[Oe List ...] The New Global Myth and The Event and the Story

[Rod Rippel]

Keenan

 

            Your guild's topic, consciousness, is certainly a current cutting edge concern of philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, poets and the thinking-curious in general.  Neuroscientists especially are very interested in the phenomenon of consciousness and its relationship to our brains and the mind.  I hope your group is reading everything you can get on the subject.  Here are a few random thoughts.

 

            I like Gene Marshall's first paragraph where he uses poetry to address the issue of consciousness and goes on to say we don't know anything about what it is.   All we human beings have is our language and we are both enabled and frustrated by it.  It sets the possibilities and the limits of our thinking and expressing our thoughts.  It (language) has shaped our culture, sciences, and how we find and express meaning.  It does this through the stories and metaphors which have become attached to words, metaphors being the inherited baggage each word carries which relates that word ultimately to some concrete object or sense perception.  The word becomes a shorthand code for all its attached stories and relationships.  Overtime we have become used to using the word for complex meanings and abstract concepts without referring back to the concrete metaphorical underpinnings.  Take for example the word 'justice,' or fairness.  We don't have to repeat the story of the Vineyard Owner and the Day Laborers each time we use those words.

 

            My point is this:  Consciousness is a word, an experience, without an adequate metaphor or none at all.  No one has any idea what consciousness is in itself.  Using another word doesn't help.  Awareness is just another word.  It doesn't describe the nature of consciousness, its origin, how it arises, its essence, if you will.  We are very adept at describing our awarenesses and the impact they have on our lives, behaviors and interpretations but all this tells us nothing about the nature of consciousness itself.  Like fish in the ocean we use it without any idea what it is.

 

            Neuroscience works on what part of our brains is consciousness associated with.  How do we measure consciousness?  Does cognition precede our consciousness?  Does consciousness create the external world we perceive exclusively, or just to some degree?  Why is the perception of our individual consciousness so apparently uniform?  Are there degrees of consciousness (say between H. Sapiens and other animals)(is it arrogant to say we have a higher degree)?  Is there a reality external to our perceptions (thoughts)?  Are we creating our world totally?  New models and hypotheses are possible every day.

 

            Poets and artists are the experts at tweaking new metaphors out of their media (ie. Words, paints, sounds, etc..).  They are coming at this from their angle.  Poetry may be a great avenue!  New myths will emerge.

 

            This is not the first time humankind has been confronted with the Mystery (or as DHL has said, the unknown unknown).  This is a diversion: but I think of the ancients who 'invented' the character of YHWH and began to tell stories of their encounter with this One.  This irascible, jealous, intemperate, flamboyant, arbitrary, demanding, judgmental, merciful, hands-on warrior-god who changes his mind and makes bargains.  Imagine later when they looked back at their stories and they said,  "How creative of us, we have made YHWH in our own image, we have chosen Him and He has made us His chosen people!"  The entire Tanakh (Old Testament) has become a meta-metaphor about God (The Mystery) a meta-metaphor which can hold meaning even in the face of such an Unknown Unknown.   "Let us covenant and agree to tell This Story, it shall be our Reality, and we will remember it and tell it to our children, and observe it with feasts and dancing and singing and cleaving to it, forsaking all else."

 

            Such is the nature of mythology.  And how did it collapse.  Someone had the idea that it was literally the truth!  

 

            Myth is so deep that we know it true but we must Decide that truth and not rob it of the Mystery. 
Rod Rippel

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