Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung both raised the question, What is the myth that is managing your life? Many of us are not very conscious about the internal myth or story that filters every thought we think, every emotion we feel, and every relationship and encounter we experience throughout every day of our lives.
This curriculum explores the dynamics of applied contemporary mythology or the practice of choosing our most personal interior life consciously rather than unconsciously. If you think mythology was something that happened in ancient Greece and now we only read about in history books, think again. Stories are the foundation and containers of human consciousness.
The Greeks didn't hold a candle to Hollywood. Myth making is the second highest function of human beings. We all do it all the time. We may pause to consider that the body we see in the mirror, the money we manage in our checkbook, the work we do in our profession, and the relationships we nurture with our friends and family each reflect the story we hold in our heart and practice in our consciousness. Our lives are empowered or victimized by the stories from which we live. This curriculum is an invitation to choose a conscious relationship to the stories managing the depth of one's actual daily life experience as well as providing a path of methods and practices for doing so.
This program seeks to nurture intentional interior life practitioners.
In one's deepest heart of hearts, we each hunger for Truth, hunger for what is Real, hunger for a personal connection with That-Which-Is-Essential in life, now and forever. We each share an insatiable desire for this essence at the center of our lives. If that center is not personally found and claimed, we spend our days looking for it in work, busy-ness, food, alcohol, sex, drugs, money, power, social recognition, entertainment, consumption, and 10,000 other distractions and false centers. Yet, when we bump into It, we know it. We know It at a deep level; quite apart from whether or not it fits our programming in a specific wisdom tradition or lack of wisdom tradition. We know IT. And we know we belong to IT and wish to sustain and nurture and expand our personal connection to IT, above all else. In the beginning, we may not have a name for IT, but eventually, through claiming a name or names, and through personal and perhaps collective practice, we will expand this presence in our lives. From a marketing perspective, 'Interior Mythos'Journeys (IMJ), recognizes three potential audiences.
1) Those practicing a traditional wisdom tradition.
2) Those who, with or without a traditional wisdom tradition, consciously seek a connection and a life centered in a personal relationship with IT.
3) Those who are obsessed and driven by their deep hunger but who don't know for what they actually hunger and may not be conscious that this deep hunger is driving, directing and shaping all the attention and activity of their daily personal lives and relationships.
This group simply has a sense of un-fulfillment, dissatisfaction, and indefinite longing of which they may be vaguely aware and that may make them open and receptive to a presentation of IT when an encounter with IT occurs. Remember that the IMJ curriculum is a Hail Mary pass. The human family is in a deeply disconnected state (from That-Which-Is-Essential) and is currently racing toward the cliff. We don't have 300 years to educate one another on how so and so actually had it right in the ancient poetry and scientific worldview of this or that culture and wisdom tradition.� We need some connection with The Essential NOW! Because it is this connection alone that can feed a healthy relationship to our neighbor, the environment, our politics, education, global culture, economics, and yes, our most personal self. The IMJ curriculum is designed primarily to address Group 3. Why? Because Group 3 is the common denominator in the human family.
Group 2, because of their conscious personal relationship to the IT, are generally appreciative of the IMJ material because they recognize the Truth they have existentially experienced in this encounter and see it as a tool they might use to expand this relationship. Ideally, Group 1 would be the most excited to receive this great new tool for accomplishing the mission in the world they originally were established to address; and that they spend a lot of energy telling themselves they are effectively protecting and promoting while their numbers decline and the human family races for the cliff. You might think Group 3 would recognize this as Good News! While some of us have spent a lifetime hoping to connect with Group 3 and partner with Group 3 to lead the charge, their relationship to the curriculum of IMJ is generally dismissive and/or met as a threat to their traditional language and symbols which once pointed to IT but now only point to themselves.
IMJ is finally irresistible to those who seek Truth and who seek it in our shared contemporary setting of a diverse, digitally enveloped global village, existing in a quantum scientific worldview, in an evolving cosmopolitan culture, in the Space Age, and at the dawn of a new millennium. If there is an attraction, this is it.
If one wishes to have a stronger physical body, one must do some physical exercises. The same is true regarding a life of depth. If I wish to live at a deeper level, I must do some depth exercises. In times past such interior exercises were referred to as spiritual exercises or spiritual practices. In contemporary mythic language, we will discuss this same activity as relational exercises or relational practices in order to be clear regarding the everyday life dynamic to which we are pointing.
The purpose of this web site is to support and nurture individuals and groups in their solitary or shared journey of depth. Regular interaction with the video and text material on this site can constitute a meaningful contemporary relational exercise. This is not a speed-reading or speed-watching exercise. Often the best practice or exercise is to encounter a 5-minute video or text module and then let it linger deep in your being as you interact with your everyday life for the next 24 or 48 hours. The depth meaning of a substantive art form is often not revealed in the direct encounter but in the indirect after-shock or post-resonance of unintended reflection in relationship to the seed planted through the initial encounter. Schedule such regular encounters with yourself and the site. Then mix in a heavy dose of your own personal, real, everyday, life activities and watch the relational exercises mature. If you are not certain where to begin on the site, consider engaging the Life Journey series in sequence.
These video art forms are designed to guide the seeker on a contemporary journey of depth. Reflection questions are provided for each segment.
No. Story Circle conversations are not bull sessions but rather guided interactions over material and art-forms focusing upon a specific profound curriculum topic. The task of a Story Circle group is to illuminate the depth of a specific material in the everyday life examples of each participant seated around the circle. Story Circle groups consist of 5 - 12 members. To ensure maximum comfort, bring your best friend or life-partner or someone you would like to bond with over a series of substantive conversations. Also, consider recruiting your own Story Circle group.
NO! Quite the opposite! Properly encountered, the curriculum of Interior Mythos Journeys has the capacity to renew and invigorate traditional depth-seeking instruction and institutions. Depth-seeking wisdom traditions were each founded by a contemplative who personally connected with the Universal. That Universal Reality reflects the truth of every human being on the earth today and every human being who has ever lived throughout all of history. Out of the founder's contemplative encounter with the Universal emerged a specific Story.
You have perhaps been guided and nurtured by that Story and may know it well. You may know it so well you relate directly to the Story and may be less clear about the real life content to which that Story originally was designed to point. The curriculum of Interior Mythos Journeys is designed to provide a contemporary art form through which we can connect the dots again with the Story of our specific Wisdom Tradition. The understanding of these specific stories representing the Great Wisdom Traditions, for the most part, have today been hijacked by human fundamentalists, human moralists, human sentimentalists, and human rationalist scholars. In each case, radical disconnection from the Universal has occurred.
Therefore, the one chance for revitalizing each of the traditions is to reconnect with the original, existential, universal encounter of the founding contemplative in order to reinvigorate each of the stories with the truth that already resides in the actual experience of every human practitioner or would-be practitioner.
Joseph Campbell has invited us into the awareness that we live in The Time Between the Myths. The old shared stories no longer resonate to connect us with the deepest currents of our own lives. A new shared story has not arrived. This Time Between is our moment. More than any other single truth it defines our lives. Interior Mythos Journeys is an effort to bring awareness to what we mean by reality in such a time between and to illuminate the relevant postures and practices that can contribute to the living of a full and significant experience of life. All profound traditions of the East and West were began by a Contemplative, or someone who chose to be present to their own deepest experience of life and to learn and grow from that encounter. Our time between is a call to all of us to reconnect with our contemplative depth.
If it has been a while since you shared a substantive conversation with the young person in your life and desire a method for doing so, this might be it. One facet of the Interior Mythos Journeys curriculum grew from a program designed for NCAA Division I Women Athletes as they sought a way to reach peak performance through the application of depth life principles and practices in the fast-paced, high-pressure environment of collegiate athletics. The material is contemporary, universal, and appropriate for young people seeking a deeper path.
Joseph Campbell invited us into the awareness that we live in The Time Between the Myths. The old shared stories no longer resonate to connect us with the deepest currents of our own lives. A new shared story has not arrived. This Time Between is our moment. More than any other single truth, this reality defines our lives at the dawn of the new Millennium. Interior Mythos Journeys is an effort to bring awareness to the meaning of Reality in such a time between and to illuminate the relevant postures and practices contributing to a full and significant experience of life.
All great wisdom traditions of the planet were initiated by a contemplative; someone who chose to be present to their own deepest experience of life and to learn and grow from that encounter. Our time between is a call to reconnect with this contemplative depth. The practice of all fundamental human endeavors, economic, political, moral, environmental, cultural, flow from our willingness to acknowledge and connect with this depth or not. The implications in either case are determinative. Divorced from the universal depth we share, self-centeredness dominates and the human family is estranged from itself.
First of all, if you are experiencing this material as abstract and intellectual you are clearly missing the curriculum. The curriculum of Interior Mythos Journeys has no content except your life and my life. This material does not provide information to remember but an invitation to take a journey of depth into our own most-personal experience of life. We each get to decide to embark on this journey or dismiss it as something intellectual and abstract to think about. Future programs will explore more explicitly interior-life practices and will be most appreciated by those who have engaged the prerequisite material of Life Journey #2 The Ultimate Reality.
For many of us, it is necessary to use the head to get out of the head! Life Journey #2 The Ultimate Reality (LJ2) is prerequisite for all Interior Mythos Journeys curriculum and programs. Without a foundation of Ultimate Reality no successful communication can occur regarding life practices.
Life Journey #2 is also prerequisite for Life Journey #1 and all other material previously presented by Interior Mythos Journeys.
Yes, this does not make sense. Yes, this is the way it is. The Ultimate Reality is foundational. The Ultimate Reality is contextual. Without the benefit of the context of LJ2, and therefore a Reality Base, an exposure to Interior Mythos Journeys material will likely result only in confusion and argument. Therefore, please suggest LJ2, taken sequentially through the 8 modules, as the appropriate starting point for each new explorer.
You don't drink it, you swim in it. It is a great unanswerable question as to whether a fish is aware that it lives in a sea of water Similarly, most of us mistakenly think we live in time and space and bump around on a small planet called earth until we die and then we don't anymore. We don't give much thought to the greater timeless and infinite reality of the Being of which we are a part of. We swim in an invisible and interior Sea of Energy that holds us and sustains us and from which we can never be separated. But, because we choose to be mostly unaware of our true nature we spend our time floundering or drowning in this essential Reality we have yet to claim. This website is mostly an invitation for all of us to learn to swim in the deep water of our own lives. This is a journey of trusting that this deep water does in fact support us.
There's an app for that! It's free, and you should be able to watch all of our videos on your smartphone after downloading.
Some people spend a lot of time worrying about, focusing upon, fretting over, and wishing they could change the weather. However, the weather is the weather. It is our inescapable external environment. We can't do much about it but we sure love to talk about it and give it attention. What if we were to spend as much energy, focus and attention on out interior posture and environment, or the weather inside The external weather we have little or no influence upon other than the relationship (an interior reality) we choose toward it. Yet out interior environment is where we actually live and upon this environment each of us has absolute dominion, we are in charge. It is the nurture, sustenance, management and practice of an intentional interior life in a contemporary setting that is the domain of Interior Mythos Journeys.