the game of life needs myths and rules

A mythological order is a system of images that gives consciousness a sense of meaning in existence, which, my dear friend, has no meaning it simply is. But the mind goes asking for meanings; it can’t play unless it knows (or makes up) some system of rules.

Mythologies present games to play: how to make believe you’re doing thus and so. Ultimately, through the game, you experience that positive thing which is the experience of being-in-being, of living meaningfully. That’s the first function of mythology, to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.

The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, art image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. This function we may call the cosmological function of mythology.

The question of truth doesn’t matter here. Nietzsche says that the worst point you can present to a person of faith is truth. Is it true? Who cares? In the sphere of mythological imagery, the point is, I like it this way; this is the source of my life. Question the cosmological authenticity of a clergyman’s archaic image of the universe, his notion of the history of the world—“Who are you, pride of intellect, to question this wonderful thing that’s been the source of all my life?”

People live by playing a game, and you can ruin a game by being Sir Sobersides who comes in and says, “Well, what’s the use of this?” A cosmological image gives you a field in which to play the game that helps you to reconcile your life, your existence, to your own consciousness, or expectation, of meaning. This is what a mythology or a religion has to offer.

Of course, the system must make sense. One of the most bewildering experiences I ever had was during the Apollo 10 moon flight. This was the one just before the actual moon landing, when these three wonderful men were flying around the Moon just at Christmas. They were talking about how dry and barren the Moon looked. And then, in honor of the holiday, they began reading from the first Book of Genesis. Here they were, reading these ancient words that had nothing to do with the cosmos they were flying through, describing a flat three-layer cake of a universe that had been created in seven days by a God who lived somewhere below the sphere that they were in at the time. They talked about the separating of the waters above and the waters below, when they had just pointed out how dry it was. The whole discontinuity between the religious tradition and the actual physical condition struck me very strongly that evening. What a calamity for our world that we do not yet have anything that can wake people’s hearts the way that those verses do and yet would make sense in terms of the actual, observable universe!

One of the problems in our biblical tradition is that the universe presented is one posited by the Sumerians five thousand years ago; we’ve had two universe models since then. There’s been the Ptolemaic system, and, for the past four or five hundred years, we’ve had the Copernican universe, with the solar system and the wheeling galaxies. But here we are, stuck with that funny little story in the first chapter of Genesis. This doesn’t have anything to do with any of the rest, not even the second chapter of Genesis. The second function of mythology, then, is to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you.

- Joseph Campbell

life as your narrative

When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it as perfect. So, I have a theory that if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it's your own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there's no precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is timely.

- Joseph Campbell

we all live by a myth

Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence.

Now, many of us live by myths that guide us, myths that may prove adequate for our entire lives. For those who live by such myths, there’s no problem here. They know what their myth is: one of the great inherited religious traditions or another. In all likelihood, this myth will suffice to guide them along the path of their lives.

There are others in this world, however, for whom these guideposts lead nowhere. You find these folks especially among university students, professors, people in the cities, folks whom the Russians call the intelligentsia. For these, the old patterns and the old instructions just don’t hold, so that when it comes to a life crisis, they are of no help.

There are others who may feel that they are living in accord with a certain system but actually are not. They go to church every Sunday and read the Bible, and yet those symbols aren’t speaking to them. The driving power is coming from something else.

You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home, find my family murdered, my house burned up, or all my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these things every day, and we think, well, that only happens to other people. But what if it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?

I’ve known religious people who have had such experiences. They would say, “It is God’s will.” For them, faith would work. Now, what do you have in your life that would play this role for you? “What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do; what is the call of your life to you—do you know it? The old traditions provided this mythic support for people; it held whole culture worlds together. Every great civilization has grown out of a mythic base.

In our day, however, there is great confusion. We’re thrown back on ourselves, and we have to find that thing which, in truth, works for us as individuals. Now, how does one do this? I think one of the great calamities of contemporary life is that the religions that we have inherited have insisted on the concrete historicity of their symbols. The Virgin Birth, for example, or the ascension into heaven--these are symbols that are found in the mythologies of the world. Their primary reference must be to the psyche from which they have come. They speak to us of something in ourselves. They cannot primarily refer to historical events. And one of the great problems that is confronting us now is that the authority of the institutions that have been presenting us with these symbols—the religions in which we have been raised—has come into doubt simply because they have insisted on talking about their underlying myths as historical events somewhere. The image of the Virgin Birth: what does it refer to? A historical, biological problem? Or is it a psychological, spiritual metaphor?

I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his hooks, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self-development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship”).

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the wonderful student of African cultures, called Ergnjfenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out. Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

One of the most vivid examples I know of this phenomenon is the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin. He was a perfectly prosperous businessman with a family and a house; then he simply became fascinated by what began to open up for him in painting. You start doodling with things, like painting and they might doodle you out of your life—that’s what happened to Gauguin. He just went off on this adventure, forgot his family and everything else. His awakening led him to Tahiti and all of those beautiful paintings. He forgot all about Maslow’s values and began simply to live his bliss.

- Joseph Campbell

the hero's journey

The basic story of the hero journey involves giving up where you are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then returning to the field of normal life.

The first stage is leaving where you are, whatever the environment. You may leave because the environment is too repressive and you are consciously uneasy and eager to leave. Or it may be that a call to adventure, an alluring temptation, comes and draws you out. In European myths this call is frequently represented by some animal stag or boar manages to elude a hunter and brings him into a part of the forest that he doesn’t recognize. And he doesn’t know where he is, how to get out, or where he should go. And then the adventure begins.

Another obvious case of the call to adventure occurs when something someone been taken away and you then go in quest of it into the realms of adventure. Always, the realm of adventure is one of unknown forces and unknown powers.

On the other hand, there may come what I call a refusal of the call, where the summons is heard or felt, and perhaps even heeded, but for one reason or another cut off. One thinks of some reason for not going, or one has fear or something like this and one remains; the results are then radically different from those of the one following the call.

- Joseph Campbell

proper use of rites and symbols

A ritual is nothing but the dramatic, visual, active manifestation or representation of a myth. By participating in the rite, you are engaged in the myth, and the myth works on you—provided of course, that you are caught up by the image.

But when you just go through the routine without real commitment, expecting it to work magically and get you into heaven—because you know that when you’re baptized, you get into heaven, after all—you’ve turned away from the proper use of these rites and images.

First, think about your own childhood, the symbols--that were put into you that remain. Think not how they relate to an institution, which is probably defunct and likely difficult to respect. Rather, think how the symbols operate on you. Let them play on the imagination, activating it. By bringing your own imagination into play in relation to these symbols, you will be experiencing the marga, the symbols’ power to open a path to the heart of mysteries.

It is my belief, drawn from experience, that there’s nothing better than comparative mythological studies to let you grasp the big, general form of an image and to give you many different ways of approaching that image. Images are eloquent in themselves; they talk to you. When the intellect tries to explicate an image, one can never exhaust its meaning, one can never exhaust its possibility. Images don’t essentially mean anything: they are, just as you are. They talk to some kernel in you that is.

So ask an artist, “What does your picture mean?” Well, if he despises you enough, he’ll tell you. The point is that if you need him to tell you what it means, then you haven’t even seen it. What’s the meaning of a sunset? What’s the meaning of a flower? What’s the meaning of a cow?

- Joseph Campbell

eternity

It's a basic mythological principle that what is referred to in mythology as "the other world" is really (in psychological terms) "the inner world." And what is spoken of as "future" is "now." Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.

Journey and Return / Differentiation and Integration

Being exposed to individuals who are not part of one's collective kinship group has the effect of sharpening one's own sense of individuality, if only faintly. It is said that urban life creates isolation and aloneness. But it also creates a unique self able to identify with other unique selves by way of empathic extension. Partially weaned from the collectivity, one begins the process of reconnecting to others, this time as individual beings, and, by so doing, furthering one's own sense of selfhood.

memoir

We too can make a myth out of our meager circumstances.

the hero's journey

To recap the Hero's Journey:

I. Heroes are introduced in the ORDINARY WORLD, where

2. they receive the CALL TO ADVENTURE.

3. They are RELUCTANT at first or REFUSE THE CALL, but

4. are encouraged by a MENTOR to

5. CROSS THE FIRST THRESHOLD and enter the Special World, where

6. they encounter TESTS, ALLIES, AND ENEMIES.

7. They APPROACH THE INMOST CAVE, crossing a second threshold

8. where they endure the ORDEAL.

9. They take possession of their REWARD and

10. are pursued on THE ROAD BACK to the Ordinary World.

11. They cross the third threshold, experience a RESURRECTION, and are transformed by the experience.

12. They RETURN WITH THE ELIXIR, a boon or treasure to benefit the Ordinary World.

Morality, Truth, Beauty

Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.

- Katha Upanishad

The word religion comes from the Latin ligare, to bind, as in ligature and ligament. The prefix ‘re-‘ implies the re-establishment of a connection which has been lost.

The primary purpose of myths is to bring human beings into contact with a deeper component in their psyche, which gave them the sense of belonging to something far transcending their own individual ego-existence. Where this level could be reached, it gave a sense of meaning and purpose to life; a sense of connection, not just to other people and all the world but to a dimension beyond time and existence altogether.

Compared with the majesty of God which has created every last minute detail of the universe, man knows nothing. Yet the very fact that he is part of this creation, that he is part of its complex purposes and that it is somehow connected with his existence, gives man a sense that, although in himself he is nothing, he is also identified with something infinitely greater than himself. He is part of the totality, ‘the One’.

Man used to be an animal, part of nature, life completely dictated by instinct.

Then man opened up Pandora’s Box, ate the Apple, was awoken and became aware, conscious. Instinct no longer dictated man’s life. Ego ruled.

With freedom and consciousness, man was free from nature’s bound, and soon fell prey to envy, greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, depression, loneliness, sin.

Now humans live in lives of constant tension. At the deepest level, there is nothing they want more than to re-establish the lost unity to live at peace with each other, with nature and with themselves.

But to do this they have to make a constant, conscious efforts. To assist them in that effort they have evolved a whole array of devices, mechanisms and rituals: from laws and political institutions to codes of morality; from every kind of artistic expression to the framework of religion. What all these creations have in common is that they all originate in a desire to underpin or to re-establish that sense of unity which every animal enjoys without thinking all its life long.

...The need to resolve this psychic split gives rise to other distinctive features of human behaviour for which the animal kingdom offers no real parallels. One conspicuous means whereby human beings sublimate their tendency to egocentricity is through their love of games and sport. Not only does the rivalry between teams and individuals provide a socially acceptable channel for competitive impulses which might otherwise become socially disruptive. By disciplining physical or mental activity within a strict framework of rules, the participants in a game or sport become subordinated to something higher than themselves. A psychological model for all sporting activity is the spiritual discipline of Zen archery, in which the archer's purpose is so to eliminate the distortions arising from his own ego that the arrow naturally flies to its target. Whenever a game is played well it produces those moments when body and mind come into such instinctive co-ordination that the players seem to have been lifted above themselves. This was why, until it became corrupted, the original Olympic Games were one of the central religious ceremonies of the ancient Greek world. The skill of the competitors expressed an ideal of perfection which elevated not only the athletes themselves but all those who watched them. Something of the same sense of transcendence, although it is similarly open to corruption by the ego, accounts for the extraordinary glamour which surrounds sport in our modern world.

An even more significant instance of how human beings express this urge to transcend the limitations of their ego-existence is through every kind of artistic expression. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order. From music to painting, from architecture to poetry, from a finely worked piece of jewellery to the disciplined exuberance of folk-dance, any effective work of art always combines these two elements: on one hand, the imagery of movement, vitality, imagination and colour we associate with the energy of life; on the other, that sense of pattern, rhythm and harmony by which it is structured. Whatever its outward form, the aim of any artistic creation is to weave these essential elements together in a way which gives us a sense of a perfect resolution. Any work of art thus seeks to create a marriage between those complementary aspects of the psyche we see as masculine and feminine. Analyse the appeal of a Beethoven symphony and we see how it is made up of that familiar fourfold combination of strength and mind, heart and soul. The music commands our attention by its masculine power. It appeals to our intellect by the formal subtleties of its structure. It moves us by its feminine grace and delicacy, its flowing life, its appeal to our feelings. It elevates us by evoking something beyond ourselves, a sense of perfect totality. Like all great art it thus harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.

Any work of art can be analysed along similar lines, even if only in terms of how it may fall short of such perfect balance. Whenever we sense any artistic creation to be in some way deficient, this is either because it somehow lacks life or because it is inadequately organised, or both. Any work of art which succeeds, however, can make us feel mysteriously more alive, by connecting us with the sense of a perfection beyond the limitations of our own ego. Such is what the artistic impulse in mankind is all about. But no device for re-establishing that sense of unity with our inner life is more ingenious than one coded into us by the process of evolution itself: to conjure up inside our heads those patterns of imaginary events we call stories.

- Christopher Booker

the authenticity ethos

Authenticity is a matter of genuineness, a hallmark of the unalienated original self. In his brilliant book Sincerity and Authenticity, literary critic Lionel Trilling identifies the ethos of authenticity, of individual impulses that are expressed freely and spontaneously without concern for propriety or others' reception. This value is associated with the 1960s—the generation to which many of today's college faculty belong—and the rejection of convention. It abounds in such mid-twentieth-century literary classics as The Catcher in the Rye, with its disparagement of "phoniness"; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with its search for "quality"; or On the Road, with its rejection of conformity and its celebration of spontaneity. A logic of authenticity seeks a singular self, a unique individuality that does not change or yield according to circumstances. The roots of this ethos can be traced through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and thought, from Emerson's notion of self-reliance back to the roots of Protestant Christianity, in which a person's history and family become irrelevant to the notion of the soul, and all that matters is individual faith, not ritual action.

The authentic self is often characterized by solitude. Groups are anathema to the authentic self, because participating in a group requires compromise, while authenticity requires consistent loyalty to one's own principles. As Freud pointed out in Civilization and Its Discontents, because we are members of society, individuals can never attain complete happiness, for we must always compromise our desires. The authentic self therefore celebrates separation of the person from society. It is distrustful of convention and even of success, since achieving worldly success means meeting the expectations and desires of the populace at large. Vincent van Gogh was the perfect authentic self: he had his own distinct, original style, suffered during his lifetime for his singularity, and was never commercially successful.

For authentic selves, the concepts of originality and authorship are critical. Since each self is unique, so are its words. In the celebration of authenticity that began in earnest in the eighteenth century, each text had to have a singular author. Authorship might have to be "authenticated" in order to ascertain precisely the identity of the originating individual.

Authentic individuals are especially prominent among the literary and musical geniuses whose oeuvre is perceived to have bubbled up spontaneously from their souls.' Unlike in earlier times, their inspiration was not thought to derive from a muse or from God; their creativity came from the internal inspiration of the writer or artist herself or himself. As these moments of inspiration "are increasingly credited to the writer's own genius," writes Martha Woodmansee, "they transform the writer into a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product. Wordsworth was the quintessential author, forever emphasizing his originality and creativity. And because authors are originators, they own rights to their work." Johann Gottfried von Herder's view, which guided this idea of authenticity, was that "one ought to be able to regard each book as the imprint of a living human soul. " Thus it is not just possible but essential to trace the book back to its originating soul.

- Susan Blum

God is dead, truth is dead. There are only multiple truths, depending on perspective. What is then important is our perception of reality. Because reality is determined ultimately by our mind.

Also, man is born without sin but is then corrupted by society and civilization. Parents, politicians, and preachers are hypocritical moral figures. Thus to be truly moral, one must look to nature and to one's heart for moral guidance and not to authorities such as the family, the state, and religion.

This I believe is the central essence of the authenticity ethos.

On a different note, let me say one thing. We can posit that objective standards of beauty and morality exist because biologically we are essentially built the same way. We are motivated and driven by the same desires. Gender roles are not socially constructed. They are a direct result of our biology and our genes. Our taste in art is not socially constructed. Humans tend to find similar things beautiful (a sunset vs. a pile of poop). Our moralities are similar (rules against incest, murder, and theft are found in all cultures). These things might not be "truths" to an alien species that come across our planet, but these are essentially truths for us, because we have been built to love, want, and desire the same things.

The reason why we have religion, family, and the state is because we need them. Communism forgot this. Communism was based on a false belief in human nature.

In an age of science, religion and myth are still relevant because science can not address the universal God-shaped hole in our hearts. We humans have evolved to seek fulfillment regarding questions of spirituality, meaning and purpose. But just because we have this need, does not mean that the object of this need exists. Nevertheless, we have this need and we have to address it, even materialists and atheists. Like their religious counterparts, they have their own mythic narratives that they believe in.

Can we ever know and experience the true reality? We begin our search for meaning with this question. Once we have found a narrative that sufficiently addresses this question of reality, then we have found our reality. Is this the true reality? Probably not, but by then, we don't care.

myth is neither allegory nor philosophy but identification

Within myth, the faithful hardly believe in anything; they simply and unself-consciously respond to the world they perceive with the aid of the myth, a world, moreover, that they see as real. The beliefs we observe in others are, for the insiders, invisible and taken for granted. The fan does not believe the Red Sox are the best team; he knows it. The devout don't believe Jesus is the Christ; they encounter Jesus directly as the Christ. The myth implicitly presents the world as it is, not as it may possibly be.

When the believer says, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet,” he is bearing witness, to the facts as he sees them, as realities in the universe not belief in his mind.

Myth can convey meaning and purpose, but it does so with a price and a danger. That’s what it looks like from the outside. But from the inside, it doesn’t look that way. From inside of myth, we become more authentic, and life gains greater significance and meaning, the more we identify with the mythic tale.

What constitutes a worthwhile life?—cannot be asked while we are living mythically. From inside myth, the question of meaning never arises. All myth can do is tell compelling stories. To ask critical or abstract questions of a myth—how the stories are related or what ideas they represent, for example—is already to violate the mythic mind. Myth is neither allegory nor philosophy but identification. The most important thing about myths is not the depth of ideas they contain— remember, I said they calm the mind precisely by staying on the surface of things—but whether they are compelling. To remind a companion who emerges in tears from a viewing of The Last Picture Show or some similarly sad movie that "It's only a story; it's not real" is both to miss the point and to misunderstand the compelling nature of, and total identification with, myth.

We begin to ask why and what for when faith and myth become self-conscious. Mythic thinking breaks down whenever we become reflective or self-conscious. Meaning is the price we pay for self-consciousness.

Faith over belief: "People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance with our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's finally all about."

- Joseph Campbell

belief vs faith

However important knowing the characteristics of myths may be, we miss something essential if we do not distinguish between knowing about myth and living mythically. The word about connotes a separation between the knower and the known that is alien to genuine myth. One can formulate propositions that are either true or false about an object. Persons outside a myth can characterize and describe myth, as I am doing here, but knowing about a myth is different from living from within it. I may know all the statistics of the Atlanta Braves baseball team—how many games they've won and lost, their team batting average and ERAs—but that is different from being a fan who identifies with the team and the mythology of baseball.

What separates a fan from someone who knows about—one who is inside a myth from one who is outside—is emotional identification, ritual, and imaginative reenactment. The fan identifies with the team and its heroes. The fan is happy when the team wins and is despondent when it loses. Similarly, the person living within a myth identifies wholly with the characters and events of the myth. Eric Havelock emphasizes that the ritual oral performance and retelling of Greek myth elicited an active, hypnotic identification of the audience with the myth. The audience was not merely watching a performance of a myth; it was ritually engaged in a reenactment and identification with it. In these circumstances, audience and performer become one. Within myth, I do not think about Achilles; rather, I wholly identify with Achilles; in a sense, I become him, as long as I submit myself to the incantation. This fanatical identification with the myth annihilates my autonomous, separate ego. I no longer live "as if" but in and within the myth.

The absolutely critical distinction between knowing about myth and living within myth is clarified by Wilfred Cantwell Smith's discussion of faith and belief. Belief is analogous to knowing about. It is both propositional and provisional. Belief is "the concept by which we convey the fact that a view is held, ideationally, without a final decision as to its validity. Thus, it is reductionistic. Belief rests between complete skepticism, on the one hand, and certain knowledge, on the other. From the outside, we say of someone that they believe in, rather than know, the Resurrection, the four Noble Truths, and the superiority of the Red Sox to the Yankees. And, as we all know, beliefs can be true or false, whereas knowledge is unassailable. In contrast, faith elevates belief to a religious level. Faith is a total, engaged response to and identification with myth that annihilates the critical distance between it and me. It is through the eyes of faith that one sees whatever one sees, not as a proposition that can be true or false, but as the way things are. Faith engages heart and soul. It is not enough to know about; one must directly experience and respond through the auspices of faith.

- Dennis Ford

Christmas

For the Kids:

You better watch out!

Better not cry!

Better not pout!

I'm telling you why,

Santa Claus is comin' to town.

He's making a list

and checking it twice.

He's going to find out who's naughty and nice.

Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town.

For the Adults:

You better watch out!

Better not cry!

Better not pout!

I'm telling you why,

Jesus Christ is comin' to town.

He's making a list

and checking it twice.

He's going to find out who's naughty and nice.

Jesus Christ Is Comin' To Town.

The only way to challenge a myth is to confront it with another, more compelling myth. One moves, not from falsehood to truth, but from one god--or baseball team--to another.

[fast forward to postmodern world]

Nihilism too is a culminating mythology of a long skeptical tradition that says that there is no meaning in an otherwise objective or neutral universe without purpose. Ironically, the myth of a meaningless universe is itself a way of infusing meaning into the experience of meaninglessness. According to this myth, we gain authenticity, dignity, and meaning by honestly and bravely accepting that the universe is without intrinsic meaning. The myth tells us that we are superior to those who live false, inauthentic lives by believing in one myth or the other, whether that myth be the American Dream or a socialist revolution. There's nobility and art in creating meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe. Paradoxically, a mythic strategy is effective for investing life with meaning even when the myth is telling us there is no meaning.

Story

Imagine, in one global day, the pages of prose turned, plays performed, films screened, the unending stream of television comedy and drama, twenty-four-hour print and broadcast news, bedtime tales told to children, barroom bragging, back-fence Internet gossip, humankind’s insatiable appetite for stories. Story is not only our most prolific art form but rivals all activities—work, play, eating, exercise—for our waking hours. We tell and take in stories as much as we sleep—and even then we dream. Why? Why is so much of our life spent inside stories? Because as critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life? But the answer eludes us, hiding behind a blur of racing hours as we struggle to fit our means to our dreams, fuse idea with passion, turn desire into reality. We’re swept along on a risk-ridden shuttle through time. If we pull back to grasp pattern and meaning, life, like a Gestalt, does flips: first serious, then comic; static, frantic; meaningful, meaningless. Momentous world events are beyond our control while personal events, despite all effort to keep our hands on the wheel, more often than not control us. Traditionally humankind has sought the answer to Aristotle’s question from the four wisdoms—philosophy, science, religion, art—taking insight from each to bolt together a livable meaning.

But today who reads Hegel or Kant without an exam to pass? Science, once the great explicator, garbles life with complexity and perplexity. Who can listen without cynicism to economists, sociologists, politicians? Religion, for many, has become an empty ritual that masks hypocrisy. As our faith in traditional ideologies diminish we turn to the source we still believe in: the art of story.

The world now consumes films, novels, theatre, and television in such quantities and with such ravenous hunger that the story arts have become humanity’s prime source of inspiration, as it seeks to order chaos and gain insight into life. Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience. In the words of playwright Jean Anouilh, “Fiction gives life its form.”

Some see this craving for story as simple entertainment, an escape from life rather than an exploration of it. But what, after all, is entertainment? To be entertained is to be immersed in the ceremony of story to an intellectually and emotionally satisfying end. To the film audience, entertainment is the ritual of sitting in the dark, concentrating on a screen in order to experience the story’s meaning and, with that insight, the arousal of strong, at times even painful emotions, and as the meaning deepens, to be carried to the ultimate satisfaction of those emotions.

Whether it’s the triumph of crazed entrepreneurs over Hittite demons in Ghostbusters or the complex resolution of inner demons in Shine; the integration of character in The Red Desert, or its disintegration in The Conversation, all fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning. To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility. Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

- Robert McKee