Adam Blatner

The acceleration of change in our era offers a new myth for our time: The blossoming of a flower or bud. Things can go along for months or weeks, but in a few days buds turn into leaves or flowers. Things change relatively fast after a long incubation. Birth happens. And so it is with us, with our time. Looking back into our origins can be so seductive, but I think it’s misleading. It carries forth the mythic theme that not much is changing, when in fact change itself is a major unfolding theme that must become woven into myth.

The new myth as I dare create it is in part based on Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow’s promoted “Great Story,” although they are not the only ones telling it. Brian Swimme and others are also active in this. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is re-telling Cosmos in the early 2014—makes me regret I don’t watch television, but I’ll get the DVD.

The new myth includes the emergence not only from the old myths, but from a variety of old world-views, including religion. The theme involves a shift from what you think to what it means that you create with your thinking. Reality is to some large extent what you create, and what you create reflects what we create together, the world-view, the paradigm. That is shifting, a gradual awakening. Mythology itself points not so much to the myths as to the dynamic of our mythmaking, our creating, and our cross-cultural activity. That is to say, one culture does not have a lock on truth and has some obligation to spread the “good news” to all other cultures. That ethnocentrism is becoming as obsolete as colonialism.

But if interspirituality is part of this, what of commerce? Again, the culture was immersed in a paradigm that believed that domains could be compartmentalized, that theology and ethics can be morally separated from  “business is business.” This capacity to dissociate without noticing the hypocrisy involved is build into mind, is archetypal, but that doesn’t make it okay. Rather, we must develop a skepticism towards what seems so, as mere “seeming” has misled us about so many things.

Well, people can find what myth works to lift or guide them, but for me, I’m into the myth of the flowering springtime becoming everything. I sense our lives are potential awakenings, and this awakening may take centuries, millennia.

There is faith in this being okay, in not being attached to whether the collective veers into this or that limited trend before getting corrective feedback from the cosmos. Well, maybe a little attached, because our passion to make it better adds a flavor. I relinquish my hope that I personally and alone may change the course of fate, if only sacrifice everything in a one-pointed effort to do so. I don’t believe I have that power, so I don’t take full responsibility.  However, I do take some responsibility an do believe I have a little power, so I do what I can, such as writing this essay. I am hopeful that I may fuel your thinking about things, creating your own myth.

A myth is sort of a poem, a story, something you can relate to. It’s more than dry fact, because it suggests the power of a person to stick with it or change course, to be forgiving here and stringent there. To let go or persist. The main thing to think about myth now is the recognition that the focus needs to change from the content of the story to the telling, to the creating, elaborating, and daring to question the story that is told. Perhaps we should not pass it along in the old form. I’ve dared to make up a number of myths. Perhaps you can improve on them.