An essay that I wrote in high school, circa 1997-98. I've come so far!
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Brandon Kelly
World Literature 1
Essay 1
The
Myth of My Life
Myth
exists in everything. It permeates the
impenetrable and creeps like late-day shadows into our everyday lives. During this semester, I have been able to
confirm my belief that myths can be personal, as well as universal, thanks to
the epic works and encompassing comprehension of Joseph Campbell. In his life he has executed a pervasive study
of myth, and myth itself is most often a journey into spirituality. It is a device through which we explain how
civilizations, how life, came to be. My own
life has been filled with myths, thusly spirituality, and I have come to form a
culmination of beliefs pulled together from various sources. Upon watching a video interview of Mr.
Campbell, I realized that he came to summate precisely in what I had come to
place my faith. What I believe to be the
meaning of life is truly myth, for it is the confinement of what is infinite
into a vessel that I, as a human, can understand. What follows is my life experience of
spiritualism, based deeply in myth and forged from religion and extensive soul
searching.
In the beginning, there
was a vast consciousness (as I have derived from the teachings of Carl Jung,
Genesis, and parts of Gnosticism wherein the Supreme Being is both male and
female simultaneously and separately.)
It held no body, yet was a collective of individual globules of
light. An individual particle of light
represents a living soul. Apart from
each other they were small, but in community were massive. For a lack of a better term, I call this
amorphous form "God" or the "Higher Being."
God,
in this stage, is a creator of things and of all things. Mere thoughts, spawned from the souls that
comprise God, form the building blocks of creations, are physical things and
can be combined to create any matter.
They are, as I call them, the currency of creation. The souls of God, the same souls that drive
human beings, created Earth, the universe, and all other worlds where life (or
no life at all) may yet exist. We
comprise God, we are the creators, and thus, we are all gods. We have power yet untold in this realm of
Earth.
After
the wondrous creations had been made, a desire came about to experience the
creations as a creation. It is these souls
(God) that experience the world through the vessels of life: physical human
bodies.
Through
experience, souls improve upon themselves and thus improve the whole. God cherishes every individual experience, no
matter how minimally circumstances differ with a similar experience. God wants to be the tiger stalking the
deer. God wants to be the deer hunted by
the tiger. God wants to be the jungle in
which this struggle of life and death takes place. The only way to facilitate a spiritual entity
to know what life is like is through a device called birth – as we all know,
book knowledge is extremely different from hands-on experience.
Let
us look at the process by which the soul transfers itself as a spiritual entity
to a physical, living creature. Outside
of space and time, a soul flourishes. It
contributes to creation, it lives an eternal life, separate but connected to
others just like it. To better itself,
the soul decides to manifest and transplant itself into a physical realm that
is subject to time. Before doing so, it
uses a limitless repository of information (what Jung calls the collective unconscious
and the Hindus call the Akashic Records, or Hall of Records) to form the
circumstances of its future life. Through
usage of the collective unconscious, that which is a library of all life
experience in all realms, key events are planned for the life, leaving periods
of ambiguity separating them. This plays
in part with the idea of "fate" and that "things happen for a
reason." Few things in life, thanks
to this pre-planning session, are coincidental.
This
step complete, the soul prepares itself to enter life, which is in itself a
gargantuan step. Earth, in my belief, is
one of the most difficult worlds into which one can be born and experience
life. Simply by entering this world, one
forgets where it comes from. Gone from
its mind is the fact that it is a god, that it has powers incomprehensible and
that it is still connected to that timeless, boundless realm from whence it
came. In this cocoon of forgetfulness,
one despairs and searches for what it has lost, yet without fully understanding
for what it searches. The human simply
feels that something is missing. Some
forget to search because the weights of this realm are so cumbersome. Since I believe wisdom is drawn from the
collective unconscious and because they forget they have access to it, they
sometimes don't make good life decisions.
They forget entirely their origin and have little comparative wisdom,
drawn from the unconscious, upon which to base well-informed life decisions.
Before
a soul descends into mortality, it plans a series of life lessons to learn or
improve upon. These lessons become the
trials of that individual's life. In
essence, the soul either learns the lesson in a lifetime or it doesn't, and it
must spend yet another lifetime trying to grasp the true concept and improve
itself. These lessons could be such
things as loyalty, what it feels like to be isolated, what it feels like to be
a hero, and others. In my beliefs, I am
not sure there is room for good and evil, there are only decisions and
experiences. At the end of life, there
is no Hell, for I believe that Earth is the real Hell. Every good and every evil comes down to one
core idea, and that is an experience. A chain
of human emotions brings an individual to make decisions; that, and the doing,
is what a soul is after.
At death, the soul
transitions from the realm of life to the realm of eternity, slowly recalling
its full power as a soul. There is a process
of review of the life it had just lived.
Through use of the collective unconscious, it studies the aspects of its
former life and decides whether or not it has learned the lessons it set out to
learn. If the decision is ultimately no,
the soul must live yet another life focused on that lesson. If the answer is yes, the soul may then
decide to learn another lesson or remain in eternity. Upon injecting itself into a living world, it
completes the cycle of life.
These
series of beliefs have taken me nearly all my life to collect, form, and
mold. While I hold them very dear to me,
the truth of the matter is that it is myth.
I have created my own myth based on the myths of other cultures and the
ideas of other people. But there is a
key that ties it all together. I knew
these elements of faith to be true before I heard of the collective
unconscious, before I knew what the Akashic Records or Gnosticism were. I had a belief in them, and when I discovered
for myself that others believed the same, I felt I knew it to be a truth.
For
a period of about four years I was a devoted Christian. I went to Sunday school, the service
thereafter, youth group Sunday nights, Wednesday service, and a summer camp
called Falls Creek in Oklahoma
Such
things as these awakened me spiritually.
I realized that I had not contemplated the myths of the Bible. I had not filtered them through my personal
battery of experience. Did I really
believe that Jesus was resurrected in the flesh and climbed up to Heaven? No, I decided, it was a metaphor that people
translated literally. The true essence
of myth is metaphorical and the real danger is literal translation. To do
this is to miss the point entirely and is similar to focusing on the beauty and
craftsmanship of a pan when there is food within it. Many do not think to eat the food, so intense
is their devotion to the beauty of the pan.
People don't think for themselves.
They pass the responsibility of their spiritualism on to another,
whether it be a pastor, a rabbi, the Pope, or even God. The truth is that they are responsible for
themselves. Organized religion is a tool
for segregation. They all have the right
idea, but they are fighting over the metaphors of their own particular myths.
The
truth, mythologically speaking, is that we are all part of the same being, and
thusly we are connected to each other in a very deep-seated way, no matter the
differences we share. We are, as
individuals, a cosmic speck in an immense super creature. In the same way that our bodies are
micro-universes, for we contain millions of organisms that are alive and work
together to make us healthy, we are the tiny organisms of a superior power,
working together to improve upon its nature.
I
will always remember the day in Ms. Easley's class that I watched the video
interview featuring Mr. Campbell. For
me, it is a great feeling of easement to know that such a scholar of myth,
religion and spiritualism can back up a belief system that I myself
contrived. It supplies me with a feeling
of unity with the world that I have never experienced before. A feeling that I really do belong here, when
all my life I've felt like I should not be here.
