From Me to We - The New Mythology
Many of us are familiar with the idea of the heroic journey, the monomyth that sits beneath the many traditions and cultures in the world made popular by the work of Joseph Campbell. Now, as we step into a new millenium of understanding ourselves and our relationship wtih the world that supports our stories, Into the Mythica offers an expansion to that classic form, marrying the idea of the heroic journey with the landscape of legend that supports it’s story to embrace the new myth of our emergent consciousness.
We all live our own myth
To quote Joseph Campbell – “There is no general mythology today, nor can there ever be again. Our lives are too greatly various in their backgrounds, aims and possibilities for any single order of symbols to work effectively on us all.”
What I learned was that Campbell was right. Our mythologies were not general but specific, made of a legend of symbols and signs unique to each individual. There were many paths. Many lines of synchronicity that made up the lives and legends of the people. Everyone’s was different, every path was it’s own unique expression.
Yet there were constants. Principles which were common to us all. They were the gravities of story, the primal principles which gave rise to an infinite number of expressions which played out as the legend of symbols which defined our individual and collective tales.
All stories have a landscape, a geography which gives the characters and their adventures their context. As we explore the heroic journey and it’s landscape of legend, we must look at the nature of that legend, at the very substance of the land we move through along our many missions and quests. Key to this is understanding that there is a subtle landscape which exists within the world, one intimately connected to our very sense of self and it’s personal Quest.
The Land was not simply what we experienced in the outer world. The movements of our stories were not just through a physical landscape, but through an inner experience which paralleled that outer form.
This is the new mythology – a shared journey from individual consciousness into the recognition that we were all a collective and that whatever story we were living was a part of the planet herself.
We shared a recognition that life could be better. That there was a way to come back into alignment with our souls in the soul – to step deeper into our own embodiment, together.
At the core of this is understanding the heroic journey and it’s significance for us as individuals and as a collective. It means looking at our stories in a new way to see the myth beneath the mundane that exists for every one of us.
This is our journey into the underlands, into the lands-beneath-the-land that form the subtle world of our stories. It is a journey of discovery, of trial and triumph, of facing the patterns that lay within us waiting to be resolved as discover our way along the sacred story that is our life and legend.
The Landscape of Legend
Reframing the Heroic Journey
The Landscape for the Heroic Journey
You are Here - The Axis Mundi
There are many worlds within world, existing within an subtle ecosystem of myth and mystery that exists within the world we already know. It is the world of stories and the world of patterns, of our traumas and trials and treasure, and it holds the landscape to all heroic journeys that have ever been. It is the world of the Mythica, the layer of legend that exists within what we see on the surface of the world, and it is real.
To understand the Mythica, we must understand the idea of the axis mundi, that we are the center of our personal universe. This is the idea that there is a relationship between our inner vibrational state and our outer experience, and that this relationship creates the landscape of the Path and Land that supports our sacred Quest.
The idea that our inner world manifests our outer circumstances is notoriously difficult to translate, for it requires a certain degree of perception to even recognize it’s existence. Simply put, if we can’t perceive the energies within ourselves clearly we can’t see how they’re creating our outer world. Because of this, the journey outward is always a journey inward, gradually discovering the trials and treasures within that manifest as our outer world.
It is the nature of the Gift of Life that makes this so intricate, for every being lives in their own set of conditions – their own hopes, their own dreams, their own fears and talents, all existing in their unique facet of the universe.
Our path wasn’t just our movement on the surface of the world. It wasn’t just an objective look at our position in latitude and longitude, but something vaster and more inclusive, something that included the subjective inner landscapes of vibration that lay beneath the surface of our story. Such was the layer of our stories, of our subconscious and metaconscious patterns, of the hidden landscapes of the mind and it’s manifestations which played out as our sacred quest, and I worked to map out that landscape, to find the place where what was above and what was below, where what was within and what was without met each other and formed our personality reality.
Our path is both physical and psychic, moving through a landscape of subconscious and archetypical patterns which are more constant and enduring than what we encounter on the surface of the world. It is the movement through these patterns, through their healing and our resolution which defines our journey through the archetypical world of our own sacred path.
How then, to create a map made of a liquid substance that still held enough constancy to be read? How to create something which showed the constant principles of manifestation while also honoring their unique expression? How to create the maps of our myth and the landscapes of our legend in a way that helped the people discover their own sacred self? At the core this is understanding there is no separation between you and the land – that we are a part of the planet and that everywhere we arrive on our Quest is related to our path and it’s purpose.
Like the surface world, the Mythica had many territories, many vibrational geographies which existed both within and without the self. It was a landscape of colors, of vibrational geographies which underlay our experience, and inspired by the travels of Alice in WonderlandI called it the underlands, the lands-below-the-land. They were the territories of our subconscious, of the myths and legends that made up our selves and their stories, and in accordance of the principle of “As Above – So Below and As Within – So Without” they were made of the energies within ourselves, of the vibrational colors and textures which made up our chakras and energetic architecture.
Our path was a movement through these energies, through a landscape of subconscious and archetypical patterns which were more constant and enduring than what we encountered on the surface of the world. It was a movement through these patterns, through their healing and our resolution which defined the path of self-development in a spatial way and the landscapes of our personal legend, and I resolved to create a way to share those landscapes with the people, to give a context for our content in the shared journey to a more abundant world.
Key to understanding this is realizing that there is a collective field in the planet which mirrors our individual consciousness, that there is a landscape of patterns which exist in the planet which are connected to what we experience in our individual self.
This reframes the idea of personal development from the individual to the collective, helping us to anchor the very real fact that our movement through the outer and inner worlds of our Quest are happening at once.
Building the Mythica
As an homage to stories, this is done through the power of Story, through showcasing the real-life connections between us all on the timelines of our lives, bringing clarity to the reality that we are all connected, and that only by coming to realize that thing can we change our planet for the brighter.
How to create a platform which helped the people see their personal myth within the Great Story? Which revealed the people, places and events which moved us forward in the new myth of the Garden?
Navigating the Site
There are three primary components to the Mythica site. The first is the Timeline, my twenty-year journey documenting the discovery of the Mythica and the building of a means to share that discovery with the world. The second is Mythos Academy where I teach the framework of living one’s myth, my version of a sacred guild for the modern mystic.
Revealing the landscapes of the heroic journey is both simple and complex, for each of us walks our own unique landscape of legend within a larger collective frontier – a map of stories which connects us all. As such the documentation of my story is meant to serve as a framework, an understanding of the Principles which give rise to the unique Expression of all heroic journeys. To serve this function I documented my story for twenty years, building it out into the architecture of the Mythica as the first tale of many meant to reveal the strings of our synchronicity that weaves us together.
Mythos Academy
Mythos Academy has multiple parts. One is the Mythipedia, an online wiki which presents the framework of the subtle earth in an interwoven way. The second are the courses and the third is the upcoming social network for the modern adventurer.
The third part of Into the Mythica is mythica media. Here, the teachings of living your myth and understanding the landscapes of the subtle earth as well as interviews with the people met along the quest and their relationship with the emergent new world. This includes Mythica comics, the podcast, and a host of videos and articles meant to teach the landscape of the subtle world.
We and the Planet are One
While there is often talk in spiritual circles about our oneness with the universe, what really anchors our collective journey is realizing that we are also one with the planet – that what we experience as our individual quest is part of something larger, something that includes each and every one of us in it’s embrace.
At the core of the idea of the Mythica is the idea of the subtle earth, that there is a layer to our experience which is part of the earth herself and which corresponds to the personal mythologies and subconscious patterns which define our quest. It is the energetic landscape which exists simultaneous to what we experience on the surface of our world, and is always there, supporting the very substance of our stories.
This is looking at the heroic journey of being human in a new way. It means coming to see that there is a subtle layer to our lives and that our movement through life happens in the territories which exist in that subtle place. It is seeing the journey of healing, the movement through the shadows and subconscious patterns which constrict our realities across the landscape of our legend. It is the quest to know thy self seen in it’s modern format as an exploration of the many territories of the subtle earth beneath the surface of our self and it’s story.
Yet in an even greater way this is coming to see that there is no separation between ourselves and the planet, that what we are experiencing in our personal life is intimately related to what everyone else is experiencing and that from a certain perspective what we consider to be our individual selves can more appropriately be seen as cells within the organism of the planet herself. In this way, the framework for Into the Mythica speaks to a new way of seeing ourselves and our stories, of seeing the journey of healing through self and shadow in the context of our larger collective consciousness and as part of the planet and the universe.
