All the elaborate rituals of many of our ancestors seem so time and energy intensive that most of us today can't imagine investing so much on things that don't further our lives in material ways. But ineffable returns are still returns, and it's just we haven't developed the internal structures to appreciate how they apply to our lives.
The rituals were meant to connect us to a deeper course of life, to connect meaning to things that become otherwise tedious. Thus the actions we perform daily (like washing dishes or weeding our gardens) become outward expressions of an inner order.
Myths are master events which rouse and engage another order of our consciousness. They speak to us in ways outside of our normal experience because they are acknowledging a level of being that is too big to fit into our everyday world. The more reflective of us know that there are wilder, more heroic parts of us that ache for expression. Perhaps a sense of destiny that can't reap satisfaction from our lives as we know it.
Perhaps if we knew more of our own nature, the nature of the food that we eat, or the land that we walk on (all things that are encoded into myths), our everyday environment would take on a significances that make life more interesting. And that's because some part of ourselves (outside of our bodies and rational minds) then participate in our lives. It's how we shoe-horn more of ourselves into our world.
The rituals were meant to connect us to a deeper course of life, to connect meaning to things that become otherwise tedious. Thus the actions we perform daily (like washing dishes or weeding our gardens) become outward expressions of an inner order.
Myths are master events which rouse and engage another order of our consciousness. They speak to us in ways outside of our normal experience because they are acknowledging a level of being that is too big to fit into our everyday world. The more reflective of us know that there are wilder, more heroic parts of us that ache for expression. Perhaps a sense of destiny that can't reap satisfaction from our lives as we know it.
Perhaps if we knew more of our own nature, the nature of the food that we eat, or the land that we walk on (all things that are encoded into myths), our everyday environment would take on a significances that make life more interesting. And that's because some part of ourselves (outside of our bodies and rational minds) then participate in our lives. It's how we shoe-horn more of ourselves into our world.
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