One man's order is another man's disorder, and structure and chaos are two sides of the same coin.
The only constant we know is change. Reflect on the changes in your grandfather's time. Compare those to the changes in your father's time; and then to your time. Social structures come up with ideas upon ideas to do one thing and then another, and behind every idea is the myth that the world is getting better, our lives are getting better and we are making "progress".
This is the Myth of Progress.
What is a myth? It's a dream you share with the public around you. What is a dream? It's a myth you share with yourself.
Logic plays no part in any of this. When a loved one passes away you do not go to logic for help and resort to programming objectives. Something as old as the hills takes over as you come to grips with the idea that we know nothing and what we know will go quickly no matter how much we attempt to massage or preserve or worship it. You will observe two things that you fall back on: myth and ritual. The myth will attempt to help you understand what you experience in that grief, and the ritual is what you enact as you process the myth.
You may subscribe to any system of ideas you like to explain the universe: physics, mathematics, biology, systems intent, cartwheeling ..... and one or the other will make sense to you for a while, at certain times, in certain places ....... but the organs of your body know no science and have their own mind and rules of engagement, quite different from yours. The day one realizes that he has a sickness and has X days left to live, all the prevailing ideas go out the window and something fundamental takes over. Now one is in that crucial space where thinking games of any sort do not matter. What does matter now to such a person?
The development of myth requires time, and gifted people who are not enchanted by the world. At some point in your life you may have come across one or two such people, because they are rare. But time is a scarce resource now because no thing has much time before changes come. Good development always requires time.
You will hesitate to question myth when you slowly come to acknowledge that you see a confluence of lower-order mythic systems at play right where you sit. One myth's instruction is to get gold. Another myth's instruction is to destroy or contain Russia and China. Another myth's instruction is that "America was once great and it can be made great again". Ask yourself how these myths developed. What is their origin? Why are these myths buried so deeply in many minds?
Next ask: how do people enact these myths? Observe the rituals.
At the most fundamental level you can think at, way way under the football championship view of the world ...... ask: Was America really great? What does it mean for any country to be great? Is this "greatness" an important thing? Why? For whom?
Then you'll slowly start to see the difference between things used to exploit people, things used to exploit fear ..... and the mythic systems required for the survival of societies in a total sense. |
