Myth and "Myth-understanding"

Your religion is full of myths.

Now that I have your attention, let me explain further:

Many of the religious stories we take for granted are myths. Now, many people assume that myths are simply "fairy tales" -- that they are pointless made-up stories. However, this is not the case.

"Myth" is a writing style -- like a fable, or a letter, or a poem, or a parable. In fact, parables and legends are very similar to myths. A myth is simply a stylized story which is meant to teach us a spiritual truth.

Myths are not meant to be taken literally, however. They use symbols and metaphors to convey their message. Often the symbols used in myths are the same as those used in symbolic dreams, and rightly so: they both come from the sub-concious mind. Their message is hidden just below the surface.

For example, in the Gilgamesh story,Gilgamesh faces one of the greatest troubles of his life as his good friend Enkidu lies dying. He seeks out Utanapishtim, the oldest man in the world, for help. The old man had once built a great boat to escape the floods which destroyed the world. The old man was successful in helping Gilgamesh find a remedy which could save his friend.

In many myths water represents the world -- the current state of affairs of people. "Troubled waters" represent problems with the state of things -- in fact, we still use the term today! In this story, Gilgamesh faces his own "troubled waters", so he seeks help from someone who has defeated similar problems. Perhaps this is a message for us, the readers. Maybe, the author(s) of the Gilgamesh story want us to understand that we can get help with our crises from others who have faced similar problems.

In other myths a person may command the "troubled waters" to become silent -- which they do. This shows us that this person is able to solve the problems simply by speaking or teaching. These myths hold greater meaning than they, at first, appear to. A spiritual leader may walk upon the waters, or build a great boat to remain alive as Utanapishtim did in the story above. By rising above the waters the leader is able to keep from drowning in the troubles of his time, as we are supposed to do – being the audience for the myth.

Still other myths may teach us to avoid getting bogged down in the trappings of tradition. A spiritual teacher may attend a festival, when suddenly those holding the festival run out of wine. Well, according to tradition, the festival may require wine. And so the teacher may instruct them to use water instead – the water becoming wine. The purpose of this story is not a literal miracle where the water turns into fermented grapes, but rather that the water symbolically becomes as wine. The point of the myth is that the celebration of the festival is important, not whether there is enough wine to go around or not.

A multitude may approach a teacher to hear his words of wisdom, and those with the teacher may notice that they are unable to fee them all. The teacher may simply state “I will satisfy them”. The multitude leave satisfied, not because the teacher miraculously turned into a taco stand, but because he gave them what they came seeking: spiritual food. Again, the point of the myth is lost if it’s take literally, but becomes apparent when we examine the symbols.

Every faith contains myths. These are the stories that help illumine our spiritual lives. They teach us about our spiritual teachers, our relationship to the world around us, and about ourselves. If we only dig at them a bit more deeply to understand the symbols and metaphors contained within them we can gain a much better spiritual understanding.

Revisiting the Garden

Many people today miss the points of their own mythology. Interestingly enough, the Creation/Evolution debate becomes nonexistent if we examine the Biblical Creation stories in their mythological context.
Perhaps the most telling tale in the Bible is the "Garden of Eden" story. This story is unique to Judeo-Christendom, as the "6 Days of Creation" story is a copy of the Babylonian Enuma Elish. The "Garden" myth focuses on the origin of suffering, for in this story all is in balance until mankind eats of the Tree of Knowledge and is then cast out of the garden.
Sadly, many believe this story is a literal tale, and so they miss the whole point of the myth. As myths use metaphors to tell their story, much of the "Garden" story becomes very clear when we but try to understand the symbols.
The Garden, it seems, is a peaceful and perfect place. This is where the animals and plants are. Here is where all is beautiful and in balance. Here is where the Tree of Life is. Here, also, is where God walks.
The Garden represents a time when we were in balance with the animals. It is a metaphor for a time when we were no different from animals. A time when we were emotionally-driven creatures -- not the somewhat rational creatures that we are today.
In the Garden we were cautioned not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. But the serpent, long a symbol of transformation and rebirth, encouraged us to do otherwise. And so, by eating of the Tree of Knowledge we were transformed from reactive creatures into active ones. That is to say that we went from lives of simply reacting to instincts and emotions to lives of active change. And so we began to shape the patterns of our own lives.
And so the "Garden" story represents the moment when we separated ourselves from the Animal Kingdom -- the time when we became human.

Religion Is A Toolkit

Religion is simply a toolkit for unlocking the soul. Through religion we learn disciplines which can help us to lead spiritual lives.
Religions are composed of disciplines and myths designed to help our spirits grow. Often in religion, we are given examples of how one should live if he/she is a spiritual person. Many times we are given guiding principles to live by, and often we are even presented with a holy person to emulate.
So often in religion it is so easy to take the guidelines we are given and to use them as a checklist -- believing that we are successful so long as we do the things on this list. But when we do this, we miss the point of religion entirely. We become focused on the habits of religion rather than the rebirth of spirit. Often persons of religious habit grow very bitter and judgmental, because religion provides such little fulfillment as its own goal.
Often it takes conviction to find spirituality through religious practice. Religion offers guidelines, but cannot force a person to open his/her spirit. The spiritual journey must be undertaken by the individual. And so, each of us can find meaning in our lives through religious discipline, if we so choose.

There are so many different religions in the world. And each of these has been shaped around the culture in which it was born. This doesn't make any one religion more valid than any other. Rather, it offers differing viewpoints so that a person may choose what works best for him/her.
Among desert peoples religion often focuses on a harsh god or gods who demand strict obedience. But in the East, where life is not so harsh, often there are no gods in religion, and when there are they are often seen simply as embodiments of a greater all-pervading spiritual force.

Disciplines

When discussing religion a good place to start is by defining what religion is. This is not as easy as it first seems. For many years people have tried to define what religion is and what it is not. Even today people argue whether the eastern religions are really religions or simply philosophies. Also, people of the Eastern beliefs argue that they cannot find religion in the Bible of the Western world. Clearly, there is no consensus for defining what religion is.
When I try to tackle this problem I go about it by trying to understand what drives us to have religions -- or, more simply, what function religions play in our lives. It is helpful to try to understand the history of religion.
Anthropology shows us that the many ways we have to understand things were originally all parts of the same thing. That is to say that there was no difference between science and religion or religion and history -- it was all the same. Each culture had its own version of what seemed to be the truth. But as time has gone by we have diversified our understandings.
Now, when did we become human? At what point did we begin to distinguish ourselves from the other animals on the planet? We notice that we began doing uniquely human things at about the time when religious artifacts began to appear in our burial sites. This is what anthropologists see as the first signs of religion. It seems that we became human when we began trying to explain what happens after death -- trying to explain the unexplainable. I would argue that the one thing which makes us human is simply our ability to question -- to seek -- to try and understand things. After all, we are not the only animals who communicate, or even who use tools. Yet, we seem to be the only ones who spend our lives trying to figure things out. Perhaps in our prehistory something happened which piqued our curiosity.
In any case, it seems clear that our questioning was pretty basic until about the time of Classical Greece, when we began to specialize the disciplines for answering our questions. The Greek thinkers advanced the schools of Science and Philosophy as their legacy. They were the first to discover that the world is round, for example. Sometimes they were sentenced to death for their varied ways of thinking and teaching.
Since that time we have continued to refine our disciplines to make our answers even more specific. In the past few centuries we have honed our questioning skills, so that now we can ask very specific questions and get very specific answers.
So what are the basic questions we ask? From the time of grade school we have had these six questions ingrained in our minds: Who? What? Where? When? How? and Why? These have become our most basic questions. And we have made disciplines to answer them:

Who are we? -- This question is best answered by Biography. We learn about ourselves by learning about those who have gone before us. We spend so much time tracing our family histories. We look to the people of the past to help us define the people of the present.
What is reality? -- This is the realm of Philosophy. The Classical Greeks invested a great deal of time asking this question. For centuries people have tried to understand what reality is and what it means. Views on reality vary from the very solid view most people have to the idea that everything is an illusion -- a shadow of the way things appear to be.
Where are we? -- Geography defines our location. We map everything: our states, our planet, and even the stars! We like to know as much as we can about our neighborhood and the distant places beyond.
When are we? -- History is the study of past decisions and actions. We look to the past for direction for the future. We try not to repeat past mistakes. But we do try to build on our past successes!
How does anything work? -- Here we ask the question of process. We attempt to understand the building blocks, rules, and actions which govern reality. These are the sciences. We look to Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine, among others, to understand our physical reality. We have become so good at asking How questions, in fact, that science has become broader than the other disciplines.
Why? -- Finally we ask the biggest question to plague humanity: Why are we here? Here is where Religion enters the picture. It seems that Religion is our way of answering the Why question. Or, for the purposes of this book, Religion is our feeble attempt to understand the universe around us and our place within it. That is to say: Religion is made by humans to try and make sense of everything. It is perhaps our greatest and most mysterious discipline. It has caused more happiness and more misery than any other thing in human history.
Religion is both a personal and a cultural thing. It is defined by how we see things. It depends on our environment, our history, the influence of our neighbors, and any number of random things happening in our lives. The very way we understand things is so fragile that one tiny mistaken idea can mess up the whole thing. We build upon the beliefs of others: often our parents, teachers, and friends. Any misunderstandings along the way get ingrained in religious teaching until they are almost impossible to correct. Centuries down the road our misunderstandings may be repeated as facts.
Perhaps the greatest problem in Religion happens when people try to use it to answer questions it is not suited to answer. For many years people thought the Earth was flat -- a broad, round circle. This is reflected in many religious teachings throughout the world. However, Geography has taught us that this is not the case. Still, many of our religions talk about "the circle of the Earth" or even "the four corners of the world"! A more disastrous thing happens when people use their religious teachings as History or Biography -- to answer other questions it is not able to answer. Religion often clashes with Science when it tries to answer the basic How? questions. We need look no further than the Scopes Monkey Trial to see the problem. This is echoed by those who would try to answer Religious questions with Science -- it doesn't work because these are not the questions it was designed to answer.
Religion exists because we want to make sense out of life. We create religion. It is not given to us on tablets written in stone, or on scrolls handed down to us by the gods. Religion is a human way of interpreting the most important questions of existence.
Religion uses some specialized tools to achieve its goals. Myths and rituals are perhaps the two biggest. The lessons we learn in our myths can fire our soul, and our rituals help us connect with that which we call Sacred. These are some of the ways through which can find our spirituality.

Our Dual Nature

Many people today miss the points of their own mythology. Interestingly enough, the Creation/Evolution debate becomes nonexistent if we examine the Biblical Creation stories in their mythological context.
Perhaps the most telling tale in the Bible is the "Garden of Eden" story. This story is unique to Judeo-Christiandom, as the "6 Days of Creation" story is a copy of the Babylonian Enuma Elish. The "Garden" myth focuses on the origin of suffering, for in this story all is in balance until mankind eats of the Tree of Knowledge and is then cast out of the garden.
Sadly, many believe this story is a literal tale, and so they miss the whole point of the myth. As myths use metaphors to tell their story, much of the "Garden" story becomes very clear when we but try to understand the symbols.
The Garden, it seems, is a peaceful and perfect place. This is where the animals and plants are. Here is where all is beautiful and in balance. Here is where the Tree of Life is. Here, also, is where God walks.
The Garden represents a time when we were in balance with the animals. It is a metaphor for a time when we were no different from animals. A time when we were emotionally-driven creatures -- not the somewhat rational creatures that we are today.
In the Garden we were cautioned not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. But the serpent, long a symbol of transformation and rebirth, encouraged us to do otherwise. And so, by eating of the Tree of Knowledge we were transformed from reactive creatures into active ones. That is to say that we went from lives of simply reacting to instincts and emotions to lives of active change. And so we began to shape the patterns of our own lives.
And so the "Garden" story represents the moment when we separated ourselves from the Animal Kingdom -- the time when we became human.

In truth, we are no different than our animal cousins, yet we still try to view creation without ourselves. We talk about how nature works, labelling our own actions as "unnatural" -- and yet, we are a part of that natural order. We try to understand how animals interact amongst themselves if humans are not around, and we remove ourselves from the equation. We call ourselves human, as if this title somehow negates the "animal" nature we share; as though we are somehow alien to the natural world in which we find ourselves.
In fact, one of the most distinguishing factors about us is that we prefer to distinguish ourselves from our world. We speak of "natural" and "unnatural" actions, as though anything we do could be unnatural. And so we deny our connection to the world; our evolutionary heritage. Instead, we pretend that we are something much nobler.
For so long in our dominant culture we have denied our animal nature. Instead, we describe our animal behavior using words such as "sin". We fail to understand that being animal is an essential part of being human.

The most important fact to remember is that we are animals. Everything we do is governed by this. Everything we are. And as much as we try to believe otherwise, this fact will always haunt us.
Being animals, much of what we do is based on instincts and reactions. We live by emotions, and often we don't think about what it is we're doing. And so, to understand human behavior we need to understand animal behavior.
Perhaps the first thing we must consider is just what it is which distinguishes us from all other animals. We may believe it to be our ability to communicate. But all animals communicate in one form or another. We may consider it to be out ability to use tools. Yet, many animals, especially primates, use tools to obtain food or for protection. I would suggest that the deciding difference is our ability to ask questions: to behave based on reason rather than instinct -- we have "eaten of the tree of knowledge", so to speak.
And so our dilemma becomes more complicated. For we are torn between our thoughts and our emotions. We aspire to leave our animal heritage behind us, and to be rational creatures. Yet this evolutionary baggage is still within each of us.

Much of our Western Heritage has viewed sex as horrific. I believe this is because sex is an act which reminds us that we're animals. When we have sex we bring a great deal of our primal instincts to the surface -- parts of ourselves we often try to hide.
Again, this is an item which brings back our evolutionary lineage. So often we try to think of ourselves as something much nobler than the other animals. Yet, our passions are a slap in the face for the deified vision we have of ourselves. They are a cold reminder that we still live and breathe.
We should learn to balance our passionate side and our noble side. For without the noble side, we are no more than the others animals. And without passion we lose our connection to the universe.

We carry with us the baggage of countless millenia of evolution. And this heritage brings us to an odd place. For, on the one hand, we are animals driven by our instincts and emotions. And on the other hand we strive to be rational creatures, basing our judgements on our rationality.
We threw our own selves "out of the garden". For a long time since our branch of the evolutionary tree grew out from the rest of the animals we lived with them in harmony, surviving by our instincts and our emotions. But somewhere along the line we began to think rationally: basing our reactions on the questions we have about the world around us. By becoming rational creatures we separated ourselves from the animals and began to consider ourselves superior. And so paradise was lost .
Today, this evolutionary baggage creates many of the problems in our world. We still have greed, aggression, and fear. And these threaten to destroy everything we've created. Our greed drives us to accumulate ever more -- depriving others of their basic needs. Our aggression makes us hostile to one another at every turn. And fear drives the strongest wedge between us -- begetting anger and hatred among our societies.

We live at a time when we can use our rational nature to counter our dominating instincts. We can learn to think calmly when faced with fear. We can learn to live more simply -- making wise choices to reduce our consumerism. And we can channel our aggressive energies in more productive ways.
Chief among the changes we need is a new ideology. We need to understand ourselves, each other, and our world better. We need to understand that our sense of individuality often leads to isolationism, and we must seek out the ties which bind us all together. We must understand that we are all interconnected through the Web of Life.
We must learn that there is Sacredness within all. We must find it in ourselves, in others, and in the world at large. Perhaps then we can truly learn respect for life.
Respect, compassion, and harmony: these things will be the keys to our survival.

The "Garden of Eden" is a mindset, not a physical place. The Garden represents a time when we made no distinction between ourselves and the other animals. It represents a time when we reacted based solely on our instincts.
The universe exists in a state of balance. For every action there is an opposing reaction. Life creates life and life destroys life.