Dreams, Individuals and Mythology
How to retain identity amongst the collective unconscious and the cultural zeitgeist of your time.
What seems like a millennium ago still resonates with many today: the act of ritual in harmony with nature.
Before the 18th century, the Elm tree was revered for its sheer versatility, but was largely ignored in state-planned forestry. The reduction of once proliferating life-forms into a commodity with one purpose also discards any types that fall outside this purpose. The measurement of the commodity is plotted within fixed term charts. Over time, the devastation of the other myriad lifeforms results in the failure of the entire ecosystem co-dependent on it. Billions of other species, habitats and organisms have disappeared this way. Life cannot cannibalize itself so mindlessly. It must follow pattern, habits, and even discipline. Especially in our case, being creatures with something that resembles free will and ordered thinking. It is through our empathy and harmony with flora and fauna, that we find the power to harness, rather than to commodify, the natural environment.
This way of interacting with the world, the old way, involves the creation and inheritance of ritual. This required us, enabled us, to use every part of an animal or another organism. In some ways, the intuition that helps us navigate the environment around us, such as following signals in wind, solar positions, and even things like scents and animal tracks, were constructed by these rituals. These are essentially encoded into our language and stories, as rites of passage.
A clear example can be seen in the Wayfinding of Polynesian Culture. The Polynesians were able to traverse vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean without compasses or maps. Their navigational knowledge was encoded in stories, chants, and songs. The position of stars, migration patterns of birds, description of the ocean currents, were recited and remembered as stories and songs. It seems language is, in this way, a technology fit for purpose.
Humans have always relied on much more than their senses for navigating chaotic environments. The coming of the eyes in the general biological picture is very recent. Life had already originated hundreds of millions of years before eyes opened to see what was going on around it. It was driven not by particular senses or organs, but rather, on a principle: to kill and eat other life. It is the same with dreams.
Dreams are the discovery of a personal myth from the intuitive capacity man possesses to find his place in the greater order of the universe. The myth, as Campbell said, is the public dream, while dreams are private myths. If myths are collective artefacts, rooted in some kind of neurological or genetic pathway, rather than purely cultural transmissions, then the experience of the individual adds content to this, not creating the form itself. Myths are used to shape the dreams of individual, which, in the advent of the Internet, may now be returning to public sphere, as a global village.
A dream belongs to the individual. Yet dreams can be shared, spread, and sustained by others. There is no ambition without an initial dream. Dreams consume other dreams. One dream could ensure the destruction of thousands or even millions of others, who may be in the way of the dream or driven to fanaticism by it. One day, even after we fade into dust, our dreams, perhaps, live on. Some of them still burn bright to this day, even across centuries innumerable. Families, communities, societies, bound together by the light of the bonfire. Today, the ripple effect has never been more apparent. One may influence the dreams of say, a few hundred in their life. As each of these go on to do the same, this spread becomes like a virus, a network of nodes that grows ever larger.
The myth is a public arena. It’s a pillar maintaining a certain moral order, integrating the individual to the group. This is a period of vulnerability, where we are quick to accept new masks, archetypes and power structures. The individual must be shaped. They must be made to react in the way the culture wants. Decisions must be weighed only as their merit in maintaining an orderly society. Natural hierarchies, inseparable from mythology, must be considered. This tree of life persists life. The individual takes on significance in their relationship to the total society. While all cultures seek to subject the individual to their place, it does not mean that one must submit to the demands of a culture. Cultures are a confluence of other cultures. The individual’s thoughts and actions serve as a tributary supplying energy to a public pool of ideas.
The wise, healthy adult knows their body well. They are sensitive to their cellular and organic fluctuations, pain and tension. They have acquired awareness of this and know very well how to tend to it. So too must we figure out how to be effective cells in the species-organism that is humanity. As cells we may be specialized but within all of us is the ability to adapt, take on a place of higher responsibility, of changing or having such a precise impact at a point in time. Overspecialization breeds weakness. It confines one to a particular rung on the ladder. Mobility is seen by those who can look to society as a mirror, the reflection telling them who they are. What’s true of the group is also true of the individual.
Some in society pop up every once and a while, to destroy, restructure or else elevate themselves to a higher position in this hierarchy. Among these, there may be figures who appear to be willed almost into existence by the shared dream of a culture. Yet, it is merely the projection of the archetype, the messiah, onto these individuals. It reveals something deeper within us. Once masks are lifted, archetypes unveiled and the shadow beneath integrated, we may yet find greatness within us. But greatness is ephemeral. The person experiencing it must have, as Herbert said in his Dune series, a feeling for the myth they are in. They must reflect what is projected upon them, yet uncouple themselves from belief in their own pretensions. It is essential to find the balance, of sending forth willpower and conviction to a susceptible but willing receptacle. An emperor is nothing without people to persist his empire. The messiah, the wise elder, the maiden, the fool, the sun, the moon… the archetypes, the masks we wear and see, come in many faces. However when see one another, when we look, we are really just holding up a mirror to ourselves. There we look and feel a deep-seated wonder, an indescribable complex of emotions, unrivalled in its vastness and its ancient history.
In Vedic Hinduism, “The syllable Om is the supreme Brahman. The past, the present, and the future, all that was, all that is, all that will be is Om. Likewise, all else that may exist beyond the bounds of time, that too is Om. All this verily is Brahman. This Atman is Brahman." To conclude with a final remark by Campbell, by finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.