PERSONAL MYTHOLOGY AND
THE SACRED STORY OF OUR LIVES
Among the most empowering insights of the great mythologist Joseph Campbell was his recognition that ancient and traditional stories contained profound insights that could help contemporary individuals more deeply comprehend the mystery of human existence. Moreover, Campbell taught us that if we could learn to appreciate this fact, we would find that we, too, are engaged in a kind of heroic journey in the living of our lives. Another of the great teachers of this wisdom, the renowned psychologist Carl Jung, underscored the importance of exploring the mythic dimension of our lives when he wrote that the single most critical question any of us can ask of ourselves is "What is the myth you are living?" Campbell and Jung also understood that both great myths and legends and the seemingly ordinary stories of our own lives are equally driven by a common cast of powerful and eternal characters, figures such as the fool and the wizard, the dragon and the warrior, the mother and the father, the orphan and the innocent. By seeking to recognize the myths that each of us is living and the particular archetypal characters at the core of these myths, Campbell and Jung believed that we might address the fundamental challenge of life in our time, namely how to confront the pervading sense of personal meaninglessness so prevalent in the modern world. In a larger sense, of course, this question of seeking symbols and stories through which we might make meaning of our lives has been a fundamental concern of human life since the dawn of human consciousness. Facing this concern is both acutely important and uniquely difficult in our time, however, because unlike the countless generations that preceded us, we live in an age in which both society and culture offers us no meaningful alternative to personally wrestling with this question and seeking answers from within the context of our own inner lives. Still, for most people in the modern world, the question that must be posed before one is willing to inquire into the nature of the mythic stories at the core of our lives is quite simply "Why bother with myths at all?" For most people reared in a culture without obvious or clear mythological underpinnings, it would appear to many that we are living well enough without a mythological context and that, as a species, perhaps we have outgrown the need for mythic consciousness. What remains invisible to these men and women is the inevitability of unconsciously living out an incomplete and ill-fitting myth if a conscious psychic process has not derived a more holistic and adaptive one to take its place. Often derived as children from the unconscious myths lived out by our families or through trying to meet or avoid the expectations of our parents, these initial personal myths produce patterns of behavior which limit our ability to adapt to life's changing circumstances and to evolve both intellectually and emotionally. Greatly increasing the power of such unconscious personal myths is the fact that they are frequently reinforced by the dominant, one-sided myths of our culture. Only by recognizing our unconscious patterns of behavior and consciously exploring the personal, familial, and cultural myths underlying them can we be begin to evolve more effective and creative relationships with ourselves, others, and the world. Beyond the painful psychological dysfunctions that result from continuing to live out our unconscious and self-limiting mythologies, however, perhaps the most damaging effect of this situation is a gradual loss of our ability to experience the sacred at work in our lives. Campbell was profoundly aware that this particular problem has been worsened by the fact that we live in a culture in which conventional religion has lost much of its collective power to speak to us mythologically. Commenting further on this dilemma, Sam Keen, a longtime colleague of Campbell, observed "My life is the text within which I must find the revelation of the sacred," poignantly reminding us that we must each learn to recognize the particular ways in which the divine speaks to us. Beyond its great gift of helping us to psychologically function more effectively in our everyday lives, the exploration of our personal mythologies also offers us a powerful framework for understanding the uniquely sacred text at the core of each of our lives. It is this exploration of the sacred dimension of our stories that ultimately promises to endow the unfolding of our lives with an ever-growing sense of genuine, deep, and abiding meaning.
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For more information about this topic, please contact Richard Stromer either by phone at 510-883-1369 or by e-mail at SoulMentor@PersonalMyths.com.
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