Photo of Light Sculpture by Glyph Graves in LOCUS @ Second Life, by Happiness Merryman

 From the jacket introduction to Joseph Campbell “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space”:

Drawing on his many years of cross-cultural scholarship, Campbell begins by locating the source of all mythological “Elementary Ideas” in the human imagination. He then examines the role of the human body in the various “Ethnic” manifestations of these mythological universals. He argues that mythology can best be defined as “metaphor transparent to the transcendent,” and further, that religion is, in fact, misunderstood mythology. From this perspective, he examines the place of metaphor as myth and as religion.

Turning his attention to our contemporary Space Age, he posits that the laws of “outer space” are within us, and that “outer space” and “inner space” are therefore one and the same thing, and that an entirely new mythology is implicit therein. But what is this new mythology?  How can we recognize it? Where is it to be found? Campbell demonstrates that metaphor is indisputably the language of Art, and he concludes that the psyches of today’s artists are the seeds of the new metaphors already inexorably shaping the mythologies of tomorrow.

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And from the text:

(Referring to previous material,p 87)

This is the idea already recognized in the Mesopotamian number 43,200 and its transformations (see pages 34-38), correlating, as of one measure, the cycles of the celestial spheres, periods of historic time, and pulsations of the human heart. Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) adds that in the Indian yogic schools it is held that all living beings exhale and inhale 21,600 times a day: 21,600 x 2 =43, 200.

In such a context, since the macrocosm (order of the universe), microcosm (order of the individual), and mesocosm (order of the attuned society) are equivalent, the social ideals and moral principles by which the individual is constrained to his group are conceived to be, finally, of his own nature. And for the same reason, the visionary realizations of the yogi in solitude would be the psychological sources out of which the mesocosmic order of his mythologically grounded cultural monad originated.

(AJN Note:  And so perhaps “Metacosm” is the new spiritual and philosophical context of Metafor!)

Excerpt from FRACTAL TIME: The Secret of 2012 and the New World Age, by Gregg Braden (Hay House, 2009)…

When we understand what the darkness of our cycle means and why its necessary, we begin to see the great challenges of our time in a new light. With that light, our moment in history and our response to the changes that come with it take on a new meaning. With these ideas in mind, it becomes even clearer that now is the best time for us to go through such a cycle.

The reason is that now is the first time we have the understanding, the need, and the technology to reach into the realm of all possibilities and choose the kind of future that will arise from the chaos of the present. This is something that would have been impossible even 50 years ago.

If we look closely at the stories and records that have been handed down to us for more than 250 generations, it becomes obvious that those who experienced the end of the last world age worked hard to make sure we know precisely what it means to do so. We find the fruits of their labor preserved for us today in their temples, texts, traditions and cultures.

Tai Chi in the Temple of the Dawn, Camp Happiness @ Second Life. Photo by Happiness Merryman

Metaphorical Journeys & Virtual Reality

(Editors Note:  Just as highly symbolic and participatory sand paintings are used for healing and transformational ceremonies in cultures all over the world, it is now possible to "paint" in a new kind of silicon-based medium, that of virtual reality, where shamanic arts find new expression and potential through the marriage of art, spirituality, technology and metaphor. While Joseph Campbell, in the passage below, is speaking about the Navajo Sand Painting ritual, similar 'journeys' and mythic re-enactments and re-enchantments can be created at the speed of light, out of imagination, and create sensuous,  interactive and immersive landscapes for personal awakening and soul-work. AJN)

In the Navajo sand painting, the bounded area is equivalent to the interior of a temple, an Earthly Paradise, where all forms are to be experienced, not in terms of practical relationships, threatening or desirable, evil or good, but as the manifestations of powers supporting the visible world and which, though not recognized in practical living, are everywhere immediately at hand and of one’s own nature. The painting is used in a blessing ceremony, for healing, or to impart the courage and spiritual strength requisite to the endurance of some ordeal, or for the performance of some difficult task.  The dry paining is of colored sand strewn (with amazing skill and speed) upon the dirt floor of a native dwelling, or Hogan. Neighbors and friends have assembled, and for a period of one to five (in many other rituals , nine) cintunuous nights and days of chanting, prayer, and metaphorical acts, the patient or initiate is ceremonially identified in mind and heart and costume with the mythological protagonist of the relevant legend. He or she actually enters physically into the painting, not simply as the person whose friends and neighbors have soliticously assembled, but equally as a mythic figure engaged in an archetypal adventure of which everyone present knows the design. For it is the archetypal adventure of them all in the knowledge of their individual lives as grounded and participative of an everlasting pattern. Moreover, all the characters represented in the ceremonial are to be of the local landscape and experience, become mythologized, so that through a shared witnessing of the ceremonial the entire company is renewed in accord with the nature and beauty of their spiritually instructive world.

(Joseph Campbell, in “The Metaphorical Journey,” in THE INNER REACHES OF OUTER SPACE)

Photo of The Wildlife Sanctuary @ Camp Happiness in Second Life by Happiness Merryman

What is – or what is to be – the new mythology?

“God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”  So we are told in a little twelfth-century book known as The Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers. Each of us – whoever and wherever he may be – is the center, and within him, whether he knows it or not, is that Mind at Large, the laws of which are the laws not only of all minds but of all space as well. For, as I have already pointed out, we are the children of this beautiful planet that we have lately seen photographed from the moon. We were not delivered into it by some god, but have come forth from it. We are its eyes and mind, its seeing and its thinking. And the earth, together with its sun, this light around which it flies like a moth, came forth, we are told, from a nebula; and that nebula, in turn, from space. No wonder then if its laws and ours are the same!  Likewise, our depths are the depths of space, whence all those gods sprang that men’s minds in the past projected onto animals and plants, onto hills and streams, the planets and their courses, and their own particular social observances.

Our mythology now, therefore, is to be of infinite space and its light, which is without as well as within. Like moths, we are caught in the spell of its allure, flying to it outward, to the moon and beyond, and flying to it, also, inward. On our planet itself all dividing horizons have been shattered. We can no longer hold our loves at home and project our aggression elsewhere; for on this spaceship earth there is no “elsewhere” any more. And no mythology that continues to speak or to teach of “elsewheres” and “outsiders” meets the requirements of this hour.

And so, to return to our opening question: What is – or what is to be – the new mythology?

It is – and will be forever, as long as our human race exists – the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that is to say, not to the flattery of “peoples<” but to the waking up of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large – each in its own way at one with all, and with no horizons.

Excerpt from Joseph Campbell, MYTHS TO LIVE BY (Penguin Books, 1972)

Camp Happiness @ Second Life, Photo by Happiness Merryman

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Take a break from your monkey mind for a few minutes and listen to Era's "Infinity Ocean"...:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9ICpuRYTOA

I am reminded…of that very strange prophetic work of the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, A Vision, which he composed mainly during the twenty years from 1917 to 1936,and wherein he has recognized certain affinities of his own intuitions with those of Spengler’s morphological view.

Yeats there represents our present moment as the last phase of a great Christian cycle or “gyre” of two thousand years. “And I notice,” he writes, “that when the limit is approached or past, when the moment of surrender is reached, when the new gyre begins to stir, I am filled with excitement.”

Excerpt from Joseph Campbell, MYTHS TO LIVE BY (Penguin Books, 1972)

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Photo: Camp Happiness @ Second Life by Happiness Merryman

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Celebrate! Dance in the new gyre with Jean Michel Jarre’s “Chronologie 6”… Feel the pulse! Tune yourself to the heartbeat of the Universe!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MZRVt_p1HA

The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness

History Points to Now

There is a universal consensus among the indigenous peoples of the earth that our time – spanning the last years of the 20^th century and the early years of the 21^st century – no ordinary period in the history of humankind or of the earth. With their prophecies, traditions, and systems of timekeeping, they remind us that during out lifetime we’ll experience a repeat of the cycle that sparked the dawn of recorded history.

Over the centuries that followed the last shift of world ages, the themes of what happened then, and humankind’s reponse to it, have been incorporated into myriad religious and spiritual practices. As diverse as they appear, the common thread that joins them together offers a clear message for us today. It’s only in recent times, with the aid of 20^th century science, that their message has started to make sense.

What a message it is! Using everything from prophetic visions to the dates of precise astronomical alignments, our ancestors devised every method imaginable to alert us to a single fact: now is the time of the most extraordinary conditions and opportunities that accompany the rarest of events, the shift of one world age to the next.

(Excerpt from Gregg Braden, FRACTAL TIME: The Secret of 2012 and the New World Age)

Short video: The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6CVzAYkVxI

Photo by Happiness Merryman @ Camp Happiness in Second Life