You Are A Myth Making Machine

This is the fundamental idea of the MythoSelf Process. Not that you are living inside of a myth, that was Joseph Campbell’s offer, understanding and contribution, not mine.

My observations are about a way of life, living it … not peering into it to understand it better or more deeply.

Oh, okay, to live life better and more deeply we may have to dive into understanding it better and more deeply as well.

But, never mistake understanding for diving directly into life itselt and experiencing it … they are not the same things.

The revolution is aesthetic … NOT intellectual … NOT psychological … NOT philosophical … AESTHETIC.

The revolution begins when you take back your life and begin living it, as opposed to thinking about it.

That’s what I mean by aethetic … diving into the deep end of sensuality.

Experiencing your life directly through your sense and sensate experience, as opposed to intellectualizing you life and ideation.

You may be challenged by never having had any formal aesthetic education, and I don’t mean art history, learning to read poetry or appreciating good music.

I mean learning how to recognize the signals from your senses directly … to experience physical sensation DIRECTLY!

There are lots of psycho-somatic practices that teach people to attend to their physical feelings and then make meaning of them … or figure out what the sensation is trying to offer you about whatever you’re feeling (instead of just feeling it).

WTF???!!!!!?????!!!!???!!!

That’s exactly NOT WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!!!!!

I designed the MythoSelf Process to lead people back to themselves.

Back from the edges of interpreting to the direct sensations of experiencing.

The MythoSelf Process leads people back to becoming aware of being.

We use an ontological stance, NOT an epistemological one, as the root of our practice.

BEING!!!!!

When I refer to being I refer to the very basic experience of living life as you find it.

Read that once again please …

… the very basic experience of living life as you find it.

Now I make my living as a change artist, i.e.: someone gifted in the art of helping people to change and experience transformation.

Yet … I have no intention to help people to learn how to make change happen in their life, other than to get to a state where they have become unchanging as they experience themselves …

I AM THIS

Then life happens … you can neither stop that, nor do anything about it.

(On another note, why would you want to if you could?)

The MythoSelf Process directs you to become saturated with life, stepping into it fully, not away from it with “meta-meanings” that remove you from it.

The MythoSelf Process moves you to the MESA-STATE … to the center of the swirling experience you call your life to experience the entirety of it … fully and completely.

To quote myself … the MythoSelf Process leads you to “have the experience of YOUR life” not some shadow of it … or projection … or interpretation … or something designed to represent your life as intended by others (what we commonly call culture and arrived at by the process of enculturation).

This is the revolution …

Years ago I used to talk a lot more about UNLEARNING … the process of learning how to forget what you had learned that ain’t true.

It’s about remembering to forget what you know as truth that has no basis in fact, e.g.: you should be polite to strangers.

Why?

A child immersed in natural learning often asks “Why?” as the most basic question that comes to them about what they are learning.

“Why do caterpillers turn into butterflies?”

NOT, “How?” … but, “WHY???”

(“How” comes later … and, despite the curiousity surrounding “how” for the most deeply curious “why” remains more persistent.)

Soon enough however, the most persistent child learns that “WHY?” will never be rewarded in the same ways as “how.”

Knowing “WHY” we do math, will never get the child the same rewards as knowing “how” to do math.

Yet, knowing “WHY” before knowing “how” might have saved humanity countless tears.

“WHY” do we want to or need to win the war? shifts the conversation.

“How do we win the war? directs our attention to create an “other” that must be defeated or conquered.

When we examine the “WHY” we often find ourselves at odds with what we hold as our fundamental values and beliefs.

“Why go to war?” … because we want their stuff … their land, their women and children, their food, their minerals … their stuff.

Yet we tell ourselves that we are doing the moral and just thing, and often justify it by proclaiming our gods want it to be this way … i.e.: with us as the victors and confiscators of the spoils of war.

One of the first aphorisms I learned was about how the victors write the history books.

Now I’m not writig a treatise on war, but I am using the example to make a point.

By directing the attention away from “WHY” and over to “how” we take away the naive curiousity and wisdom of our children and “turn them into adults” … in other words, good little worker bees.

To take back you life means first and foremost you’ll have to leave the hive …

Finding life as it comes to you

We’re all experiencing a great shift in how we know the world.

Too much happens too quickly to track it all effectively … and most of it not at all.

We are at a time of a great confluence … of cultures, ideas, information, resources … and it goes on and on.

We live in a shrinking world with regard to time and space as our sense of distances becomes ever smaller as we continue to refine our technologies and dream about reaching beyond our solar system and colonizing the outer planets of our galaxy … and then we reach again with our mind’s eye beyond that as well.

Yet, in deference to Joseph Campbell, we don’t have a mythology that supports the dreams we hold in our mind’s eye.

Our mythologies are from another time and space.

We inherited the mythologies of questing and conquering, without gaining the wisdom required to limit our thirst for what we don’t yet have and don’t yet know … worshiping not the gods and their circumscriptions about unlimited knowledge and power, but hubris itself … overbearing pride and arrogance that we alone hold the keys to the Universe.

AND, we have largely succeeded in exceeding ourselves.

We have at hand the means for destroying that which sustains us and make us as we know ourselves to be possible.

Yet we seem NOT to have the means to limit ourselves to what we can sustain … to what will allow us to remain and prosper.

We are systematically killing the planet and raping her resources, to the point where what was unimaginable fecundity has begun to look less like the Garden of Eden or Paradise, and more like an over used landfill, heaped with waste and heaving with disease.

FWIW I don’t believe this is irresolvable or irrecoverable … BUT IT WILL TAKE A NEW MIND.

This has always been the focus, direction and intention of the MythoSelf Process model and work … designing a new mind for a new world.

The MythoSelf Process does not attend to fixing problems or even curing their cause.

The MythoSelf Process aims at building a new mind that transcends problem formulation and construction.

The MythoSelf Process organizes around a new paradigm of connectivity, beginning with the elevation of becoming connected to one’s self.

The MythoSelf Process insists on a revolution based in accepting things as they are, not as we wish or hope they would be or will be, because as we look away from where we find ourselves we remain unable to do what we must in the moment we are living our experience and acting on a phantasm we perceive to be real.

The revolution is almost over

We all seem to sense that things are moving faster than our old minds can keep up with … and simultaneously many, if not most … if not all … of us are waiting for the revolution that will allow us to make the leap beyond the tragedy we are witnessing to the ability to do something about it.

And, for many, if not most … if not all … of us, we continue to act in the same ways we have learned that got us to where we find ourselves now.

Our hubris drives us forward believing that MORE IS BETTER, when the evidence we faces shows us that more may be too much.

We silently tremble in fear about not having enough in a world of unbelievable plenty, because some want much more than they need or could even ever use or consume … while others want more than that for themselves and theirs alone.

We live in a world run by an elite class that thinks like the old farmer who claims that he doesn’t want all the farm land there is, just the farm land that next to the farm land he already has and just what’s next to that too.

But the real REVOLUTION will be INTERNAL and not external … the revolution will be a changing of the mind we use, not how we use the mind we have now.

The OLD MIND asks, “How do I …” … the NEW MIND asks, “Why do we …”

When we make this shift we will become what we are destined to be again … myth-makers, i.e.: mythogenic beings.

We will rewrite the codes of life in the service of life … and not in the service of death and the extraction of wealth from the dying … the dying planet or those who live upon it.

In the new world view that the revolution brings we will not seek to change things and make them better, we will seek to perceive life as it comes and lives in harmony and balance with it.

The old revolution was technological … the new revolution is biological.

LIFE WILL AGAIN BECOME THE DRIVING MEASURE OF VALUE.

We will put technology in the service of life, and not life in the service of technology.

The NEW REVOLUTION will be quiet and personal, one person at a time arriving at the new mind that honors and reveres life as the most desirable asset … to live fully and saturated with the experience of living … beyond the acquisition, accumulation and consumption of things, or information, or even experiences … coming to rest in simply being, and respecting life as it comes.

The MythoSelf Process proposes this radical assumption: that we are moving beyond the paradigm of fear that leads to the avarice and greed that forces us to acquire, accumulate and consume more than we need.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are whole and complete as we are, without the need for the props of culture to support or steady us in our desire to fully experience our lives as fully intact sensate beings.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are beyond the cusp of beginning to realize what we are capable of becoming, and have stepped across the threshold of being that which we already are when we have become fully human.

The MythoSelf Process proposes that we are capable of writing a new story, of redefining the myth of being human and living in a cosmos beyond our comprehension, to a new myth that recognizes us as fitting into a cosmos that works perfectly and that we are designed to fit into perfectly as well.

Imagine that … the absolute sense of certainty that the Universe works perfectly and that you have been designed to fit it just as perfectly, just as you are now.

Not by some grand scheme necessarily, not by some divine decree – although that too may be possible, but rather by the endless unfolding of the Universe coming into being and revealing you to yourself as part and parcel of its own being.

You cannot not be of the Universe that contains you, and despite that fleeting sense you may have of either you or it not being complete and whole, there can be no other reasonable conclusion.

So I am proposing that you join me in the revolution willingly, openly, wholeheartedly … and do whatever it takes to learn to become fully human … to manifest, realize and reveal that which you already are.

Write the myth that lives within you by releasing it in the acts and actions of your life … join me, the revolution awaits you.

Joseph Riggio, Ph.D.
New Hope, PA

Architect and Designer of the MythoSelf Process