The Advent of the Postmodern Prometheus: Bringing Back the Fire of the Gods

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Midway through Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, the Creature finally meets his Creator at the foot of a glacier just below the highest peak in the Swiss Alps. Earlier, the Creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandoned his eight foot, yellowish Creation in disgust. The Creature, in humiliation and resentment, searches out and murders Frankenstein’s brother, William. The Creator, in anguish, then pursues his Creation high into the Alps to seek vengeance. Upon finding him, the Creature beseeches his Creator for mercy, stating:

Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine, my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me.

Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

The line between Victim, Monster, and Hero blurs in this promethean tale of morality and human nature, hubris and retribution, obsession and denial.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the Titan God who creates the clay form of Man into which Zeus breathes life. He is one of only a few gods who actually loves and cares for humanity. He takes the lessons of civilization from Athena and teaches Man how to rise above his animal instincts. On observing Man’s suffering, in defiance of Zeus, he steals fire from Mount Olympus and gives it to Man for warmth and industry.

In Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein is the Modern Prometheus, who breaks the bounds of the gods by discovering the secret of life itself and bestowing it upon a lifeless body. Shelley then explores the fretted bond between the Creature and the Creator—uncertain of whom is the actual monster in the unfolding narrative.

In the Jewish Torah mythology, Eve and Adam embody the archetype of Prometheus as well by stealing from the Elohim the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Goodness and Badness, or Morality. This evolving myth, likewise, explores the relationship between Creature and Creator—morality and human nature developing out of hubris and retribution, obsession and denial.

The prevailing religious interpretation of the story of Eve and Adam traditionally paints this narrative as a morality play based in the underlying archetype of Victim, Monster, and Hero motivated by vengeance and the possibility of salvation. The actual myth is, in fact, something deeper and more profound—a tale of a parent’s love for his children and family bonds that transcend moral perfection and performance based in the underlying archetype of the Lover and Beloved, motivated by compassion and generosity.

In the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype, the Monster or Villain is the archetypal embodiment of obsession and hunger—a desire to acquire and then retain some object, quality, or aspect owned or represented by the Victim. The Victim is the archetypal representation of the loss of identity or integrity as a consequence of some violation by the perpetrator, the Monster. The Victor or moralistic Hero is the archetypal representation of the power manifest in the cultural or religious moral code. He defends the social order against the intrusive actions of the Monster—to restore a particular interpretation of justice.

In a simplistic moral tale, the moralistic Hero is a one-dimensional embodiment of social good. He wears a white hat or a hero’s cape. The Villain or Monster is a one-dimensional embodiment of evil and immorality. He may wear a black hat, and often has a facial deformity or some animalistic feature that somehow embodies the face of darkness. And then, the Victim is the archetypal embodiment of life, beauty, innocence, or goodness, which the Monster desires to possess. The Hero is obligated to defeat the valueless Monster, utterly destroying his power or existence in life or the social realm.

The morality of justice and retribution muddy this simplistic tale. One man’s Hero will often be another man’s Monster depending on one’s perspective in battle. The Victim’s moral behavior may often be the catalyst for their own demise. The Titan Prometheus does in fact violate the moral code of the Gods by stealing fire, acting against Zeus as the Perpetrator of a crime, but at the same time helping Man as a Hero.

Frankenstein’s Creature, victimized by his Creator’s rejection, sets out in the role of the Hero to avenge this wrong. But the Creature is also a Monster, the perpetrator of evil upon several innocent Victims whom he murders. The Creator, having been slighted by the actions of the Creature, then lashes out against him, seeking revenge in the role of the Hero against the Monster that he initially victimizes. In this more realistic tale of morality, vengeance creates a cycle of violence. As the great moral philosopher and activist, Gandhi once stated, “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

In the Jewish Torah mythology, the Serpent embodies this moral complexity by its position and orientation in the narrative. It is introduced as a facet of the Tree of Morality and is further identified in the text by a Hebrew word that means “to make naked or to reveal”—painting the picture of one who reveals morality. As a composite picture, the Serpent is thus the archetype of moral conscience, the mediator between impulse and action, the revealer of a deeper moral character, or the Soul. Initially, on the Tree of Morality, the Serpent Conscience reveals Eve’s inner thoughts on her relationship with her Parent. She doubts his benevolent character as a Good Parent. The Serpent reveals that Eve suspects that the Elohim are selfishly keeping this powerful goodness of wisdom and moral consciousness from her. As such, she chooses to take what is not hers to have, at least not in that moment of her juvenile development as an Elohim. Her adversarial conscience of selfishness and greed are represented by the lowered Serpent on the ground. Later in the mythology, the raised Serpent will represent healing and a morality of love, compassion, and generosity as a resolution to this mythic tale.

Traditionally, patriarchal religious interpreters wholly identify Eve by her vagina, or more to the point, her lack of a penis. Men and women are seen as morally and inherently separate and distinct subspecies. Women are a characteristically weak, inferior subspecies of human beings who lack moral character and are the cause the fall of mankind. Nakedness in the Garden is sexualized and temptation is thus a prominent characteristic of women’s sexuality that lures men to their doom. However, this tells you more about the religious and patriarchal institutions than the actual myth.

In the mythology, Eve is fundamentally and equally human, or more specifically, Elohim, a Hebrew word meaning “one who is a very great power”, which is then extrapolated to a family of Elohim. She represents two distinct dimensions of the Elohim story. One is her capacity to perpetuate human life as a mother in the sexual pairing with her husband when she eventually is mature enough. However, in the Garden narrative, this capacity for reproduction is merely a potential of her biology. In the juvenile developmental narrative of the Garden, there is no bumpety-bump procreat’in go’in on, or as the ancient he-bros liked to say, “know’in each other”. Eve and Adam are presented as immature Elohim, acting in the role of brother and sister, still grappling with their powers and responsibilities, uncertain of themselves or their relationship to one another.

This, then, portends the second dimension of Eve’s identity as the second born of humanity. As such, she represents the inheritor of ancestral and cultural myths, passed down from one generation to another. Adam is the first born. In the ancient traditions of Mesopotamia and the Levant, he is designated to represent the desires and identity of the Father, to take care of the family in his absence. He is specifically instructed by the Good Parent as to his position and responsibilities in the Garden. He is then responsible to pass this along to the next generation, in this case, his younger sister.

The myth actually indicates he screwed that up and adds “Do not touch” to the one prohibition of eating the Fruit of Morality—establishing the first religious edict intended to control the behavior of others in the tribe. Within the mythology, it is from this dimension of her narrowed experience as an imperfect inheritor of the cultural myth that Eve’s doubts arise (not because she lacks a penis). Adam then responds to the opportunity for wisdom and moral consciousness out of his own doubts, immaturity, and insecurities, likely as any adolescent lacking in impulse control (and not because of sexual temptation.)

Similar to the divine origins of fire in the initial story of Prometheus or the spark of life in the story of Frankenstein, moral maturity is the domain of the Adult Elohim in the Torah myth. Each of these desired capabilities is stolen from the greater powers who own them. The fundamental need for these powers arises out of specific vulnerabilities in human nature—suffering, death, and ignorance.

The Promethean Paradox of the Torah-Gospel mythology is that “Bringing Back the Fire of the Gods”—fixing the original problem presented in the first part of the myth— does not involve a journey back to where we began in order to return what was stolen. Nor does it require a punitive transaction in payment. But rather, it motivates a developmental journey, moving us forward, to essentially become the Fire, to become morally mature Adult Elohim, embodying the mature fruit of the Tree of Morality.

Later in the Torah-Gospel myth, the Tree of Morality is brought to life as the Law of Moses. This is then summarized by Rabbi Jeshua as love—love for the Parent Elohim and love for all within the Universal Family of Elohim—establishing the relational archetypal paradigm of the Lover and Beloved.

To the contrary, many of the traditional moralistic religious interpretations of the so-called “Fall of Man” are founded in the adversarial paradigm of the Victim-Villain-Victor archetype. These versions of the narrative envision a moral battlefield, pitting Man against God in a perpetual struggle against his Laws. Religious moralism by intent and purpose is fundamentally transactional and rule-based. Thus, in the various Abrahamic religious systems, the Mosaic Law is portrayed as a list of rules one must follow. To break a rule is to incur the wrath of the rule-maker, the Divine Judge. In this religious paradigm, Adam and Eve are the original sinners or rule-breakers that bring condemnation and death into the world, which then, must be paid for by a punitive transaction to satisfy the holiness and justice of the Angry God, and, of course, necessitates a system of intermediaries to represent the God and enforce this code in the daily life of the tribe.

Conspicuously, in spite of the obligations that the Mosaic Law lays out to amend for one’s routine failures against each other and the Divine Ruler, this is never enough for those seeking social control. Consequently, various traditions evolved throughout the ages and across the Abrahamic traditions to “fence in the law”—to add additional boundaries and conditions.

As such, in formulating the Christian religion, several new moralistic layers are added to the original relational mandate given by Rabbi Jeshua to love one another. Based on the later prophetic vision and writings of the neo-apostle Paul, Christianity becomes fixated on Paul’s transactional gospel that an ultimate sacrifice must be given as a payment for sin, once and for all, to satisfy the blood thirst of the Angry God. This idealized human sacrifice, shedding the blood of the Son of the Christian God, Jesus Christ, becomes the ultimate payment for the sins of humanity throughout history from Adam to the end of the world. Well… sort of. Mysteriously, unlike the sacrifices under the Mosaic Law, this human sacrifice doesn’t actually absolve one’s guilt unless other criteria are met. These conditions vary according to the extrapolated doctrines of some thirty thousand Christian sects over the last two millennia, each claiming to represent the Word of God. Perversely, many of these disagreements between sects were only resolved by torture, banishment, or the point of a sword to get the opposing side to agree, or else disappear in the backwaters of history.

Elseways, Greek moralism is certainly more consistent and straightforward. Prometheus is directly punished for his insubordination to Zeus by being chained to a rock in Tartarus, the great pit, to have his liver eaten out each day by an Eagle. Since he is a god, his liver grows back each night only to have the torment repeated the next day. And then, for receiving stolen goods, Men are punished by the creation of the first woman, Pandora. Similar to the misogynistic interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Eve, Pandora is formed most beautifully and deceitfully to bring all manner of suffering and evil into the world.

And then, in the story of Frankenstein, his breach of the boundary of human mortality is punished by the Creator’s ultimate death in pursuit of revenge. The Creature is forever lost wandering alone in the barren ice fields of the Arctic, an aberration and cautionary tale to the limits of scientific hubris.

On the other hand, in the relational paradigm of the Torah-Gospel myth, the failure of Eve and Adam is portrayed as the falsification of the identity and character of the Parent Elohim, doubting his good intentions and assuming a malevolent purpose in keeping the fruit of Morality for himself. Rather than a violation of some magical divine code, this is merely the consequence of defying a universal relational equation that defines truthfulness, trustworthiness, respectfulness, and generosity as the basis for relationship.

In this equation, one side of a relationship is defined by the truth of who I am. The other side is defined by the truth of who you are. If either side of this truth-telling contract is violated, whether I lie about who I am or otherwise, who you are, or else vice versa, you lie about who I am, the false identification will imminently inhibit the relationship—eventually leading to separation and death of the relationship.

The Garden of Eden symbolizes the Adamite’s intimacy with their Parent. Their exile from the Garden symbolizes the death of that relationship. The rest of the mythology is the path to the restoration of intimacy with the Good Parent by reaffirming the truth of his good character and intentions as a loving Parent Elohim, bringing new life to that relationship, and moral maturity to the Child Elohim.

The primary symbol of the toxicity of false identification is the Viper or Ground Serpent. Initially, the Serpent Conscience on the Tree of Morality is cursed to crawl on the ground as a consequence of Eve and Adams false identification of the Good Parent’s intentions regarding the Tree of Morality. Then, in a pivotal story in the Exodus myth of the Bronze Serpent in the wilderness, the Parent Elohim sends poisonous vipers to attack the Israelites, representing their prior false accusation against the Parent Elohim and his guides, Moses and Aaron.

Likewise, in the Gospel accounts, the religious elite are described as Vipers, symbolizing their false attribution of the Parent Elohim as a tribal god. Many believed that if the entire tribe would follow the Mosaic Law completely even for a day, this moralistic Tribal Elohim would send an anointed Warrior-King, a messiah, who would slay their foes and make them a powerful nation again. However, in context to Rabbi Jeshua’s teaching, the political aims of the Jewish religious establishment were irreconcilably in conflict with the relational paradigm to love one another, inclusive of one’s enemies. The narrative of a familial messiah who reconciles humanity to the Parent Elohim and to one another is identified as treasonous to the cause of the expected political messiah who would kill their enemies and establish a new Jewish kingdom. As both cannot be true, the religious elite accuse Rabbi Jeshua of blasphemy and he is then crucified under Roman Law as a valueless traitor.

In the Victim-Villain-Victor archetypal dynamic, the Monster-Villain is identified as a valueless entity who deserves to be destroyed. When we falsely imagine our adversaries, those we fear and hate, to be valueless, we justify all manner of violence. They no longer deserve compassion, kindness, or empathy. In this adversarial paradigm, any possibility of relationship, or love, is destroyed the moment we project onto our adversary false and demeaning characteristics and motivations, whether consciously or not.

Thus, in the Mosaic Law, two of the primary Ten Commandments are prohibitions against making false attribution to the character or identity of another. And, later, Rabbi Jeshua states that all failures will be forgiven, or let go, except to vilify or attribute false intentions to the motivating spirit of the Parent Elohim. The truth of each person’s identity is central to our ability to love and accept one another according to the Torah-Gospel mythology.

In the Exodus myth of the Bronze Serpent that was mentioned earlier, those bitten by the poisonous Ground Vipers, sent to embody their prior false accusations, are healed when they look upon the raised Bronze Serpent, embodying healing and truth. Later, this develops as a symbol of a mature Conscience founded in love as Rabbi Jeshua identifies himself as the raised Bronze Serpent. This gives meaning to his impending death on the cross as a representation of the possibility of love and healing over the powers of false identity and broken relationship.

Relationships can only develop when we embrace the truth of one another and ourselves, both our strengths and weaknesses. Human systems for control, whether personal or institutional, only serve to destroy intimacy between one another. In our pursuit of love and relationship, we must let go of the dogma of moral perfection and inauthentic behavior to embrace each other in all our beauty, imperfection, and vulnerability—sharing our strengths and supporting our weaknesses. Ultimately, we must embrace the fire of loving one another.

 

The Art of Relationship (Video Podcast)

The Art of Relationship: The Morality of Love Versus Control

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Near the end of Charles Dickens’ tale, “A Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge, standing before the visage of his own grave, searching for redemption after a long night’s journey into the darkness of his own soul, cries out:

Spirit! …hear me! I am not the man I was.… Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!

I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!

Over the course of Scrooge’s Dark Night of the Soul, the Three Spirits confront his lifetime spent in pursuit of social prominence and ravenous profiteering. His selfishness and greed have left him bereft of family or friendships—destined to die alone, forsaken, and unnoticed. In the morning, as the Dark Night passes away, Scrooge awakens to an undeveloped potential buried deep within his soul for compassion and generosity towards his fellow man. He makes a transformational choice to let go of his prior ways, to embrace a future life of charity, and to repair his broken relationships in the present.

Our own life story begins in the past, a consequence of countless, thoughts, actions, and decisions made by others and ourselves in a bygone time and place, which then forges our potential and subsequent experiences in the present moment and builds a framework of future possibilities. However, when this life story is founded in fear and scarcity, it leads to an obsession with ordering one’s relationships and circumstances according to a moral framework of control, motivated by selfishness and greed.

On the other hand, a life story founded on a belief and experience of safety and sufficiency can lead to a spirit of openness to community and sharing with others according to a moral framework of love, motivated by compassion and generosity. To understand our present foundation and capacity for relationship, we must go back and examine this underlying archetypal dynamic of love versus control as a framework for our life’s journey.

At the heart of the human condition is the recognition that we are impotent in the face of the inevitable course of time and the forces of nature. Thus, humans have attempted to reconcile themselves to the capricious whims of these often devasting powers by devising elaborate rituals to control them.

Conceptually, the word religion is fundamentally defined as a ritual action to control one’s circumstances or fate. The etymology of the word religion evolves out of an underlying Latin word meaning “to bind”, variously used to describe fear, obligation, or conformity. This may describe our personal orientation to some overwhelming circumstance or uncertainty such as a favorable fall harvest, a relationship status, an unusual skin rash, or the outcome of this weekend’s baseball championship. And then, on a societal level, it may inspire the establishment of hierarchical institutions that embody the need for social control, delegating preeminent authority to a privileged-few priests or rulers, who mediate the power of the gods.

The associated religious mythologies are fundamentally moralistic narratives that define human frailty in the face of the powers of nature and the gods. Many of these myths in turn inspire religious rituals that compensate for the desires and appetites of a particular god. On one hand, the impulse underlying these rituals may be to control chaotic human behavior that angers the god, threatening punishment upon the sinner and possibly bringing great catastrophe on the entire community. On the other hand, these religious rituals may describe a way to influence or control the gods by giving to them what they desire, transacting a reward or benefit from them.

In ancient Greek cosmology, one’s Fate was threaded by the weavers of destiny according to the god’s grand cosmic scheme, the sublime natural order. Greeks, like many other cultures, viewed humans as victims of fate, suffering from the moral consequences of their own hubris, as well as the fitful discord and petulant impulsivity of the gods. In Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, Odysseus is at odds with Poseidon, the god of the ocean. As a result, he wanders for a decade upon the seas, futilely attempting to sail home after the Trojan War, thwarted by the god at every turn. In the myth of the trials of Hercules, he is a son of Zeus and a mortal woman that Zeus rapes. Hera, the goddess of marriage and the scorned wife of Zeus, jealously responds to Zeus’ infidelity by continually causing trouble for his offspring. Throughout Greek mythology, humans must struggle to pacify the powers above and below in order to survive in an often-dangerous world.

The ancient Greeks devised one of the most elaborate systems of ritual service to the gods, building grand monuments and temples to each Olympic god who represented a force of nature or a principle of human behavior. According to Plato, the Greek word for these overseers on Mount Olympus was derived from the Greek word for a runner, which he states embodies the early Greeks’ belief that these powers moved or ran across the heavens, influencing our lives on a grand scale. This then developed into a system of ritual behavior to influence the gods through festivals and offerings.

Similarly, the English word “god” comes from an old German word indicating, “One to whom one pours out a libation,” inferring the invocation of a transactional benefit. It is this archetypal sense of contracting with a god by offering materials or services that defines this universal human response to our fear of helplessness and vulnerability within the capricious world of gods and nature.

The archetypal dynamic of religious control is fundamentally transactional. It requires sacrifice to the powers that control one’s fate. One must feed the gods to gain their favor or to remove some curse. In Greek society, just as in many other pre-modern societies, this was done directly by ritually constructing images of wood or stone to represent the power of the gods, providing a tangible focus when offering an obligatory sacrifice.

Whether one calls it fate, destiny, luck, or the hand of god, our magical proclivity to create a supernatural alliance is more than just some primitive impulse confined to superstitious pre-modern societies. Rather, it is the product of a universal narrative that is perpetually experienced as an archetypal dimension of human nature, whether or not one is openly theistic.  Our deep-felt sense of fear and isolation are powerful drivers that draw us into the narrative of our separateness and the necessity to seek control. As such, in modern times, humans sacrifice time and money to gain the power of what they fear is lacking in their lives. They seek out celebrities, sport teams, and cultural authorities to follow in order to give them a sense of purpose, identity, or worth. They pursue wealth and power to control their unease and sense of vulnerability, sacrificing both personal relationships and community for an individualistic notion that possessions and authority make their lives valuable.

At a societal level, fear and isolation becomes the foundation for building the political and religious institutions that circumscribe our personal idolatry—a shared longing to pacify the gods or forces that represent our vulnerability. This political narrative of control often becomes a recursive story within a story as the foundation for racism, exploitation, and hierarchical rule. Firstly, it begins in the authoritarian narrative of the right of one heroic individual to rule over a tribal association to bring purpose, identity, and safety against the perceived dangers outside the group. And then, secondly, within this paternal narrative, it inevitably invokes the right of one tribal group to subjugate some inferior enemy caste, often identified as the valueless monster that must be dominated or destroyed to protect the wellbeing of the tribe. This, subsequently, justifies giving up even more power to the ruling elite.

Under this dysfunctional political hierarchy, humans are merely victims of a larger conflict, searching for a hero to save them from the insatiable appetite of an overpowering monster. Some individuals respond by identifying with the monster who, then, exploit others in either support or violation of a divine moral code. Still others become enrolled as societal heroes who fight the monster to restore cosmic order according to the dictates of the cultural or religious narratives.

The counterpoint to this political narrative is the relational or familial perception of power—that is, the prosocial ideology of love and community as a universal experience in which humanity has an intrinsic value that is worth celebrating and protecting. While, on one hand, this can be argued as a product of maturity as one grows and develops in their understanding of the world. On the other hand, it essentially begins, of necessity, very primitively in the unbroken gaze of mother and child, as Lover and Beloved. Mature development is merely the understanding of the universality of the human family, the value and strength of community.

In popular culture, the British band, “The Beatles” famously sang “All you need is love,” reflecting the Hippie generation of the 60’s mantra of “Peace, Love, and Understanding.” In a 1967 interview, John Lennon, a member of the Beatles, said, "Love is the most important thing in the world. It’s more important than food, or money, or anything else. Love is what keeps us together." Shortly thereafter, the Beatles unceremoniously broke up amidst irreconcilable conflicts within and without the band. The Hippie Generation of the 60’s antithetically became the self-obsessed Me Generation of the early 80’s, then the Religious Right in the later part of the 20^th century, and subsequently, the Cultural Warriors of the early 21^st century, which is currently attempting to dismantle the fundamental woke imperative of “Peace, Love, and Understanding” many of them once espoused in the 60’s.

Love is paradoxically both mysterious and obvious. Within popular culture and mythology, Love is a presumptively vague platitude--as we search for love, find love, make love, send our love, while we decide whom or what deserves our love. We love our mother, ice cream, our favorite sports team, and our favorite song without pausing to consider what it actually means to love. And we would most certainly love to see our foes suffer a humiliating defeat or be destroyed all together. The word love becomes just a vague placeholder for something we desire without truly understanding our varied experience of it.

The ancient Greeks explained different conceptual actions and desires with separate words to alternately indicate erotic or attractive desire, friendship, familial devotion, as well as altruistic action in support of another. All these separate Greek concepts get swept together when translated into English by the ambiguous emotional platitude, “love.”

Thus, love generally indicates something we feel good about and, consequently, something that can be lost if circumstances are disadvantageous or disagreeable. As such, we fall out of love with our family, friends, lovers, sport teams, and menu selections. Yet, we still believe that somehow, love is all we need.

The art of relationship is paradoxically both enigmatic and familiar. As children, we learn a pattern of relationship within our families, regardless of how healthy or functional these relationships are in our developmental journey. The formative attachment between parent and child is founded on a normative intuition, an archetypal pattern, of the safety of home and family. We intuitively discern what it means to depend on others, beyond our capabilities to meet our own needs. And we find value in the possibility and opportunity of cooperation and shared family responsibility.

Subsequently, our emotional temperament arises out of an implicit differential between an archetypal ideal of family relationship against our actual experience of support and safety—a subjective evaluation of our unmet emotional and physical needs.

Regardless of our ability to articulate this ideal, or our awareness even of our unmet childhood needs, the developmental journey must necessarily be completed to become mature personalities, healthy mates, good parents, and beneficial members of society. What is lacking in the childhood family structure must eventually be developed over the subsequent course of our adult lives in order to nurture healthy relationships.

As we travel along our life’s journey, we internalize many different narratives, different stories, based on experiences both real and imagined. As the basis for learned behavior, these narratives become an operational palette underlying habitual responses to new experiences based on emotional triggers at the core of these narratives. These associative triggers bring an instinctual script from memory to be a retrospective context for what is happening in the moment, creating a predictable pattern to our presence in the world. In turn, these psychological tendencies define our personality. And as a whole, these inculcated narratives are our personal mythology—the collection of stories that formulate our identity.

Our formative family experiences create a subset of our personal mythology that becomes the basis for our adult relationships. When this repertoire is inadequate, we must amend them with corrective experiences. A key archetype in this repertoire is the cultivated Parent image based on our developmental encounters with responsible adults in childhood—whether they be our own parents, or others that provided a safe place for our development, such as teachers, mentors, or coaches. From this, we may begin to develop an archetypal relationship with the image of a Good Parent—one who protects and nurtures the vulnerable child within our narrative repertoire.

Without a good sense of this Responsible Adult in our personal mythology, it is not possible to become a responsible adult in our experiential day to day lives. We subsequently collapse into our existential vulnerability as perpetual victims in a dangerous world, operating defensively out of fear and inadequacy. Unfortunately, without corrective engagement, one may live their entire life reacting to a state of powerlessness and victimhood, perpetually engaged in the dysfunctional power struggle of the Victim, Monster, and Hero, which empirically, is quite common.

On the other hand, the archetypal relational pattern of functional empowerment develops in the form of the Lover-Beloved relationship. Mythologically, this is illustrated in the pre-religious interpretation of the Torah and Gospel stories. In the original mythology, the term “elohim” means “a very great power.”  As such, a family of powerful elohim is described in the narrative—Yahweh is the Parent Elohim and Adam is the first Child Elohim—setting the pattern for the Universal Family of Elohim that includes all of humanity. The myth unfolds as the Parent Elohim tries to raise up his children in his image as the Good Parent.

This archetypal image, or Imago, is described in a particular conversation with Moses, a foundational leader of the mythological tribe of Israel, in which Yahweh identifies himself as one “who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant with [kindness] and truth.”  This is then repeated multiple times throughout the writings of Jewish Histories and Prophets to describe the character of Yahweh as the Good Parent. In this familial context, it becomes a description of what it means to be a mature adult Elohim, the ultimate framework for human development. Later in the Gospel accounts, Rabbi Jeshua emphasizes this purpose, stating:

Yet I am saying to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who are persecuting you, so that you may become sons of your Father Who is in the heavens, for He causes His sun to rise on the [hurtful] and the good, and makes it rain on the just and the unjust... You, then, shall be [mature] as your heavenly Father is [mature].

Our primary identity as Child Elohim defines our inherent great powers. The archetype of the Lover-Beloved is founded on our capacity to use our great power relationally, to altruistically benefit others in mutual relationship. A moral choice is given to love and support each and every person within the universal family regardless of caste, custom, conduct, or creed.  On the other hand, we also may choose to use our powers politically, or selfishly, to benefit ourselves, separating ourselves by building walls to keep out our fears and vulnerabilities.

In the moralistic religion of Judaism, the relational framework of the universal family of Adam in the Torah mythology is replaced by a transactional covenant. Coming out of the Hasidic movement of the neo-Babylonian captivity in the 6^th century BCE, the captive Jewish people sought the blessings of a tribal god to restore their national identity. The parent Elohim, Yahweh, of the Torah is reimagined as the tribal god of the Israelite nation who values and blesses the Jewish people over all other tribes and nations based on their conformity to a moral code, known as the Mosaic Law. If the Jewish nation fulfills their end of a bargain, the exclusionary tribal god will restore the dominance of the mythic kingdom of David.

In the original pre-Christian Torah-Gospel mythology, there is a fundamental narrative of the battle between the religious and familial value systems. The four Gospel accounts of Rabbi Jeshua’s life and ministry are founded on the familial Torah tradition of the fatherhood of Yahweh and his anointed Son who comes to restore the intimacy and power of love within the universal family.

Initially, this is contrasted with the moralism of the Jewish religious elite. But then later, a competing moralistic gospel of sin and salvation is instituted in the prophetic epistles of the neo-apostle Paul. This new transactional gospel replaces the need for continual offerings to satisfy the hunger of the Christian god with one ultimate human sacrifice, which sort of satisfies the anger of this moralistic Christian god, and sort of removes the curse of sin, once additional criteria are met to avoid eternal damnation. Later, this becomes the foundation for all the various Christian religious traditions after it is made a primary tenet in the fourth century Nicene Creed which unified Christian doctrine under the decree of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Many, if not most, religious mythologies begin by defining some broad relational foundation that is then developed into some divine moral code. However, there is an overwhelming tendency to move away from the relational to the institutional, from love to control, regardless of how central love or relationship is to the framework of the incipient mythology. The heart of the problem is that love and community are seen as a weakness within the political hierarchy. Relationships inevitability require one to make oneself vulnerable to another, to open up oneself to the reactions and motives of another. And this is seen as fundamentally dangerous, exposing one to potential harm by others who often may be seen as competitors and enemies. There is inherently a cost to form an open community. This has historically caused the idealism of the belief in a universal family to repeatedly fail, to be discarded for the safety of some authoritarian construct that controls our place in society at the cost of our personal relationships with one another. And of course, it is inherently advantageous for those at the top of the political hierarchy to promote and reinforce the claim that they are superior and should be given power and privileges to rule over the underclass according to the supposed will of god.

The moral foundation of human behavior, both individually and corporately, may thus be characterized by these two fundamentally opposed ways of being in the world. We either follow a path of mutual relational association motivated by love, or else, a path of hierarchical moralistic disassociation motivated by control.

As with the Dark Night of Ebenezer Scrooge, each Life is a story framed in the past, the present, and the future, written in indelible brush strokes on a living canvas that makes up who we are—our identity. Every breath we take is a note in a grand cosmic composition, born in solitude and joined to the universal chorus of humanity. While life inevitably happens moment by moment, moving us forward in time, we have an elemental choice to open up our emotive crayon box to respond to life in all the glorious colors of a shared odyssey, or to hold on to those one or two familiar crayons, representing some darker shade of fate, marked by a life of angst and dissipation, to repetitively work over the same existential spot, with the same monotonous strokes, until our crayons are worn thin in our darkest night.

The Art of life is the composite brush strokes that paint our personal mythology, framing our operative identity, what makes us who we are. Within this archetypal framework of Love versus Control, we choose the color palette from which to interpret or rationalize our experiences, privileging some stories while ignoring others, and then burying the incongruent narratives deep within our subconscious. If we choose the drab color palette of Control, we privilege the narrative of our repetitive victimization—stories of powerlessness, competition, and struggle within a dangerous world. We either rise to the top to subjugate others, or else sink to the bottom in perpetual servitude.

On the other hand, if we develop a broader, more complex palette of Love, we privilege the narrative of our vibrant empowered possibilities—turning stories of vulnerability and failure into the potential for cooperative relationship in community. We may then let our guard down in recognition of our mutual need for one another. As we reach out for help and support from others, we, in turn, make ourselves available to support those in need.

Love in community is an altruistic action operating as a product of the power narratives we develop and nurture. It begins with our lived experiences but grows as we develop a more mature understanding of these experiences and the possibilities they bring to relationship and our identity as lover and beloved.

The Formative Myth of Humanity (Video Podcast)

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

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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.

 

Podcast: Notes Between the Lines with Tom Strelow

Searching for Humanity in a Postmodern Age of Technology, Paranoia, and Propaganda

The Power of Narrative to Build Community

A common parlor game asks: “If a genie were to grant you 3 wishes, what would they be?” A typical answer might be to have more money, more authority, or just more stuff. Or else more charitably, one might wish for world peace or an end to world hunger. Typically, our answer comes out of our personal sense of scarcity or limitations—what is overwhelmingly lacking in our life? What makes us feel powerless and afraid. 

As a primitive psychological state, this sense of Scarcity quite often overshadows our life story, defining the dominant or privileged narratives that make up our identity. On the other hand, Sufficiency, as a counter story to Scarcity, is a sense that comes from a mature developmental resolve that we are empowered to engage our needs and problems competently and constructively. To find an authentic answer to our need for safety, we must look beneath the narrative of "Scarcity and Sufficiency"—to examine what it is that makes us afraid, or to feel vulnerable. 

Archetypally, vulnerability in story and life has often been symbolized by nakedness. In the biblical myth of Adam and Eve, eating the fruit of morality did not, in fact, make them naked. It merely made them aware of their vulnerability, inspiring fear that some imagined adversary might harm them, which then drives them into hiding. Within the Scarcity narrative, vulnerability is intolerable. It constitutes an existential threat that drives us to protect ourselves from whatever dark forces lurk in the shadowy recesses of society, nature, and our souls. The transformative dynamic at the heart of the biblical mythology is the personal power to let go of our fear of imperfection, insufficiency, or failure—to accept our own vulnerability as we accept the vulnerability of others—which then draws us into community, to find support and safety in the diversity of the common good. Over the course of history, this capacity for humans to cooperate and work together has been essential to our survival. Contrary to the modern libertarian ethic, rugged individualists rarely survived alone against the world. 

Socially, however, fear can spur us inward into an exclusionary moral dynamic of ”us vs them"—founded in political and religious institutions and hierarchies overseen by authorities and systems of control. It is often cultivated by a deep-felt sense of victimhood—that there are strange or foreign powers opposing, attacking, or diminishing us in some way. As long as one is captive to this dynamic of fear and victimization, there is no real path to authentic or mature realization of love for one's fellow man. A prosocial morality founded on an inclusive communal relationship—a "universal human family"—is broken down by fear,; dividing us into cliques, tribes, and warring factions. This is the paradox of the religious traditions that idealize "love" while tearing down our sense of personal power that is necessary to love and accept one another in all our perceived differences, imperfections, and vulnerability. 

Psychologically, humans are by nature storytellers. We transform our experiences into intrinsic narratives that identify who we are. The psyche can be imagined as a stage upon which these identity stories are triggered by new events and reenacted. Many times, our fears cause us to privilege certain conservative narratives that hold us captive to repeat the same stories over and over, like familiar spirits that haunt our souls, unable to move on. We become our disabilities, never able to progress, to find our intrinsic power, to become mature human beings in all our potential to love and relate to one another. 

The construction of the psychological narrative, or storytelling, is the fabric that knits us together—the collected stories, built upon a lifetime of experiences, that define our identity. This, then, is the power of narrative, as we shift from an identity of scarcity to sufficiency, to realize that we need one another to be sufficient. Community is the responsibility to support one another-—reaching out to others in need, and then allowing them to support us in our own limitations. Acceptance of our own vulnerability, letting go of our fear, is the foundation of mutuality and community—being empowered to love one another.