At Last The Truth You Have Been Waiting For

Our human imagination is the creative element of our reality. The scientific impulse, the desire to define the truth of reality works hand in and hand with the imagination every step of the way. Truth is always partial, the expansion of consciousness is the journey of increasing our experience, our awareness of the truth of existence. 

Myth is the power of our existence. Myth is precious, necessary and essential to human survival and all progress. We take on stories because they work for us, we are constantly refining and embellishing the story of life. The expansion of consciousness is the adventure of creating a more meaningful story about life. Myth or story is practical, it inspires us, motivates us and enables us to keep going. Myth is fundamental and everything is built upon myth. Our experience is not factual it is mythic, which is to say it is a story based on what we might call facts.

What is a fact, a fact is something that we agree upon. Facts are agreements, nothing more. Agreements are essential for relationship. Relationships are a necessity for our species, to survive and flourish, To enjoy life, to grow, to be healthy we have to make agreements. Nothing survives in isolation we have to come to agreement because we are in relationship to others. Facts are part of a continuum, a story. A story, the myth we agree to, is a meta-agreement that encompasses a selected number of facts. A myth is based on a series of agreements. The more facts, the more agreed upon components that we encompass in our story the bigger the truth.

The world is constructed upon and from the mythic bedrock. The truth of the world is always mythic. Myth is based on facts, but myth is how we put the facts together.

No one is in possession of all of the facts. Facts on their own do not gain the attention of human consciousness, not for any sustained period of time. 

We love stories for a very good reason, myths are stories based on facts that are often exaggerated, always embellished and creatively woven together with other facts. Existence is creative.

In time it becomes impossible to know all of the facts with absolute certainty, the more time passes the more versions of any particular event or person can and will appear. The modern world is totally run on stories, facts have to be presented in a way that are exciting and interesting otherwise they will not take root in our society.

Recent historical figures have an aura of mystery around them Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Martin Luther King, Ghandi to name but a few all have accumulated slightly different perspectives, these figures have contributed to the mythic bedrock in a small way. Even contemporary figures in the public spotlight have a mythic quality, such is the nature of fame, such is the nature of the collective imagination and the storytellers, the media, the biographers, and the bloggers all who help inform the mass of humanity. Every individual will carry a perception of all famous people, they will have a story running in their subconscious that will have formed, is being informed dependent upon what information has encroached upon them. 

It is impossible to research every single known fact about every single person or every area of history, or science. So it is that the collective imagination will always be awash with assumptions and  unwitting fragments of imagination that all accumulates around any human artifice, any person, any event, any theory, anything.

This is glorious and quite liberating, for it validates the human condition, which is one of creativity, wonder, mystery and the never ending quest for a greater truth. Life is a grand adventure story.

Although we all, from time to time, bemoan advertisers, marketers, public relations agents, spin doctors, truth merchants and ardent self promoters, we feed them, listen to them and actually need them. Without stories the human being is not alive, storytelling is a daily prerequisite for survival. We listen to gossip, we love to watch films, we read novels, we watch the news, we want to hear the news from our friends, we not only thrive on stories we actually have to have them in order to stay engaged with life. We want to hear different perspectives about any event so that we form a personal truth that works for us. Our truth is ever evolving.

Ah but we have science don’t we, science is just factual? No science is a story based on facts, like everything else. The narrative of the story of science is that science is the truth, that is science’s story. Science keeps on changing its perception, it keeps refining its story, and throwing away some of the past stories that it used to believe was relevant. This is good, this is true, this is the nature of progress, the story keeps on developing. 

The facts of science in of themselves are technical, each scientific fact of any import requires a great deal of study. Study in any subject involves taking on some agreements, some assumptions because they personally work for us. There is not enough time in a human lifetime for any scientist to have studied a significant amount of the whole of scientific literature and certainly not enough time to the millions of experiments that make up the body of science. 

Science requires storytellers, journalists normally,  in order to illustrate the latest discovery or breakthrough, in so doing the facts will be presented in a certain light, a conclusion of the importance of the discovery will be drawn, a likely outcome will be suggested. Scientists from different fields require stories about what is happening in different areas of science, they are interested like all human beings in the personalities, the personal journeys and the human element involved in the development of a scientific breakthrough. Science like all endeavours is emotional, it is a passioante enquiry, it is never, cannot be a neutral, cold, purely logical endeavour. Leading Scientists, those few scientists that actually seek to break new ground are human beings who are ardently motivated, imaginative, intuitive and desirous.

The neo-Darwinian story is a fabulous and useful story based on  some facts and based on a degree of truth. As we expand consciousness the truth quotient of our story increases. The myth becomes truer. Darwinism has given us a wonderful structure it has enabled us to see that physical life forms adapt, learns and change in accordance with the conditions and challenges of existence.

There is no physical hard evidence for all of the details of the evolutionary story as it presented by the Neo-Darwinian storytellers. We do not have a hoard of fossils that show the slow gradual transformations from monkey to human. However we can see the logic that the monkey is an idea that in some ways has been utilized to create a human being. That may well be true, possibly. The mammoth was an creation that was adapted into an elephant to suit other conditions, quite possibly. We do not know for certain, but it seems to make sense. Monkeys are not turning into humans, so that does leave us scratching our heads. As far as we can tell monkeys have been monkeys for an awfully long time, without going through any gradual mutations into human type monkeys, so we know the story is to improved upon.

It looks as if there is a physical adaptive element in evolution, there is a feedback mechanism whereby life changes through the physical conditions it encounters. We can see that the physical organism does evolve, does change on a micro scale, through DNA in some way, but it looks as if there are sudden and perhaps almost instant jumps in mutation where a new species appears that was based on an old species. We are still learning, we do not have the absolute evidence as such to come to a definitive conclusion as yet.

The important point is that Darwin has provided us with a story that has expanded our consciousness, like all stories it is open ended. The expansion of consciousness, our evolution involves increasing complexity. This challenges us to see how the Darwinian story fits together with the stories from spirituality. How do different perspectives fit together to make a better story. How can we create a greater truth a more useful story, one that encompasses the best of what we have learnt from the last couple of hundred years of science with the experience of those who have explored spirituality and consciousness, subtle energy and the anomalous mysteries of such things as UFOs.

The answer is that the tectonics of the mythic bedrock are shifting and adapting, new myths are forming, new stories are arising and the collective imagination is perceiving a larger vista of creation a more complex picture that accommodates the rich diversity of the human perspective.

Reality is a negotiation, what will we agree to, how will a new story of life come to dominate the world. We are all involved in bringing the new mythology to the surface, the rule of law is that everyone has the right to believe in what they want to, that is their right and that is what will happen.

Now, if we want to create an integrated version of the truth, which is to say a truer myth than has gone before, then we should listen to the different paradigms of enquiry. 

Any person who has spent a lifetime studying a subject and is presenting a cohesive picture that encompasses the truths found by most of the other people who have studied that subject, is worth listening to. 

A geneticist  who in general agreement with all other geneticists and who presents a more persuasive and comprehensive overview of human genetics should be listened to when he or she talks about genetics. The same goes for people who have spent a lifetime meditating and have found the same experience as suggested by other meditators, this would seem to validate meditation, in the same way the geneticist validates the science of genetics.  If someone has spent a lifetime or should we say two or three decades studying astrology, shamanism or any other area of consciousness then we might well find that they have something worth listening to. Should we listen to a geneticists opinions on astrology, a geneticist who has never studied astrology, should we listen and take his opinion seriously, it is only an opinion. We might choose to believe him, but it should be noted there is absolutely no scientific reason to believe him. He has not studied astrology. I choose to believe science when it talks about what it knows, and not believe it when it talks about what it does not know.

What interests me, what enthralls me is the glorious revelations, the incredible stories that make sense to me from all areas of life, what impels me, is to see if there is a story that is forming that encompasses all the other stories that are evolving and contributing to the collective story of the human species.

I am one of many, who is captivated by an integral approach, I am standing on the shoulders of many pioneers who have experimented, observed and envisaged the truth of human evolution being based on  developmental levels. An approach that suggests that everything fits together in a holarchy of complexity---such as the Enchantments of Life.

The Enchantments of Life is a work in progress, but what I will say unashamedly is that it tells an incredibly compelling story that validates the wonders of science and spirituality as well as many other mysteries within the framework of an evolving planetary being.