Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way the myths we no longer understand…. since we no longer know how to dream…
Gilles Deleuze – Desert Islands

I believe there is a profound similarity between consciousness and mythology. I believe that the similarity between the two extends beyond the processes that bring the two to the light of the conscious mind. I believe that they are inextricably linked as expressions of the human mind.

there exists a…system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms….which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
Jung – The Science of Mythology

It is significant that society has artifacts. Art, literature, technology and movies are the narratives of our time; they are our artifacts. These all index a system which, taken as a whole are a reference points to ourselves. In the same vein consciousness can be taken to have artifacts. Meanings, qualities and resonances between objects and people are all artifacts of consciousness. I believe that there is more to the relationship between consciousness and mythology. One (mythology) conveys the meaning of a society to itself, the other (Consciousness) the meaning of a person to his or herself. They can both be rich in meaning or impoverished. They can contain an abundance of significance or they can be devoid of any.

Taken as a whole, do the artifacts you engage with mean anything to you? As a human being can you say that there is an artifact in your society that signifies the meaning of your life to you? Rituals as an artifact have, throguhout all human history had an important role in society. Rituals, guided by a mythology have, like a well told story held an abundance of meaning, conveying to their participants a significance that has reached beyond the physical materials that compose those rituals.

However, drawing the line between myth and consciousness is hard. Connecting the lines between them is harder still. That said I believe that they parallel each-other and drawing the parallel can illustrate the connection. Both are the products of the same parts of our bodies; our minds. On the one hand many minds share in a creative unity together; finding expression in forms that signify a shared essence. On the other hand are minds, doing the same thing. Consciousness is in many respects the expression of a brain. The expression is not made for a perceiver, that would lead to an endless regress of perceivers with no end. But likewise myths frame a culture and are only recognized when the frame of refernece turns onto the frame itself. The rest of the time the myth acts as a schema for the people whom it frames.

Bubbled up in the middle is consciousness. Society can be described as a group of minds on concert. That concert; like any has an orchestra of actors including the artifacts of culture. And between those minds artifacts and minds act reciprocally, both conveying and reinforcing meaning to eachother. It is through this complex dialugoue that a narrative is formed. That narrative, like the narrative of any literature is the very meaning of our time. As it is for consciousness, literature reads from the pages of our minds; concrete details abstract some part of humannity and meaning is made.

In consciousness corners, surfaces and the textures of the world form into objects and space. Right now in the background voices suggest space; we are extended into the world through these voices. It is an ambiguous space; held constant by their presence, dissapearing as they do. The narrative told by the voices carry me elsewhere; taking me into another world outside myself. Narrative, replacing myth enforces the same act of removal. I am taken beyond myself in conjunction with the intention and meaning of the story. The associations I can make, the descriptions and the charachters of the story are all characters in and about me. They subsume me. The world of the narrative is suggested by the story just as the voices behind suggest a single object of space. Both the narrative and the voices are phenomena of the world and different parts of it. Both are phenomenological properties of the human world brought togther by a single thread – the human mind.

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. The scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes – How shall I negate this world whose power and streagth I feel? Yet all the knowledge on the earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine
Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus

Both narrative and consciousness tell a story much deeper than the narrative. Multifacted, complex, bound; they have a common denominator; that common denominator is meaning. In other words boundedness, context and meaning are all carried by a grammer that is common and that grammer becomes the universal principle of human meaning. It is with humanity in common that these meanings become the myths of our time. My own consciousness is in some sense a myth. It is the myth of my own creation; but it is a myth none the less.

The great novel doesn’t tell a a story. It is a viscerally told narrative  describing an epoch. Charachters are not caught by narrative; the charachters are cuaght by context much like my mind at any one time exists in context; circumstances happen against them as they happen against me. Happenstance is a charchter and that charachter is fate.

This is why fate is such a powerful force, nothing exists outside fate just like nothing exists outside the universe; just like I cannot exist outside my body or my mind who are the fates and the characters of my consciousness. Mythology on the other hand is the narrative of culture; it carries the burden of meaning for people giving people their significances in this world. Mythology then is the fate of a society. It is the teleology supplying the meaning of peoples existence. All these meanings; the meanings of consciosuness, literature and mythology are bound by a grammer that is universal to us all, both as individuals and as peoples; this is the human condition. Understanding that grammer is understanding humanity not for its parts, but as a whole and that is the science of man.

They are powerful things. In our lives we are faced with categories of things all of the time. Categories are useful things. They lump groups into chunks we can understand. At a distance those groups seem so simple, so well defined. Probably the easiest example are political groups. We all imagine we know what they stand for. Religious groups are another example. It’s easy to forget that irrespective of the beliefs we believe the groups have there are human minds just like ours supporting the system of ideas. At an even more pervasive scale is a culture. But what is a culture? Underneath it again are people and artifacts. But other than that the whole phenomena of culture feels vague.

We talk about cultures, ideas and systems similar to them as if they were concrete things we understand. What interests me is the space in between the people that compose a culture or any other group of people that are somehow similar in some way. It is fascinating that people can look each-other in the eye and understand that they share something in common. How much of what we share however, are just myths?
We identify with our ideas and values and many of us are able to articulate quite well what they are. However, for the most part what we are articulating are just the categories and words of other people. They’re not our own. I’m sure if we dug deep enough we’d find some divergence somewhere.

Probed hard enough there would be some questions about what we believe that would just be intractable for us. Many of us are fortunate to turn our systems of shared belief into objects that carry all the meaning of our beliefs for us. Sometimes the myth is a place; maybe a memory, a place we’ve been that signifies freedom from the life we never thought we’d have to have. For others religion brings us that myth of freedom from life through afterlife. Transported to something bigger than our humble little spots on this globe in the middle of nowhere our superstructure saves us. For others money or nation do the same thing. At root however, are we just dreaming a fantasy away from our flesh and bones? I believe in many respects we are.

Mythology is wonderful thing. Many myths capture the essence of a meaning that resonates with a crisis we feel in this life. Nations are strong and bring together things we think we share in common apart from everybody else. On the outside it’s easy to say that someone is ‘American‘ or ‘Arab‘ or ‘Jew‘.  More interesting is the fact that these myths become a reality in this world just through belief. I’m not suggesting that going to church saves us from our sins. But I am suggesting that the consequences of believing that we have an identity causes things to happen. When groups of people create a dividing line between themselves on the basis of an idea isn’t something happening in the real world? But between those people does anything really exist?

And ideas do things. Libertarians are certain that centralized governments restrict freedoms. Sane people on the other hand feel that the absence of any central structure will either lead to chaos or some form oligarchies worse than the governments that were replaced. Either way an idea is the cause. I have been fascinated by the power of design. When an idea inspires a room to be designed a particular way and the idea is carried off doesn’t the room have an effect on it’s inhabitants?

One of the complaints against Plato’s Utopia or Communism or any other radically central and prescriptive government is that central to their idea is always a distrust of the people in their societies (much like Libertarians have an emphatic distrust of governments in general). Realism is an idea despite the fact that it’s not that realistic.  But books written in its vein have an effect on the people who read it; usually the idea is a romanticized view of the world, life and living. And as an idea realism may not have been quite what it was without Rousseau, a philosopher engaged with ideas. All of these ideas are myths; in some sense they are real. On the one hand they exist as a constellation of activity in the brains of several people. But they are also real in as much as they are shared and as a consequence of being shared they have an effect in this world.

Much has been written about culture and ideas; many people have studied and systematized ideas. Logic is the the study of the syntax of ideas. What still remains is understanding the relation that culture has to the minds of individuals. Further than that what the relation is to different brains with minds interacting with each-other. If as I do, you believe that the descriptions of physics are approximately true and, by implication, that the natural world is closed to anything that isn’t physical then the question is a very real and perplexing one. Whatever the answer is it will say something powerful about all of the ideas that we have. Furthermore it will say something about us that won’t resemble anything like the ideas we have. How could it? When faced directly with our own ideas, our view of the world and all the differences we find between ourselves; how could one idea coherently express all the other ideas that are out there. Furthermore, and most importantly in fact; to what extent will that single idea be a composed of the ideas that are out there now at the exclusion of those ideas we haven’t yet had?

I can also recollect that I was seeing that landscape….at once I appears…it affirms the reflected consciousness…my reflecting consciousness is consciousness of itself…

Jean-Paul Sartre; An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness

If I weren’t there the light I saw wouldn’t have dawned on me. The light would have been there, it would have been there for me but, I was there to experience it. In the moment of reflection in which I experience the light time and events compose me, I stand in a bracketed relation to the light. Is the world I experience with you a ‘becoming‘ as I am in that moment?  Can we say of inter-subjective truth that it stands in similar relations with people and culture as I do to the world, time and my mind?

When anyone of us walks through our homes or enters a room are we engaged with ourselves or with our surroundings? I think for the sake of orientation we would be in our own way if we were engaged with ourselves. However, when we pause and orientate ourselves into our environment we become available to ourselves. Our surroundings, bracketed by time and composed in our minds coalesce into a ‘self‘ that for a moment is the ‘me‘ in that room.

Likewise time moves forward stopping all of us from moment to moment begging the question; where are we? Art, books, news, technology and language adopts the meaning bracketed by time and that meaning, like we are to ourselves becomes a fixed point, a phenomena in a moment of history.

The story of the ‘Lord of Flies’ describes a group of boys on an island who have to construct their own reality. The reality becomes distorted from the norms of our society. In many respects it is society under a microscope. But, irrespective of the intent of the author what is consequential is the moment of reflection between the boys when they are discovered by a man.  What they became as a group is given significance through a reflection only permissible by another. No longer engaged with the immediacy of their surroundings and themselves they become an identifiable piece in a larger framework. The converse occurs for us as individual minds when our reflective act occurs. The world turns outside-in and we become ourselves; bringing ourselves together.

The disparity between outside and in between people or between the primacy of outward experience and the experience of  ‘me‘ is a moment of negative entropy in which a coalescence occurs within fixed bounds. Entropy then defines the separation between one group or another, one mind or another or one phenomena or another. Physics in this sense is not just descriptive of the relations between ourselves, our minds and our networks; it becomes a human metaphor for reality as we comprehend it. Hegel describes a social corporation as a dynamic structure of reciprocal relations between agents who exist within a dialectic framework and more recently the study of hermeneutics has described truth as a relation between people at fixed points in time. In many respects Hegel’s idea in fact may hold true between groups of us. If that is the case then in as much as our experience of ourselves is described by a form of entropy, reality as can comprehend it stands in the same kind of relational structure between people.

As a human being more in touch with what I experience than the background of that experience I am aware of moments. Alone, looking out onto the world I no longer experience a world as an immediacy of here and now. It parts at a distance and forms into a unity of events and structures with me at the center. Then through reflection the significance of my own existence becomes apparent. I look and see that light from the sun filling every space it can reach.

And then as the moment passes I move, engage with the world and disappear.

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Amon Tobin – At The End Of The Day

Sunlit, the day descends; at any moment one of us thinks. But is there an ‘I’ to speak of before thought? Right before that transaction between our bounded consciousness and the world what is there? Am I there? What, is the ‘I’ that transacts?

Light requires no perception. It doesn’t require me. It radiates over the world filling it before our eyes. Colors bounce from leaf to petal. The eye of the ‘I’ hovers over the world projecting out into that world. Somewhere in the equation there is an ‘I’ to whom that world belongs. That ‘I’, a mind, equivalent in some way to the perception and the perceived is the whole. I wonder if I am in that whole; the product of all the equations that describe the world. If I am, am I a product of one of the sums, a consequence of a mind interacting with the world?

For everyone of us there is a world. We share that world in as much as there is consensus between us that the world exists. Where consensus breaks down, so too does the world that is shared between us. The mind, like all of us is contained within a constellation of events that are themselves bracketed from moment to moment in time. Between the moments where there is a consensus for the mind that ‘I’ am here, I may not in fact ‘be’ anywhere. I may breakdown through lack of my own consensus and cease to exist. I look out into the world, and for so long as there is only light, and there are only flowers; I may not exist.

And then I come into being, cognizant of the moment, in agreement with myself that I am here looking at the world. But that ‘I’ that takes over for that moment is a moment of negative entropy; it is time and activity convergent into me, forming the ‘I’ that sees.

In that moment I am. But where does ‘I’ fit onto me? Where do I fit into my own consciousness if not at the center of it? For the center of my consciousness is not me. It is the world of which I am conscious.  I wonder therefore; am I an epiphenomenon?

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Not insignificantly these questions are idle. They frame questions we ought to be asking, they don’t give us the answers we need. They are a weak facsimile. Welcome to my universe, if you enter you must observe my rules. If you do you are welcome to stay.

I am sitting outside a bungalow at a shaky wooden table under a mountain in Palm Springs. The bungalow is part of a small hotel called the Korakia. Flowers, a swimming pool and the noise of guests talking inhabit my space along with a cool evening breeze, coffee and my cigarette. Light blue, a lavender and cotton air and the splash of water remind me of the smile in the eyes of a stranger welcoming me. I own this place, like very place I go. I am rich. I inhabit a space that I return to and this scent is a manifesto written in my eyes. Let me explain.

The sun descends on today into an evening, and every evening, like every day is a possibility. Possibility is the placeholder of choice; the choice that is made about the contents we as humans experience. Those experiences are the universes we inhabit. Along with the aesthetic possibilities of this world are the human possibilities of encounter; the eyes and voices, the sounds that we wish to hang on the walls around us.

Driving here my wife and I discussed people we have known. We realized something. Our realization maybe taken the wrong way; and if it is that’s fine, I don’t care. Like everyone we have made mistakes. However, we never failed at being human; our world is a human world and happily so, we have lived like humans and as humans with hearts that break we have lived.

There are many who seek justice, who’s litigious preoccupations betray their weakness. There are others who, for the sake of their own ignorance abhor the challenges of other minds. These are not the minds of human beings. Nor are they welcome in our world.

Is this born out of anger? Is this born out of any degree of cynicism. The failures of past regimes of any shape or form have been born out of distrust; either implicitly or explicitly  – I say no.

Sitting this evening by the fire-pit my wife and I discussed Oscar Wilde. I am making the choice he made; not to create art, but for the contents of life to be the art to which I work. He lived by an aesthetic sensibility which encompassed a love of beauty. He was punished for his choice and in his Ballad repented. Shunned by society for externalizing his system into his life Wilde in many respects was a martyr. My universe, the universe I am choosing is both beautiful, idyllic and human. However, I also accept the cracks we all share, for the human world must encompass all the strength and weakness of humanity. My right of passage is simply this; be honest, be kind, be human with us all.

Welcome to my universe. Welcome to a world which, when shared between us will be palace across the world in which minds meet, where love is made with contact and bonds are made to be held tacitly across time. Welcome, make yourself at home and join me as we explore with the time that we have the lives that we share in our moments of clarity.

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