
Maybe having such experiences at an early age helps to maintain a healthy understanding of what entertainment is. But it doesn’t seem to help at all for avoiding addiction to entertainment.
Just thinking... If author provided a sample of one's own voice reading a piece of own text, so that one could listen the audio in a semblance of author's voice... is that feasible?
Not sure I understand? I’ve done voice versions of some of my posts. (Like this one, to take a random example: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/priests-and-kings). Is that what you mean?
This turned out to be very time-consuming, although fun. With more practice, I might be able to do it more efficiently. Currently, I’m able to work only occasionally, so audio/video version don’t seem the best use of time.
I'm thinking of the play button at the top of article, text-to-speech. Substack gives male and female voices to choose from. It'd ve cool to have the author's voice. Not sure it's technically feasible.
Oh, I see! Yes, I think it would be technically feasible for Substack to offer that as a feature, but currently they don't as far as I can tell.
Great post! I explore this too in my storyverse ethos and the three paradoxes of desire that form a (possibly universal) grammar of desire. What you might find particularly interesting is that I figured this out by breaking g down how sexual fantasies work. A place where mythic mode is definitely needed!
Let me know if this interests you.
Thanks David. I riff on your article at https://johnstokdijk538.substack.com/p/october-14-2025.
I like that! Link for anyone else who'd like to take a look: https://substack.com/home/post/p-183570155
Thanks! Yes, Egan's chapter "Mythic Understanding" was a major influence on this post. I hope to publish some follow-on posts; the next one is drafted, and has a "further reading" section in which that's item #1.
Aaaugh, I hate it; this post was incredibly uncomfortable to read; please tell me more.
I suspect I tried as a young child to stamp the mythic mode out of myself entirely, and actually succeeded as far as I could then perceive. It is likely crucial for me to recover.
Any chance you could post your "further reading" section quite soon?
Sorry about that! (And I love your first paragraph :)
"Further reading" is coming Thursday morning (post completed and scheduled). It may be disappointing; if it doesn't address your interests, let me know and I'll see if I can think of something more relevant.
Thursday's post is actually about reclaiming the mythic mode as an adult. It's not a how-to guide, though, so maybe not what you are looking for...