A viewer asks: “The American psychologist Rollo May, argues that people need myths to make sense of their lives. He says people lost something essential when they gained rationalism, individualism, and the modern worldview that promoted the novel, and that without myth people are prey to anxiety and addiction through loss of meaning. Modern novels promote a realist, rational, secular individual but empties the world of symbolic, communal, and transcendent layers that myths provided. Was the development and popularization of the novel engineered by the Extraterrestrial Alliance to diminish and impoverish human imagination and connection to the transcendent? Are myths of benefit in healing consciousness?”

DWQA Questions › Category: Non-Local Consciousness › A viewer asks: “The American psychologist Rollo May, argues that people need myths to make sense of their lives. He says people lost something essential when they gained rationalism, individualism, and the modern worldview that promoted the novel, and that without myth people are prey to anxiety and addiction through loss of meaning. Modern novels promote a realist, rational, secular individual but empties the world of symbolic, communal, and transcendent layers that myths provided. Was the development and popularization of the novel engineered by the Extraterrestrial Alliance to diminish and impoverish human imagination and connection to the transcendent? Are myths of benefit in healing consciousness?”

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Nicola Staff asked 3 weeks ago

We see great value in the perspective of this psychologist in realizing people have a deeper need than simply gaining a surface stability and control of day-to-day needs of life. What he appreciates but is not making very explicit is that human beings have a spiritual core that needs not just care and feeding but a dedicated ongoing partnership with the divine in order to satisfy the yearnings of the soul with learning and growth as a nutrient. We would describe this as having a higher calling and inner awareness that people need a lofty pursuit of some kind in order to feel their life has purpose and meaning, commensurate with its true value in being a kind of miracle of existence. That is what is reflected in the myths widely used as role models and historical icons, the many stories of a tragic hero or a successful one who becomes a champion or victor in a struggle. People have an inner knowing there is something more important about their existence than the mundane details of their lives and, indeed, that is true. So this gap between what people see and can touch as objective reality falls far short of inner desire for a kind of greatness that seems elusive, but that is the human condition—living as divine beings in a fragile animal body, in a quite limited and constrained physical existence for only a short while. Given the contrast between objective reality seen by everyone and largely agreed to, and the inner yearnings, it is no wonder people have turned to a mythical narrative for comfort and inspiration.