15-16 Jean Houston

Mything Links

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By JEAN HOUSTON

omething extra o r d i nary is happening. All over the world myth is bursting through.

Most of us were raised in print culture wherein principles of continuity, uniformity, and repeatability were elevated over the more organic principles of discontinuity, simultaneity, and multiple associations. Now the mythic flavor of the more ancient, organic perspective returns, and chaos theory becomes lauded as the way things work. We look for flow patterns rather than for linear cause-effect explanations. Resonance has become far more important than relevance, and nothing is truly hidden anymore.

How are people experiencing the nature of this new reality—the rising of the depth currents of all times, all cultures and all experiences? Its effects are felt in the fascination with myth, the seeking of spiritual experience, the revival of the knowings of indigenous people, the rising of a world music which incorporates and sustains the knowings of many regions, styles of clothing that mix and match continents on a single body, while artists everywhere are trying to make sense of it all with art that challenges the imagination, and brings new mind and new materials to bear on radically new circumstances. Clearly, we have all become “mything” links!

Even on the shadow side, we find rising for a last stand the old insular forms in their varying fundamentalist postures, before they are swept—not away, nothing is ever swept away—but into a new amalgam in which they, too, become part of the larger story. Today, and for all of us, all parts of the planet are catching all parts of the planet.

In order to prepare for these world changes, the human psyche is manifesting many different expressions of itself as it helps the planetary movement toward convergence and transition. Psyche is moving at remarkable speeds past the limits most of us have lived with for thousands of years into an utterly different state of being—a dreamlike reality in which it is difficult to tell any more what is news and what is drama, what is matter and what is myth.

We live in chaos which we may have created in order to hasten our own meeting with our own deeper selves. In virtually every culture I visit, I find that images that were relegated to the unconscious are becoming conscious.

Happenings that belonged to extraordinary experiences of reality are becoming more common, and many of the maps of the psyche

and its unfolding are undergoing awesome change. Buddhist cybernauts share realities with secretaries who hold black belts in Kung Fu. Women Episcopalian priests draw ancient mazes on the floors of their cathedrals and lead their parishioners through the sacred geometry of the labyrinth. U.N. economic advisors practice deep meditation and find the solutions to the tribulations of countries in resources met in inner space.

Myth is bursting through at such a rate that even the most ancient and honored of myths themselves are changing.

Some years ago I found myself sitting on the ground in a small village in India watching a television dramatization of the Ramayana. The village’s one television set was a source of great pride, and all the villagers had come in from their fields and houses to be inspired and entertained by the weekly hour in which the many episodes of this key myth of the Hindu world were so gloriously produced. The story told of Prince Rama (an avatar of the God Vishnu) and his noble wife, Princess Sita (a human incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi), and how they had been betrayed and banished to live in a forest for fourteen years. Nevertheless, they are very happy, for Rama is noble, handsome and full of valor, while Sita is virtuous, beautiful and completely subservient to her husband. They are, in other words, the archaic ideal of the perfect married couple. Unfortunately, their forest idyll is brutally interrupted when Sita is abducted by the many headed, multi-armed demon, Ravanna, who promptly carries her off to his own kingdom of Sri Lanka. Enter the saintly monkey Hanuman, who with his army of monkeys and bears, along with Rama, is eventually able to vanquish Ravanna and his formidable troops of demons and rescue Sita.

Rama takes her back, however, only after he is convinced of her virtue and the fact that she not once “sat on the demon’s lap.”

There is never a minute in the Hindu world when this story is not enacted, sung, performed in a puppet show, a Balinese shadow play, or a stage or screen performance. It is the core myth of the Hindu psyche. And this television series was a lavish treatment, filled with spectacular effects, exotic costumes, thrilling music and dance, and acting appropriate to the playing of the gods. The villagers were as entranced as I, for this was religion, morality, and hopping good musical theater all in one. Furthermore, they were joined together in the knowledge that all over India at that moment hundreds of millions of people were watching this program with the same fascination. Suddenly, the old Brahmin lady who owned the television set and who was sitting next to me on the ground turned to me and said in lilting English, “Oh, I don’t like Sita!”

“Pardon?” I was aghast. This was like my Sicilian grandmother saying that she doesn’t like the Madonna.

“No, I really don’t like Sita. She is too

weak, too passive. We women in India are much stronger than that. She should have something to do with her own rescue, not just sit there moaning and hoping that Rama will come. We need to change the story.”

“But the story is at least three thousand years old!” I protested.

“Even more reason why we need to change it. Make Sita stronger. Let her make her own decisions. You know, my name is Sita and my husband’s name is Rama. Very common names in India. He is a lazy bum. If any demon got him, I would have to go and make the rescue.”

She turned and translated what she had just said to the others who were sitting around.

They all laughed and agreed, especially the women. Then the villagers began to discuss what an alternative story, one that had Sita taking a much larger part, might look like. It was a revisionist’s dream, listening to people whose lives had not changed much over thousands of years actively rethinking their primal story. It was like listening to the rewriting of the Bible.

Astonished and exhilarated, I sensed that I was experiencing in this village a beginning stage of the re-invention of myth, the changing of the story. No matter that this primal tale was ancient beyond ancient, and venerable beyond venerable; it belonged to an outmoded and limited perception of women and their relationship to men and society, and it had to change or go.

Thus are myths and metaphors recast, redesigning the human fabric and all our ways of seeing. It is our privilege and our particular challenge to witness and assist a new story coming into being. As actors in this new story, we are seeing the rise of new archetypes, or, perhaps, the evolution of old ones. As artists, we give new form to the emergence of the new story.

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he fact of the matter is that we are required to work with myth to open up the story to changing conditions—not just in India but everywhere in the world. Patterns of millennia have prepared us for another world, another time, and, above all, another story. At the same time, exponential change, unlike any ever known in human history or pre-history, has confused our values, uprooted our traditions, and left us in a maze of misdirection. Factors unique in human experience are all around us—the journey into the unknown that comes with the economic collapse, the Herculean tasks that face us to save the ecology, the rise of women to full partnership with men, the daily mythic revolutions in technology, the Daemonia of the media becoming the matrix of culture, the seeking of the Grail of an unfolding planetary civilization, and the Protean shifts in the understanding of human and social capacities. The Zeit is getting Geisty as the old story itself is undergoing the sacred wound in order that it too grow and address the multiples of experience and complexity of life unknown to our great grandparents. Nor can it Fine Art Magazine • Fall 2009 • 15

heal the many wounds which come with this plethora of experience and its attending chaos.

We have become so full of holes that perhaps we are well on the way to becoming holy.

Since the new story, the new mythology is not yet in place, it is up to us to separately and together—and especially the artist—to carry out the work of re-envisionment. But can one ever really change, or even invent a myth?

Go beneath the surface crust of consciousness of virtually anyone anywhere, and you will find repositories of the imaginal world—the teeming terrain of myth and archetype: holy men and wise women, flying horses, talking frogs, sacred spaces, death and resurrections, the journeys of the heroes and heroines, each bearing a thousand faces. Having taken depth probings of the psyche of many people the world over, I know this to be so. I know that in the west we have moved from the Promethean myth—of snatching fire from heaven—to the myth of Proteus, the shape-shifter. The sea-god Proteus was capable of taking on all manner of shapes, forms and purposes at will. This is us today —suddenly, like Proteus, we have to become protean—highly resilient and creative, able to adapt to the ever changing story, especially in the light of constant challenge, and ever present peril. This is why the myth is changing, for mythic structures not only support the work and health of any culture, but allow the psyche its own healthy development. In the past, personal identity and cultural identity tended to be consonant with each other. Now the psyche is adrift because the old stable stories are no longer operative.

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yths, after all, contain the greater story that never was but is always happening. Myth is the coded DNA of the human psyche. It is the stuff of the evolving self that awakens consciousness and culture according to the needs of time and place. It is the promise of our becoming.

When we undertake to consciously work with the great old myths, a rich and varied world of experience opens to us. We can travel with Odysseus, experience the passion play of Isis and Osiris, wander with Percival in search of the Grail, and die and be reborn with Jesus.

Within the spoken or ritually enacted myth we can allow our lives to be writ larger, the personal particulars of our local existence finding their amplification and elucidation in the personal universals of the greater story and the larger characters which myth contains. Those who have entered the realm of the ancient stories and their persona, seem to inherit a cache of experience that illumines and fortifies their own. They soon discover that they, too, are valuable characters in the drama of the world soul, pushing the boundaries of their own local story and gaining the courage to be and do so much more.

How then can we change patterns so deeply woven into the structure of our psyches?

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Up until recent decades, I doubt that one could have done much more than alter certain details.

Now, however, in a time of whole system transition when everything is deconstructing and reconstructing, myth too, requires its redemption. It is as critical a task as one could attempt at the beginning of the millennium— how to actually go about changing the dominant myths by guiding people into the realms of the psyche wherein they have the power to change their own essential story. This is what the artist knows and can use as a basis for her inspiration: that all over the world psyche is now emerging, larger than it was. We are experiencing the harvest of all the world’s cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. What had been contained in the “unconscious” over hundreds and thousands of years is up and about and preparing to go to work. What had been part of the collective as the shared myth or archetype is now finding new rivers of unique stories flowing from out of the passion play of individual lives.

This does not mean the dismissal of traditional myths, but rather that now—as the maps of the ancient traditions no longer fit the personal territory to the degree they once did owing to the radical change of our time—we must live our lives with the mythic vibrancy of those who inhabited the ancient stories. We are mentored and informed by the ancient myths, and we are also in an open moment, a jump time where myth is recreating itself from the stuff of personal experience. For the development of the psyche, this is as monumental as when people stopped depending on the meanderings of the hunt and settled down to agriculture and civilization. Just as we are becoming capable of discovering our own personal mythologies, we are becoming required to discover them. In so doing, the artist adds their own deepening story to that of the emerging New Story, and with it, the new planetary civilization. With so much more history, with so much more experience behind us and within us, we have achieved what is surely an extraordinary evolutionary achievement—the ability to continuously receive, re-create, re-frame and extend our experience. This new protean capacity of the self is virtually a new structure in mind, brain and psyche, for it grants us the capacity to view ideas and systems—be they aesthetic, social, intellectual, political or philosophical and spiritual with a freedom that was not ours in the past. Now we can view them, turn them inside out, re-invent them with little or no anxiety.

What is emerging the world over, owing in part to the rise of myth again, is a technology of the sacred, a high art form as well as a once and future science. It finds its theory and practice in the teachings of the mystery schools of old, in shamanic training and initiations, as well as in the modern laboratories of consciousness research and the cutting edges of psychotherapy.

While Facebook and twittering, mobile phones, global computer networks, and other

information superhighways give us access to the world mind, there are arising groups of artist-scientists who are providing us with the highways to the world soul. From this emerging new story, many more capacities—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual—become available as well as the ability play out its story.

Change or re-grow the story and you release all manner of latent capacities.

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ince culture is everywhere being newly reimagined, nothing is more necessary than a rebirth of the self. These are times that are meant to breach our souls, unlock the treasures of our minds, and, through the divine act of remythologizing, release the purpose, the plan and the possibilities of our lives. We are re-grown to greatness and take our place with Percival and Penelope, with White Buffalo Woman and the Lady of the Lake, with Quetzacoatl and Bridget and Mr. Spock. And the name of this new character out of myth is You. And the name of the myth is Your Story—reframed in the light of the understanding that has come from this process, and re-conceived for the renewal of self and history. The artist’s role is to be the midwife of this renewal, the one in whom the world mind takes a walk with itself.

“Thank God, our time is now,” poet Christopher Fry says, “when wrong comes up to meet us everywhere. Never to leave us, till we take the longest stride of soul men ever took.” This stride of soul must carry us through every shadow towards an open possibility, in a time when everything is quite literally up for grabs. We can do no less. The psyche requires its greatness, as do the times. This adventure in myth—both ancient and personal—is one very important, very original and exciting way to greatness, or should I say, responsible living of the life we are given.

I should tell you that back in that village in India, when the beautiful episode from the Ramayana ended, and following the commercial interlude, the next program that all of India was watching was the prime-time soap opera of some seasons ago, Dynasty! As I watched the dubious comings and goings of the characters, I didn’t know where to hide my head. My hostess saw my embarrassment at the comparative low level of American television and patting my arm said, “Oh, sister, do not be embarrassed. Don’t you see? It is the same story.”

“How can you say that?”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” she continued, her head wagging from side to side. “It is the same story.

You’ve got the good man. You’ve got the bad man. You’ve got the good woman. You’ve got the bad woman. You’ve got the beautiful house, the beautiful clothes, the people flying through the air. You’ve got the good fighting against the evil. Oh, yes, indeed, it is the same story!”

Thus are myths and metaphors recast, so redesigning the human fabric and all our ways of seeing.