My laughter at the cartoon turned heads in the store: a solar system with a red arrow pointing toward Earth saying “You Are Here … If That Helps Any.” The “here” lasts only for a sub-instant, since we are spinning at unimaginable speeds through unrepeatable space.
Locating “You” in a chaotic universe (in ancient myths, a magical dark forest) may be the mind’s meaning of life, since “mean-ing” creates the mean or middle pattern – between invisible and material – a survivalist drive to make chaos seem organized, from the great unknown to the mundane. The mind’s skill at discerning patterns and making myths offers a resting place, an “orientation” – literally a self-locator toward east (orientation deriving from oriri: to rise, as in sunrise). Many words, like this one, are mini-myths in themselves: the sun, we now know, does not “rise,” yet we still use the word that sprang from the Earth-centric myth.
Self-locating in the cosmos took on epic proportions in 2012. I had spiraled deeper into familiar sources for my storyteller art, with no idea how timely they’d be as December 21 came and went, with world media spinning apocalyptic Mayan tales relating human events to galactic cycles, filled with mythic images. I found definitions of mythology by Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and others who called myth a map, whether for a culture or an individual, and I got even deeper value from re-reading the ways Jung’s theories of the “collective unconscious” mirrored Campbell’s thesis that mythologies reflect the collective dreams of societies, eternal in essence yet expressed in local terms in a given time.
Because life had comet-ed me, for decades, through orbits of folks energized by the Mayan stories, the calendar and its implications had been in my own unconscious background for a long time, generating a sense of portent, with unknowably potent forces at work. To feel complete, responsible, and in tune while it was swirling around, I studied the astronomy of the Great Dark Rift in the Milky Way, in the context of the 26,000-year precession shaped by the galactic cycle, and eventually could feel an unbroken thread between the cosmology, the stories, and the timing (even though the cyclical “window of darkness” identified by ancient astronomers opened a few years ago, and will remain open for a few more, while a light-source appears, in a parallax phenomenon, to roll down the Rift “birth canal,” to be reborn as a “new sun”).
For those in the rebirthing and new-consciousness cultures, the story is exhilarating. Feeling in tune with the music of the spheres may be life’s richest aspiration, source of the greatest art – in music, mythology, science, design, and other expressions (including energy-healing arts). In a moment of attunement, it’s possible to feel that a life-myth (a cognitive representation of the ineffable) meets three classic requirements of Beauty: wholeness, harmony and radiance – or integritas, consonantia, and claritas, per centuries of philosophy (and James Joyce). In such a moment, life feels like a work of art, in which a mystery remains, the perceiver fully alive as a participant, thus co-creator. Dis-covering/un-covering unconscious myth IS “cleansing the doors of perception,” so that this wordless reality, this bliss, can be known.
So with the passing of the long-awaited 12-21-12, imagination reopens for a new myth. For the immediate future, 2013, I’m drawn to the magical 13 of the Fibonnaci series, mathematical representation of the spiral of creation, the shaping magic of Nature. Having been surprised by a strange bliss when I discovered sacred geometry, watching spirals emerge from my handcrafted Golden Rectangles, I’m enjoying the uplift of a 13 year blooming in Nature-time, free to accelerate along the spiral.
If called to create stories to connect with universals, I can listen for the sounds inside the ideas, and sing with them in the forest we all inhabit, with greater or lesser light sparkling through the branches as we spin through the Void.