Much has been said in the last many years about the tragic lack of a
universal mythos or truer-than-true [kind of goes together with the
realer-than-real, doesn't it?] guiding story that speaks powerfully to
and for all of us. Renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell
told
Paul
Ray and Sherry Anderson in 1982 [authors of The Cultural
Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World] we*
no
longer have such a story, and thereby consigned our*
culture to doom,
destruction, and despond, for lack of such a unifying force that would
continue to guide us, evolve us, provide us with direction and essential
values, and keep our hearts open to the Glorious Mystery that is
Life. To their further dismay, he said, "The panorama of
possibilities has made it impossible to mythologize. The
individual is just going in raw. All you can do is follow your own
inward life and try to stay true to that."
Silent
as Carl Sandburg's "Fog on Little Cat's Feet": The Birth
of a NEW Story Big Enough to Embrace the Entire Human Family
And that is exactly what Experiencers had been doing -- effectively
isolated from and unaware of each other up to that point [1982-ish] --
and also many of faith -- following the higher road of their humanity,
their Soul, as best they could and trying to stay true to that. This was
during the time just before we began to gather our courage and tell our
personal sacred stories and thus to begin to find each other.
Campbell spoke a deeply disturbing truth of that time, but you know what
they say about the dark just before the dawn. Although people like
thanatologist Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross [1969],
Robert A. Monroe
[1971], Dr. Moody [1975], modern mystic
David Spangler
[1976], and psychology professor Ken Ring [1980]
began to make their insights and discoveries known [and there were quite
a few in generations before them, such as F.W.H.
Meyers, J. Krishnamurthi,
R.
Steiner, C. Jung], it wasn't until the early
1990s [Thank you, Oprah, David Letterman, et al, and to many healthcare
professionals and researchers who encouraged this!] that people began to
share their individual versions of what is becoming recognized as our
New Story, unique and without precedent.
..
but that's another story !! Read on.
-----
*In
1982, Joseph Campbell was speaking specifically of the American
culture. This was seven years before the Berlin Wall came down, a
decade before the progressive years of the Clinton administration, when
we more than ever before acknowledged the ecological and social issues
of our age, eleven years before the dawning reality of the
world-wide-web. The internet and other mass media and relatively
inexpensive communication technologies facilitated so effectively our
becoming so much more mutually aware, to the point that we were becoming
indeed a world culture. Big Business, Big Government, Big Science,
and more economic travel for more people, but especially the internet
have been powerful contributors to this outcome. I believe if Joe
Campbell was still with us, he would address us and our challenges from
the perspective of a world culture, today. Never before have we
been so universally, mutually aware just how interconnected and
relational we truly are.
There
is one difference in this case. On the level of individual
cultures and countries, we speak of having lost something that is to be
regained. But in the context of a global culture, the scale is
literally 20 times greater and the quest is for achieving something we
have never had or imagined on this scale before. In both
situations, the sought outcome is a new story that will unite us through
our common humanity in terms of a potential greatness we can hardly
imagine!
