Consciousness as Myth

Day Lily

 Are we thrown into the world or do we explode into the world? Pompous ass that I am, I see a massive difference. I'll go further "Life itself is an impossible dream of one sort of another. Without myth we people would be empty." The "special sort of matter"—when it is discovered—requires myth to keep it from collapsing into the void. "We cannot live on bread, spreadsheets and data alone."

  And yes! The "special sort of matter" not just people, it's life. Here to reaffirm the meaning of "special sort of matter" in our dialogue so far these are the words we have used: "When fundamental stuff (the verbing and nouning of the universe—consciousness and matter) gets organized in a highly specific, complex, porous way—like a brain, a nervous system, or a fleshy body, a slime mold, a hard shelled crab or a blue green algae—it manifests as life.)

 To see the source of myth inside consciousness, we have to look past both the Front-Row calculators and their Sartre-style theater of the individual exploding into the world. We have to return to the center that decides which Heidegger called the Dasein. We have to look at the very structural geometry of how the flesh encounters the universe.

 Consciousness as we experience it does not invent myth, myth is born in the fracture.

The moment a human being becomes conscious, a terrible, beautiful separation occurs. We are "thrown" into the world as a "center that decides," which means we are no longer one with the landscape. From this place of Unbearable Absence we look out at a universe which is massive, objective, and completely silent. It doesn't have a voice. It doesn't care. We are in a void.

 Consciousness cannot endure such silence. It feels a total, agonizing absence of meaning. Myth is the violent, creative rush of consciousness attempting to heal that fracture. It is the bridge the mind throws across the chasm between the "me" and the "world."

We look at the rain we see the plants cheering. That "cheer" is the myth—the projection of life onto the silent object, the refusal to let the universe remain cold and silent.