In the Beginning is the Story:

The Myths of (Hu)Men and Gods

Many trails. One mountain top.

A tale of two tales? Yes. The first is often labeled materialist, scientific, or secular humanist. The second is often defined as religious, inspired, or transcendent. Or, ugh, philosophy. Both are stories that provide meaning and context to human existence as we make our way into, through, and beyond our world and our selves. To the peak.

Both are imaginative artifacts, myths or theories or assumptions that are given not fully proven. Both provide meaning and purpose to human interaction with the world and other humans to finding the way into, through, and beyond our world and our selves.

I say two because I have grouped them such in my own story. But I hasten to say they are infinite and with many alterations, articulations, and corrections. Just consider human creativity by walking into a library or book store. Or by finding all that is appearing in theaters and streaming on TV. In society stories provide cohesion among humans in living and working together, in language and other inventions, and in setting rules to advance and maintain themselves personally and socially.

These stories often sit side by side, one for day to day common affairs, another for more extraordinary and impossible events to lift up the unlimited capacity of human community and imagination. The two sets of stories are not divided by fiction and nonfiction or by fantasy and truth. One is more of discovery of what’s out there in the universe, the other of discovery of what’s in here in us that prompts our adventure.

For some persons one story is more dominant than the other mainly depending on the role of the person in a particular society, depending on the enculturation or education of a person, and depending on the particular situation in time and space of persons individually and collectively. Both are necessary to live and, most importantly, to flourish. To fourish means to be an agent in the making of our story.

We get to know humans and other living organisms by living in and through persons’ stories mainly by dialogue in ordinary language or by their expressions in other activities. Body to body, mind to mind, or better mindful body to mindful body. They get to know us the same way. In those moments we and they unveil ourselves and enter into their project and projection to the world. It is not just the expressed that we hear or see, but the mode and style of the expressing we actually live through with the other person. Not just their symbolic expressions but their facial and body expressions.

When I sit in a theater to watch the ballerina on stage, I in effect dance her dance even to the tightening my same muscles. When I watch the three point shot from outside the hoop, I feel myself pushing with the shooter. Or the blocker. When I read an author’s story, I travel the same tracks and try on the same style. When I see the artists painting, I discern and follow his strokes of the brush. I am re-creating with artists and actors, and seeing their souls by adopting their roles. All are telling stories through which we can touch and understand the objects and subjects, things and companions in the world.

When we interact physically with others, participating in one another’s story, we use our bodies to express and sense our minds, consciousness, souls. Objectivity in knowing is attained through inter-subjectivity. In honestly revealing my developing story and really listening to others that I trust are honestly telling me, and, further, in putting our stories together to envision and publish our emerging stories, we plan and model a common future in which we all have a stake. A future in which humans participate as designers and agents of their individual and communal destinies.

I once as a liberal arts student took a film course and watched the great film maker Satyigit Ray’s Pather Panchali. I lived through a young man’s travail in an Indian slum as Ray had directed. I was so moved that I went back to my apartment alone, lay on the bed alone. I felt the film, the director, the boy and wept profusely. I also felt myself so little and trivial, and my incapacity to tell such a story. Yet my experience of truly engaging filled my hope in my own capacity to imagine with and through others.

This is the myth I grasp beyond the artistic, scientific, religious, philosophic expression. The spirit beyond the matter, the spiritual reality in the fiction, the very immediate sense of being that supports the edifice of the imaged and named. The story behind the story that can only point or elicit mystery of existence underlying or illuminating beings which are seen, heard, felt by my bodily senses. Or as my mentors would say, the invisible in the visible. It is the intuition of whole body of Being of all beings, Sein in Dasein, as Heiddegar says, the Good as Plato says, the Light as Augustine says, the Future society as Marx says, God as religious people say.

While trying to deal with the problems and opportunities of my present situation, I sense within, “before” knowing it objectively, the intentional drive of my existence as the foundation of my imaginative perception and action in the world. When I reflect on that inner sense of my driven existence, I discover that it already has a direction with unique perspective and bias. This is the invisible context of my objectifying text. It is the ground of my figures of speech, the oft unattended background of encounters past and present.

This origin story is my myth, the realm of gods and ghosts, the circle of faith in the future and in friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers. It is my imagination and yours at the very beginning of the formation and selection of images to understand and shape our world. We engage with subjective, invisible, personal stories behind, beyond, and below the objective, visible, collective story of the world we are trying together to create. Our stories have no end. They will never be finished.

Many are the trails. The peak of the mountain is always ahead. I feel it in the excitement of the adventure towards it.