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Possibly the first modern scientist to realize that myth affected people on a personal level was Carl Jung. Following his studies in psychology, he went to work in a clinic treating psychotics who were predominantly schizophrenics. As he worked with these people, he began to notice that they related not to the outside world but to a world within themselves in which mythic themes repeated. His patients were caught in a view of reality which reflects ancient themes of behavior reminiscent of Greek and other culture’s mythic themes. It was apparent that these mythic themes were rising from the Unconscious realms of the minds of his patients and ‘possessing their thoughts and emotions.’ As a result, Jung began to study mythology so he might begin to recognize the stories his patients felt themselves to be living.

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The Purposes of Myth

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His experiences soon lead Jung into a shamanic experience of “falling into the Unconscious” where he himself experienced what it felt like to be possessed by a myth. Shamanic traditions have spoken about what it felt like to experience this moment of crisis: it has been called “the Knock of the Spirit” in some traditions. Modern psychology would refer to it as an emotional or mental breakdown as the conscious mind loses control and something beyond one’s consciousness catches hold of you and begins to guide your actions.

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In old videos of tribal ceremonies, this experience has been documented again and again. Ritual calls forth these same energies. Religious experience calls for these same energies. The individual is caught up in a powerful experience in which he or she is moved by power. On the positive side, these experiences gave each individual a sense of the Presence of the Divine—of being a part of something guided by the Divine. These experiences integrated each individual into the myths of his tribe, culture and world. They created a sense of meaning and purpose to the life of each individual. They justified their needs as being a part of something beyond themselves and in fact divine in need. They made “all right” life’s painful experiences, suffering and finally even one’s death as religious, ‘right’, in alignment with the Laws of Creation.

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The experience of being caught up in a myth is an extremely powerful experience. It is the primary source of religious experience. In fact, Jung referred to these experience as ‘numinous,’ and having experienced them, Jung knew what he was talking about. Once experienced, an individual is ‘hooked,’ for nothing read in a book or heard in a sermon can compare with the feeling of contact with these mythic energies.

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Living in a Mythic Universe

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Before the coming of the Renaissance, people lived by worldviews that were widespread. These were widespread belief systems, usually founded in religious theologies. Thus, myth became associated with religious needs and told the stories of the relationships between mankind and his gods. The combined worldviews of so many humans in the world created in the collective memory images and story lines which continued to affect people long after the original belief systems had subsided. Today, schizophrenics and other psychotically ill individuals continue to react to ancient Greek mythic themes arising in their minds, influencing their worldview and their behaviors.

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The Loss of Myth in Everyday Life

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As a result of the loss of belief in the old religions and the new ‘theology’ of reason and science, the mythic themes of the old religions have lost a lot of coherency. The myths and stories which once swayed large numbers of individuals have been forgotten as modern religions and academic institutions have dropped these stories of life and the grand themes of mankind’s relationships with his ‘gods.’ The stories, however, remain in the energies of Mankind’s Collective Unconscious. They still come to us in dreams and, occasionally, by the Knock of the Spirit.

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Today, man largely pushes those themes away as he rushes to secure a life for himself based upon secular views of the Universe. He no longer sees the Earth as a Living Presence. He no longer views the gods as being in his life and as accessible. He no longer admits his needs for them. The arising of monotheism has eliminated the gods of nature and spirits of plants, brooks, springs, and forests from his theology. Man no longer feels the presence of the Divine as he walks through forest paths or departs on travels in ships on the ocean. Instead, he perceives inanimate, impersonal, even unloving things everywhere around him. The animals are no longer his brothers and sisters. The plants no longer demonstrate the innocence and goodness of divinity. Man has become a user of all other life, without respecting it, without honoring it.

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Modern man has paid a high price for his worldviews. To feel secure, he kills everything which he feels threatened by. He pollutes his world and his own body without thought because he cares more for his own ‘standard of living’ than for the life all around him. He has no respect for life at all, other than his own. He has closed himself off from the Divinity of the Earth. And yet all the Earth is within himself. Although he does not realize it, he is the Earth, and all that he does to the Earth and its other worlds, he does to himself.

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Psychological Consequences

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Psychologically, man hides from the darkness within his own mind. Instead of being guided by mythic themes, man has lost himself in issues of right versus wrong or good versus evil. He represses thoughts his religions tell him are ‘wrong’, yet his dreams are filled with his own fear and violence against life and himself, and so he forgets his dreams, takes drugs to dull himself, and refuses to think about the way he poisons Earth’s life forms and his own body. He avoids the unpleasant, the insecure, the painful, seeking “rightness”, happiness, security. And when the individual fails to achieve these ideals, he feels that the world has turned against him or that he isn’t good enough to achieve what everyone else is clearly enjoying.

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He has no sense of myth which would reassure him of his own relative unimportance in the scheme of things and that misfortune can come into anyone’s life. He has discarded the understanding that life is a mystery, and bought into the idea that the only thing that is keeping him from being a success at anything is a good plan and some clever thinking. So modern man has no humility. He has no myth that centers him within his culture, shows him who he is, reassures him that life has meaning, legitimizes his natural needs, shows him what right and wrong is in his culture, guides boys into manhood or women into womanhood, or gives meaning to his death. Instead, in modern cultures, the ego—or conscious subjective mind—is left on its own to grapple with these needs. The individual is thus easily overwhelmed by modern life. Without the guidance provided by myth and the contact with the Divine provided by myth, the individual is adrift in chaos, holding on while he tries to understand why he is always living for tomorrow and never present in his life, why he feels so alone in society and so without support from his God and others, why in spite sometimes of material success, he feels so desperate and unhappy.

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The Modern Personal Myth

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Jung and later, Joseph Campbell, resolved these issues for themselves by asking themselves, ‘what myth am I living?’ And they delved into mythologies until they found the one myth that steered their lives. They found that, in the midst of the most powerful and meaningful portions of their lives, they were unconsciously living ancient mythic themes. Subsequently, they described in their writings how it felt to be guided by their personal myth. First, being in the grip of a myth begins with the experience of awe. Campbell, in his book Pathways to Bliss, describes this experience:

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Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery—the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

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Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development, Campbell wrote, are exactly the kinds of values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. “Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth,” Campbell told us.

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The ordinary needs of a man or woman in the grip of his/her myth no longer hold him. He is in the grip of a mystery that consumes him, leads him to fulfill the role destiny has brought upon him.

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The beginning of a mythic world is a seizure—something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond all rational patterns. It is out of such seizures that civilizations are built. All you have to do is look at their monuments, and you’ll see that these are the nuttiest things that mankind every thought of. Look at the pyramids. Just try to interpret them in terms of rational means and aims or economic necessities; think of what it meant in a society with the technology of Egypt—which is to say practically nothing—to build a thing that massive. The cathedrals, the great temples of the world, or the work of any artists who has given his life to producing these things—all of these come from mythic seizure, not from Maslow’s values. That awakening of awe, that awakening of zeal, is the beginning, and curiously enough, that’s what pulls people together.

What has happened to modern Western man is that he has lost his myths. Now it is terror that drives us together rather than inspiration. It is fear that controls us rather than Divine guidance which steadies us. And so we in the West are divided, while among those who attack us, there is mythic unity.

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In the Absence of Myth, Life becomes Existential

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That is what has happened in the United States today. Suspicious, paranoid, consumed by our worldview that all conflicts are win-loss in character, we project our shadows out upon terrorist killers. We withdraw inward defensively and become aggressive invaders of countries we perceive as an “axis of evil.” Those terrorists, of course, are living their myths, and in their zeal and passion for their causes, they cheerfully give away their lives for their causes to give us pain. In martyrdom and death, they find meaning because there is nothing else they can do to escape their despair over their lives.

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As individuals, Americans can do little about this. We are caught up in a conflict between cultures which are mythically inspired and our own which has no unifying mythology. Fundamental Christianity is attempting to impose a unifying mythology on our country based upon its interpretation of our 2,000 year-old Bible, but diversity in culture and religion is increasing in the United States—not diminishing. There is no one myth guiding mainstream America any longer. There are many myths and religious traditions that pull at us. There is no one myth or religious tradition to pull us together through inspiration other than the original vision of our founding fathers. Only fear remains as a negative unifying force, and when this happens, fear awakens a military response to all perceived national threats and power defines all international relationships.

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But while a new national myth has yet to emerge in this country, the individual can seek out his own myth to give meaning to his own life, for as both Jung and Campbell made clear, we each have a personal myth. Our myth may emerge from our past traditions or religious training, or may simply arise out of the Collective Unconscious. Man’s needs include these issues, and where these needs for religious experience have been unmet, we become sensitized to numinous symbols-images which evoke awe and mystery within us. We constantly seek these symbols as we live each day, often unconsciously, but often with a sense of lack, emptiness, or an unmet for love and meaning.

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How to Regain Myth in our Lives

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As individuals, we must conscious seek out these symbols and meditate upon them; let them ‘work on us.’ Our myths are first encountered in our childhood years. There, when we go back to our childhood years in memory or dream, we find again the symbols and stories, the enthusiasms, which moved us to excitement, to intense interest, which awoke needs in us that were all consuming. But in growing up, most of us lose those images and put them aside as ‘unrealistic’ or childish. In repressing them, we lost that energy, that passion for life we felt as children. We become lost in the demands of lower needs for economic security, accumulation, sexual expression, relationship, prestige, and other lower needs. In those lost images and forgotten needs of childhood lie our forgotten myths. In those forgotten needs is our own True Self. They lie just below the veil of consciousness, waiting to be remembered and recalled into our lives.

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Next, study comparative mythology: read, join internet discussion groups, and subscribe to mythological journals. Search for the mythic stories which light up your heart and fire your soul with meaning.

Third, begin paying attention to your dreams, for in dreams the myths live. Begin learning dream interpretation and begin journaling your dreams and thoughts as you go through each day. Your myths are constantly trying to break through into your conscious daily life, and it is only your busyness of mind and pre-occupation with mundane issues which block them. Begin asking for your myth and guidance before you go to bed. Begin to pray and reach out to the numinous, whatever you conceive the Divine to be.

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Fourth, study Jungian psychology and read books written by Jungian psychologists about the process of individuation and becoming whole. Read books by Joseph Campbell and other mythologists about the mythic journey. Learn about what has happened to others as they sought to uncover their personal myth.

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Finally, expect these activities to cause a disruption of your existing life. For to engage in these ritual activities of “seeking your true self,” such as asking “Who am I?” invokes a response from the As Above which brings one into crisis. This event can be profoundly unsettling. It is not a journey to peace! It is more like the proverbial “Dark Night of the Soul.” If you are one of those who doesn’t wish for their life to be changed by these experiences, then don’t seek your personal myth and don’t become a seeker of your True Self, for evoking this issue breaks the barrier between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and the contents of the unconscious ‘flood in.’ That flood, like the ancient legend of Noah’s Ark, sweeps the old world and old life away.

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Jung did this and experienced what his colleagues called “a nervous breakdown,” but that his students and historians have since recognized as a ‘shamanic journey into the Unconscious.’ He had to stop work for years. But he began living his myth, and it became the most important and meaning experience of his life.

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The breakdown comes because one has to give up trying to be the person one has tried to be one’s whole life. Normally, this event is scheduled for midlife. This is the mid-life crisis. The persona, or false self, has to be given away. Personal weaknesses have to be confronted. Lies one has told oneself one’s whole life have to be given away. And new ways have to be slowly put together to live one’s life in a new way.

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Living one’s personal myth means a total revision of one’s life and way of life. The experience is both destructive and creative. What must be destroyed are all those facets of life which stand in the way of one living their life as who they really are. And then a new way of living life must be created, often from scratch, so that one can go on with life in a new way by living the personal myth.

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