The Formative Myth of Humanity: Who Am I? Who Are You? And Where Are My Trousers?

Powered by RedCircle

Mark Twain, once proclaimed, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

From our first breath to our last, we are continually faced with the fundamental questions: Who am I and why am I here? At birth, our identity begins in our mother’s gaze. We see ourselves through her eyes. If she is happy, we are happy. If she is anxious, we are anxious. Our sense of safety is merged into the existential haze of parental protection and fallibility.

As the calendar ticks off days, months, and years, we begin to differentiate from our parents, discovering our own needs and values apart from them. We learn to set boundaries—initially in the power of a cry, and then eventually, by the force of the word “no”. Often, we do not even comprehend the import of setting boundaries beyond the discovery that it gets a reaction from our caregivers. We begin to develop a sense of our own power as an independent organism that, at the same time, is dependent on others for our well-being. As we grow, we experience joy and laughter, hunger and pain, comfort and fear--uncertain of the source and meaning of this ambiguous existential dilemma called “life.”

Developmentally, we are in a primal dance between our separateness and relationship--between our individuality and community. As we inculcate a sense of our solitary vulnerability in relationship to the world, we find meaning and purpose in a societal narrative that either reinforces a bias towards or away from one another.

On one hand, if we experience the world as dangerous, insufficient, and combative, we may develop a conservative view of power, which effectually defines a political hierarchy of the powerful exploiting the powerless. This develops into an immature morality of selfishness, greed, and immature competition.

In this dysfunctional social hierarchy, one’s identity will either become conflated in some uneasy narcissistic bubble of the perpetrator or deflated in a fog of perpetual victimhood. If we identify with a narrative of powerlessness, we become easy prey to the powerful--those who identify power as the ability to control others by exploiting their fears and vulnerability. However, this thirst for power and control is merely in compensation for a deeper unacknowledged fear of powerlessness.

Relationally, an exclusionary narrative of scarcity, fear, and paranoia leads to separation and isolation. Our assumptions of authority may alternately become fixated on ourselves, or others, or even some specific cultural, religious, or political ideology dictating our “place” in society. Our personal power and authority become objectified in a belief in our separateness—that we are forever alone in a dangerous world.

On the other hand, if we experience the world as safe, adequate, and supportive, we may develop a liberal view of power based on the shared value of each member within the whole of society. This principal framework of security, competency, and symmetrical responsibility develops into a mature morality of compassion, generosity, and cooperation.

In community, we see ourselves as adequate within a reasonable sense of our own capabilities, supported in our limitations by the capabilities of others, and replete in our own capacity to help others in need. We consider ourselves as committed participants, members of a larger organism, a community of diverse individuals with valuable skills and interests.

Relationally, an inclusionary narrative of sufficiency, hope, and empowerment leads to cooperation and community. Our power and authority are internalized in a belief in our mutual responsibility towards the common good, inclusive of ourselves in relationship to others. Safety emerges from the adequacy of shared resources and accommodation.

Thus, we have two diametrically opposed mythologies of humanity--one based on scarcity and the other based on sufficiency. And yet in practice, we innately hold them both in an uneasy détente within our psyches. There is a non-linear developmental path from the juvenile myth of our inadequacy and dependency to the adult myth of empowerment and interdependency.

In life, there is one certainty--growing up is hard. It takes time. It takes work. A five-year-old child doesn’t just decide one day to put on a suit and tie and head off to get a job as an aerospace engineer. Becoming emotionally, spiritually, and morally mature is no different.

It takes curiosity and education to internalize the rational and moral narratives that define a practical vision of what personal and relational maturity might look like. It also takes practice and experience to develop healthy relationships, inspired by a history of both failures and successes that breeds humility and empathy towards others, and a sober assessment of ourselves and our own limitations.

Love versus control circumscribes this developmental journey. On one hand, Love inspires a commitment, acceptance, and openness to the truth, whatever it may reveal—to breathe life into one’s essential being and the essence of others. On the other hand, Control compels the refusal to accept what is, and then, forces an inauthentic dogma or foreign ideology upon ones moral or relational framework. Control takes life away from what is true and feeds some authority construct in order to transact favor or benefit, or else to remove a deeply felt curse or wounding.

As such, in ancient times, humans would carve images of wood or stone representing whatever they feared or desired, those powers above and below that one perceived had ultimate authority over one’s life. They, then, offered up food or other valuables to transact the benefits of these gods.

Archetypally, humans, in modern times, haven’t changed. Religions haven’t changed. And Politics haven’t changed. Our methods of controlling our sense of fate are given a veneer of modernity and a contrived sense of potency but are still essentially the same. The worship of wealth and power, sex and control, life over death, are all still at the heart of modern idolatry—the attempt to control the unfathomable and mysterious powers that we perceive control us is still at the core of modern life.

Inherently, we continue to be anxious idolators bowing to the performative gods of modern society, transacting our souls for a falsified promise of peace and safety. Our modern sensibilities want instant gratification and instant responses. We look to substances and stimuli to change our immediate frame of experience—a perpetual celebration of sex, drugs, and rock’n roll. We look for self-help books that give us ten easy steps to happiness. We read blogs and follow cultural and social media influencers to tell us how to live our lives. We see pastors, priests, rabbis, mullahs, and even therapists as people who will just tell us what to do to become free of our demons.

In fact, we are prey in a dangerous world looking for some authority, some guru, to give us meaning and purpose. Propaganda, dogma, and cult narratives are easier to accept when the Masters of Media tell us who is the villain that makes us feel diminished and afraid. But what each of these perpetrators of despair has in common is that they each take power from us; they release us from the struggle and responsibility of our own work to grow and mature. So we become prisoners of our own devices, and the master becomes our jailor.

In the course of opening up our boundaries to others, to experience our authentic empowered selves, it takes time and deliberate engagement with our own fear-based narratives to facilitate healing of our past woundings and acceptance of our vulnerabilities.

Fundamentally, the landscape of our soul is suffused with festering pitfalls of past incongruities and woundings that prevent us from traversing directly and deliberately to some idealistic notion of adulthood. In our life’s journey, we develop experiential triggers in response to our past wounding that habituate our response to stressful circumstances. Inevitably, we predictably and ineffectually repeat the same stories over and over. The deeper the wounding lies within our subconscious, the less choice we have in responding to these triggers. The force of existential terror, the monsters from deep within us, grow as we associate our vulnerability with violence, death, and destruction. We are driven to protect and to control our vulnerabilities at any and all cost, counter-intuitively, even at the price of destroying ourselves in order to hide from them.

The harrowing story of Nick Cutter is an American tale of a hardworking man with a simple dream of building a home in the woods, settling down, and marrying his girlfriend Nimmie. However, the tale takes a dark turn when Nimmie’s jealous employer is unwilling to lose her hardworking employee to this anticipated idyllic life and so she pays a local witch to curse Nick’s work tool, his axe that he is using to build a woodland home for his beloved and himself.

The next day, when Nick swings his axe to chop down a tree, he, instead, chops off his arm. Fortunately, a magical tinsmith is able to fashion a new functional arm for Nick out of tin. Nick goes back to pursuing his idyllic dream only to cut off his other arm. The tinsmith again fashions a new prosthetic arm out of tin. Nick is undeterred. He is focused and determined to pursue his plan to build a house and marry Nimmie.

As the story continues, this cycle of self-destruction repeats itself with Nick losing both his legs and his torso. Each body part, in turn, is replaced by the magical tinsmith. Finally, Nick swings the cursed axe only to cut out his heart. This time the magical tinsmith is not able to fashion him a new heart. Without his heart, Nick’s simple dream of an idyllic life with his beloved melts away and he is left alone in the woods to rust away.

In the end, Nick becomes a victim of a larger system of exploitation and greed that jealously guards its industrial machinations. He paradoxically loses himself within his obsession to attain a simple life, progressively sacrificing his body for a dream that was doomed to fail.

In the human struggle to find a home, a place to feel safe, secure, and comfortable, we inevitably suffer frustration and disappointment. We begin to replace our vulnerable dreams with the artifice of impenetrable armor, a false identity. As we obsessively work towards a distant fantasy of a life of leisure, we progressively lose ourselves, never living an authentic life in the here and now.

Thus, in the face of this perceived sense of adversity, we are continually faced with the fundamental question: “Who am I?” However, our identity does not evolve hermetically in isolation, but rather it emerges in response to our vulnerabilities, and in context to the quality of our relationship with family and community.

Ultimately, the path to safety, our salvation, from these intrinsic forces cannot be dictated by an outside observer, but rather, is founded in a unique personal narrative of what experiences makes us feel unsafe or vulnerable.

The journey to health and safety begins when we become honest with ourselves as to what these vulnerabilities are that we spend endless amounts of time and energy to protect. These insecurities ultimately knit together our personality strategies that define our identity.

For a few, there may be some prior revelation, or experience, or self-reflection that enlightens them to what motivates their foremost fears. But for many, this remains hidden in the dark recesses of the subconscious, buried by their rational defenses, motivated by an overwhelming fear of facing one’s fears. Thus we ignore, and we hide, developing impregnable personas to face the world. Even those who think they know, quite often don’t, for this very same instinctual dilemma buried deep within the subconscious.

A common misperception is that all we need to do then is to shed light on the darkness, to become aware of the monsters, and this intrinsic terror and dysfunctional behavior will magically cease to exist. But healing is a process that takes time and effort to integrate and rebuild the dysfunctional narratives.

The genesis of discovering “Who I am” begins with the willingness to unravel the false identities that we have developed to help in coping, in surviving, against the insatiable hunger of these protective demons.

So “How do we face our demons?” This is the ultimate paradox. How do you un-defend that which you are most invested in defending; that which makes the safety of the lie, the false self, more desirable, seemingly more powerful than the truth of the authentic self. While we often perceive ourselves, the product of empirically founded modernity, as “rational beings,” it is precisely this same drive to make sense of the world that perpetuates our selective biases, our rational defenses against that which threatens our self-perception as being rational and moral entities.

We isolate and encapsulate anomalous ideas and experiences, those enigmas which cannot be integrated into our prior beliefs about ourselves without letting go or reforming our identity. We push these experiences deep into the darker recesses of the subconscious--out of sight, out of mind… except this doesn’t actually work. Rather than one integrated personality, a bastion of rationality and truth, we are actually fragmented beings, an aggregation of multiple sub-personalities, any of which may become dominant at any moment, triggered by some unintegrated narrative from the past.

At this point, if you were hoping that I would give you three easy steps to enlightenment and relational maturity, you will be disappointed. I don’t have any simple answers for you. I am not an expert on your life—in fact, nobody is. However, as a fellow human being searching for answers, it is my intention in this series of presentations to build maps to a suggested destination of psychological health and well-being based on both contemporary and ancient studies on human nature.

As such, a map does not fundamentally dictate a path, it merely shows the many possibilities. The traveler must choose their own path to their own subjective destination. In reality, there are many possible destinations, many dead-ends, many roundabouts, and many directions to get somewhere other than where you stand now. Inevitably, many folks will choose to remain in the safety of some familiar whereabouts, regardless of a better future beyond the horizon, what Henry David Thoreau described as lives of quiet desperation—resigned to the continuity and predictability of a mundane life. Lost to the potential of life’s heartfelt adventures and concealed beyond unconscious despair, they never venture further than the portals of the castle walls they have built to protect themselves--and yet, which also paradoxically constrain them.

In contrast, the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell encouraged, each adventurer to follow their own call to fulfillment, explaining:

The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. To refuse the call means stagnation. What you don’t experience positively you will experience negatively. You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

Some may already be on their own adventure to discover who they are. Others, while not ready now, may eventually respond to a deeper calling to adventure at a later time. While no path is prescribed and no solution solves every problem, this is resolved, as Campbell points out, if we each engage our own calling—our own dynamic path.

In the previous story of Nick Cutter, he was left to rust away in the woods. His girlfriend had moved on and married another guy. His dreams are buried and forgotten. But that is not the end of Nick’s story. Eventually, the time comes, when Nick is called to a new adventure, set on a path to rediscover his heart.

Initially, the focus of Nick’s new journey is a powerful magician, a legendary wise man who can solve any problem. Nick trusts that this sage magician can give him a new heart. He joins three other adventurers who likewise hope that this sage magician can resolve their most fundamental vulnerabilities.

As their journey unfolds, the team of adventurers encounter numerous trials and tribulations. In the course of these challenges, what they perceive to be their vulnerabilities unwittingly become their greatest strengths as they work together to support one another down the colorful road they travel, ultimately bringing them to safety.

However, when the adventurers finally reach the “all-powerful” wizard, they discover that he is a powerless fraud, hiding behind a false persona created to maintain power and control over his dominion, the land of Oz. The wizard’s real name is Oscar Diggs, or Oz for short.

Oscar succumbs to his unveiling. Letting down his own false persona, he helps the adventurers realize that what they truly need was already deep within them, buried by their fears, doubts, and false expectations. What they were looking for, they already had.

Nick realizes that he is more than just a Tin Man. While the dreams and expectations that had enveloped his earlier life ominously collapsed, buried underneath his Tin Armor is an authentic heart filled with genuine compassion and empathy.

My opening screed is but a sketch of a much larger picture that requires a greater investment of time and intuitive engagement by the individual seeker. I am but a fellow adventurer—an artist, writer, technologist, and student of both depth and experiential psychologies. My focus has been on the spiritual quest to open up the deeper dimensions of the narrative psyche, the soul, in relationship to others and our essential humanity. There are certainly many paths for the adventurer to explore to assist them on their journey.

My specific bias, based on training and background as a psychotherapist, is in depth psychology as well as creative arts and drama therapies. As such, I have endeavored to engage the non-rational channels of transformation through intuitive and embodied techniques already embedded in the psyche, as well as in culture and society. There are many other types of therapists and techniques that may facilitate opening up the personal narrative and experience of the individual, which one may explore. Historically, there is also the individual path of the spiritual quest—the hero’s journey into the calling of the unknown—archetypally, wandering down the untrodden path, stepping beyond one’s fears and expectations.

And then, unfortunately, as I alluded to previously, there is the more common path of spiritual entertainment, blindly following a path set by others, at a safe distance, to experience a figment of some truth, without actually getting your feet wet. For some this may be as far as they are willing to risk straying from the familiar. Yet still for others, the testing of the waters is an essential step to some future immersion into the psychic backwaters stirring deep within their soul.

In this series of presentations, at best, all I can I do is stir the waters, to help the adventurer imagine different possibilities in their life. Psychological growth and repair are not passive tasks—it takes an investment of time and effort by an individual to develop their personal and relational narratives.

Initially, I have committed to develop ten episodes, and then, I will reevaluate whether there is an audience that finds the subject matter interesting or useful, and whether I have anything else to say. This series of presentations is an expansion of a blog I started over a decade ago with the same name “Notes Between the Lines.” I will subsequently use this older blog to post the transcripts of these presentations. Some of the material in this series will be a simplification and amplification of matters I have addressed more academically in my book “Serpent in the Cellar—Love and Death in Life and Myth.” But I do not feel constrained by any previous exploration. I may traverse any incongruous rabbit hole that I find intriguing at the moment, wherever my disparate curiosities may lead within the general subject matter of psychology, creativity, and spiritual growth.

In this esoteric role of “stirrer of waters”, as I have previously stated, I am not and cannot be an expert on your life. And I have no experience or interest in being some sage guru, some mysterious authority who sits upon an ominous stage, or on top of a lofty mountain, dispensing wisdom, which seems to be the hallmark of many podcast gurus, social media influencers, and other self-proclaimed pundits.

I am, however, quite fond of sitting on top of mountains that I encounter along my own path, both proverbially and in actuality. There is much beauty and truth to be found gazing out beyond the horizon that brings a renewed perspective on one’s life—to see beyond the walls that enclose one’s mundane expectations, while deflating the immensity of one’s struggles and issues that seem to loom so large in their everyday world. These are moments we are meant to share between one another as fellow travelers.

As the lowest clouds envelop the highest peaks, we are drawn into a much larger universe. There is a moment in the depths of the traveler’s journey where they are invited to let go of their fear and false expectations, to step beyond the horizon, beyond what is known, beyond what one can see. I recognize that many will choose to step back down, below the clouds, to retrace their steps, retreating to the concrete world from which they came. But a few will choose the untrodden path of their own hero’s journey. It is for these few that I dedicate this series of presentations. Whether or not you have reached this fork in your path yet, I commend your courage, whether or not you realize it yet. May you find the depths of truth you seek, and the quality of relationships you desire.