What is that mythical underbelly of the day to day experience?
When did I become aware of it? What does being aware even mean in
this case?
When I was young, I remember going on walks with my mother and our
dog. She told that she had seen a UFO on the roof of that building
right there next to our school. She had also been playing around
with some "dark arts" in a ruin next to where our street connected
to the next, and saw a pair of red eyes coming through the wall.
In both of these cases she supposedly had other people involved
who could back this up.
Strange, but I think I always took these stories as metaphors.
Or maybe not literally metaphors, but as something that did not
"really" connect with the real. But I didn't outright dispute
them either.
Later I learned astrology, the I Ching, the tarot, and a big
bunch of myths. Even later I became aware that Jung was the hub
around whom all this stuff revolved in a more modern view.
I really loved the era when youtube didn't control the weirdos.
David Ike was one of my favourites. The four hour lectures that
start with financial conspiracies and end up in baby eating
lizard people are a blast. Is he still there I wonder?
I think I have enough of successful existence behind me to say
that these myths were not deleterious to me, and in fact have
been useful. There surely are people who chase the dragon down
to their own demise. I don't know what to say about that. I only
know that my existance without the softening and relativising
force of mythology would have been bleak.
I must have talked about the nihilistic realists before? There are
people who have such a dark view about the world that it seems
to me almost like they are playing with us others around them.
The view is so dark that anyone with such an outlook should have
realistically killed themselves. Why are they still here
complaining to us about it?
I take this in the same way I took that UFO. I let them have
their view, but also will not bind myself to it in any way,
keeping in the back of my mind some little marker that reminds
me that I don't really believe that it is all that bad.
But am I glad I am not one of those nihilists! I easily could
have been. I was on my way in my teens, for sure. What changed me?
I really can't remember. Somehow it feels that those myths had
a big part in it. Not in a way that they "describe the world"
factually, but more like they describe a person being moved by
external forces and reacting to them.
The real meat here is that all these divinatory systems are based
on a world view where there are givens and there is the actor.
Your cards or your stars or your stalks may say that this is a
time to not take any unnecessary risks, but they don't say you
can't go against this advice. Often there are several ways to
interpret it as well.
Compare that to a nihilist inside the newtonian billiard game.
They have no space for any agency. The forces presented to them
are too great. They are incomprehensibly vast. It isn't clear if
there is an actor in this story. It's all nature and nurture, but
there is no one in charge.
From the other point of view, it is still possible to see that
there are nature and nurture (that's the stars) but you still
act within those parameters. This acting is done through a
phenomenological frame of reference. You are you, even though
you "know" you are controlled by your stars, but you are also
the locus of control of that power.
To you it seems like you are making decisions, and if you were
not making the decisions, then your stars would have been
different. It's like having the perception of being a waterfall.
You don't control the water coming through, but if you were not
there, there would be no water.
