Comments

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  Willi Paul February 22, 2013 at 11:02am

  I come most recently from Permaculture, Nature, Alchemy with the Sacred and New Symbols as bridges. While Depth Psychology remains a mystery to me, a connectedness grows. How can the New / Old Mythology support our Faiths in crisis times? 
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  Ed Koffenberger February 22, 2013 at 10:44am

  It is upon this connection that the new mythologies can be born, and, I might add, some of the ancient mythologies can be rediscovered. Kerry, greatly enjoyed your sharing of the transformative work in which you are involved. Your understanding of depth psychology is the same as mine yet I've noticed that this connection between depth psychology and social challenges has yet to be accepted by the academic community. Curiously, many of the means of creating transformational events and movements have a strong foundation in depth psychology, but to mention that brings a taint of disdain from the current prevailing schools of psychology, so we adopt a position of "best not to mention - just do the work." There is still much bridge building needed in this area. This on-going conversation allows for such a bridge to be constructed. Thanks. 
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  Kerry Dennehy February 22, 2013 at 9:24am

  Thank you, Jerry.  This is why I was hoping that everybody throw their ideas in.  Although you and I approach things from basically opposite directions, we still meet in the human center: "the ethical obligation of living in a connected universe where thought and action is not separate from consequence."  
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  Jerry Kurtyka February 22, 2013 at 9:17am

  Kerry; the idea that came to my mind was quantum physics and especially quantum entanglement. Now of course there is a gap between what is going on down at that sub-atomic level and what is going on "up here" in the Newtonian universe. But the quantum reality is one of profound connectedness, as well as ambiguity.  Realizing that this is the nature of basic physical reality confronts one with the ethical obligation of living in a connected universe where thought and action is not separate from consequence.
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  Kerry Dennehy February 21, 2013 at 7:38pm

  Examples?  Well, a good example of a truly alternative awareness is that of the Australian Aboriginals as described in that first chapter of Sean Kane WISDOM OF THE MYTH TELLERS.  The anthroposophists are also a good example of people who have integrated a commitment to a deeper engagement with the potentials of awareness into a holistic approach to social and ecological change. Books that articulate this holism and alternative awareness are Owen Barfield's WORLDS APART, THE UNANCESTRAL VOICE and POETIC DICTION.   My understanding is that Depth Psychology itself requires a bit of a paradigm shift away from a Reason-centric Reason-only approach to addressing social ills as well as personal individuation.  Simple conceptual transformations like the one James Hillman makes between Spirit and Soul can be a revolution and a liberation to many minds. Positive challenges to monotheism presented by religions like voudun offer, again, different approaches to ecological balance and the role of people in the world. The Mundus Imaginabilis of Henry Corbin in his study of Sufism certainly raises the possibility of a new visionary approach to our sense of the nature of the world around us.  But our approaches to new awareness can start closer to home. Simple things like organizations such as Men Against Rape which seeks to challenge dominant notions of masculinity to create less destructive forms of manhood.  Much of my own work resembles the kind which Willi Paul describes immediately below: I've worked on urban farming projects with young city kids teaching agricultural skills, work ethic and character education.  These are kids who look at the little bit of green that's growing through a buckle in the sidewalk and see only "grass" or "weeds" and we teach them to take a closer look until they can distinguish and identify 5, 10 different plants in what was once just an undifferentiated patch of green.  That's a new awareness, an alternative to their previous consciousness.  We planted gardens in parks in the certainty that overnight these gardens would be trampled and ripped up out of pure meanness.  We do our best to move them out of the fatalism this certainty and countless others like it breed in them; we teach them that the right thing is worth doing even if its effects won't last through the night.  That too is a new awareness and an alternative to their previous consciousness. In Newark, NJ the city where I work there was a peace conference centered around a visit by the Dalai Lama. One of the breakout sessions was a conversation between Ismail Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who before the age of 15, enslaved by drugs, was already a murderer, and Dashaun "Jiwe" Morris, a member of the Bloods Street Gang by his early teens, initiated by taking part in a drive-by shooting, driven by his fatalism and his hunger for brotherhood into a life where life was worth nothing.  My own awareness shifted at the meeting of these two young men, both of whom were redeemed from their former situations, had written books and had become ambassadors for peace.  I realized that there was no difference between drugged child soldiers in Sierra Leone and drugged murderous gangbangers in Newark, NJ.  I realized that in poverty there is no division between first world and third world. Examples of alternative awareness and revolutions in consciousness are not difficult to come by in the present.  One last example: pornography is now the principal form of sex education in this country.  In that situation, simple sex education in the school, the religious institution or the home would be a revolution in awareness.  
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  Jerry Kurtyka February 21, 2013 at 4:44pm

  Kerry said: "I think if we are ever to make any substantive change, it must be through a revelation in our understanding of how we are aware of our environment, a revelation of the many alternative awarenesses that might exist. "

  What might that be? Examples?   
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  Willi Paul February 21, 2013 at 10:40am

  Nice flow here folks....

  This is reaction is from a member in a project that I started recently called:

  Children's Institute for New Mythology:

  "I want more opportunities to do that kind of thing for kids who have zero opportunities to make these connections (to Nature). I wonder what kinds of stories and mythologies that boy is most familiar with --- perhaps he has gotten the idea so far that little boys are into sports and trucks (this begins with newborn clothes printed with footballs and sports cars, yuck), not so much plants and gardens. I guess one thing to do is to just be really public about what we're doing, invite kids, make it fun, encourage them to get good and dirty, tell them stories."
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  Kerry Dennehy February 20, 2013 at 8:15pm

  Just wanted to clarify what I was saying by adding a quote from Sean Kane's wonderful book, THE WISDOM OF THE MYTHTELLERS "In the unpredictable world of swirling energies that the mythtellers  inhabit, there is no place set for "the gods" in the sense in which we inherit the term from literature... It seems, rather, as if the mythtellers sing of whole sets of ecological relatonships which can, or might, reveal their facets as this and as that god. The mythtellers speak of the powers in relation to each other, and with an eye to the whole ecology, not separable functions of it.  They know that each being has a partner, and each works off the other to its own gain, and in the end forms a pattern."  What is unique, in my reading, about Kane's book is that he presents the mythology of Australian Aboriginals as a means of maintaining environmental balance and as the avoidance of the kind of knowledge that would lead to the domination and abuse of nature.
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  Kerry Dennehy February 20, 2013 at 6:52pm

  This is a very core subject. It'd be worth going through slowly.  See what everyone has to say.  Throw it all in a salad bowl and toss it.  I think the conversation that Ed is talking about is with what we presently call nature, particularly unconscious human nature. I think that conversation begins with the recognition that our first environment is a psychic one. We are constructed by it and must be very aware of it, socially, philosophically.  But that environment not only reaches out to us, it also extends beyond our awareness all the way down to the deepest.  There it intermingles with what we once called the laws of nature.  To me, in this environment, myth is akin to dreams and arises from a deep place that is wiser and smarter than awareness. It enters awareness -- circumvents the shaping and distortion of awareness by entering through "side doors" like we were talking about.   The very fact that our conscious awareness is capable of "apocalypse" -- revelation -- is based on its setting in a psychic environment it does not completely comprehend. The existence of other cultures is proof that we can participate in this psychic environment in a variety of ways.   We've all heard the example of the evolution of the idea of genius from something like a visiting muse -- a voice from lower down -- to its present identity as an intelligent quotient above a certain number and contained in an individual's physical brain. That change is the result of the history of Western Consciousness.  As Owen Barfield never tired of saying, that evolution of consciousness gave us greater and greater control of our physical environment but cost us our participating in it in more richly meaningful way.  I think if we are ever to make any substantive change, it must be through a revelation in our understanding of how we are aware of our environment, a revelation of the many alternative awarenesses that might exist.    
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  Willi Paul February 20, 2013 at 12:13pm

  Hi Ed - Love to consider your evidence of "something larger going on...."

  "I believe that myths are, at least, the result of a dialogue if not the result of a an on-going conversation." Again, if not human to human or Nature to Human or Nature to spirit, who or what is in this conversation on Earth? Are you saying that the myth generators are aliens?