Mythos, the new appeal

“Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion.” (342)

I think it is very easy to mythologize our own lives. Our families become monarchies, our communities become kingdoms, our troubles and tests become Scylla and Charybdis, and we are the hero in our own tale. And ultimately, we will follow our paths with whatever twists and turns they take but always either end up exactly where we expect to based on our ideas of our own myth. What gets troublesome is when we start to think about the myth as only a myth, and put it in our heads that someone, a long time ago, made that story up in order to create harmony and order in their own world. I think Phaedrus asks, “But did they, really? What really came first?”

In a sense, Quality became a religion for Phaedrus, which followed him over and out of the mental hospital to take the form of caring for the individual worth inside of him, and he could practice this and really get at this best while taking care of his motorcycle, and letting it take care of him.

That's basically what modern religion is all about: taking care of yourself, doing yourself Good and doing no harm to others. Helping others leads to making yourself a better person (if you're doing it for the right reasons), and thus you go on to change the entire world one from an individual level.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that I think, after finishing this book, that the key to individual happiness and success is having some sort of spirituality – in the broadest sense – that we need a sort of ritual in our lives that allows us to step out of the subject – object relationship, or reverse it, and then come to terms with how we are living our lives and remind ourselves that we should take care in everything we do, not just with this one ritual. Being “true” to ourselves.

I hope that doesn't sound hokey, or over-simplistic. Because I definitely think it is a difficult thing to do: staring at yourself long enough to figure out what you are doing wrong and then be able to successfully change it for the better, in each aspect of your life, every day. For me, I get to the point of figuring out what's wrong and then not taking that next step to really figure it out. Kind of like the Sutherland's and their dripping sink, I know a lot of the time what the issue is but can either ignore it with enough ease or once identified it don't consider it to be a problem anymore, which isn't really a solution.

I don't know if this is a successful blog post. It's hard to question Zen because it is so easy just to fall back into the mindset that we invented myth – too easy to just not believe. Like peer pressure. I think the important thing is that we should ultimately be looking, and reflecting, and whether or not this post goes beyond the reflecting step, I don't really know. Maybe we get too tied into the myths that we know that we become afraid to step outside of them and find our own answers as individuals. Opening that glass door and marching through...