The Myth Model: Eagle's Eye View (Updated September 2023)
NOTE APRIL 20, 2024: THIS “FRONT GATE” SITE IS UNDER RECONSTRUCTION. CONTENT BELOW IS A BIT ANTIQUATED AND TO BE REVISED, IN GOOD TIME. CURRENT POSTS ARE “STILL WATERS” ON SUNDAYS AND “DRAFT MYTH HANDBOOK” ON THURSDAYS. THE DRAFT HANDBOOK IS AVAILABLE ON THE SINGLE HOME PAGE, “DRAFT MYTH MODEL HANDBOOK” WEEKLY POSTS ARE ADDED TO IT. SO ONLY THE CURRENT WEEK’S POST IS AVAILABLE IN ADDITION TO THE “DRAFT MYTH MODEL HANDBOOK” WHICH INCLUDES THE PREVIOIUS HANDBOOK POSTS.
The aim of the Myth Model is to bring BOTH the physical and spiritual structure of the universe into a single focus. The term Myth Model is intended to sound paradoxical, because it compounds "myth" in the common sense, with "model" in the scientific sense. ‘Myth’ bespeaks the enchantment of life, ‘Model’ its logic, but in the Myth Model, this logic takes the form of the ontological process of creation and sub-creation.
The Myth Model is at once both a trek into the adventure of ideas, and a building project of a new thought craft by means of which the trek over the turbulent sea of ideas is accomplished.
The Myth Model is pointed to here in this introduction and expanded in the weekly Myth Model posts. The Myth Model posts are presented mostly in thought verse. Thought verse is pseudo poetry for those whose thoughts are ideas which need to be clothed lightly in words. Thought verse point to insights from which the Myth Model is crafted and for which words do not really do justice. For instance, within the Myth Model, ideas themselves are not defined but exfoliated. Ideas are essential to all life and no idea is merely abstract. The Myth Model is a craft of thought by means of which reality is brought into a new focus in order to behold what it really is of which we all are parts.
If you’re willing to take on a long, tough brain wrangle, the Myth Model might be for you. After all, the thoughts you think are the light, or darkness, of your life. Subscription is free.
What the Myth Model is all about:
The gist of the Myth Model starts with the insight that all things are connected, and nearly everybody knows or feels this to be true, somehow.
The second insight of the Myth Model is that we live in creation, but not everyone is onboard with this insight, because some have it from the get-go and others, raised agnostic in an agnostic culture, like yours truly, may take decades to get it.
So part of the Myth Model is an ontological theory about how creation works. Creation starts with God's primary act of creation which is parceled out among us creatures as workers of secondary creation in the Myth Model view.
What and who the other workers of secondary creation are is also part of the Myth Model. The minority insight of yours truly is that the kinds of creatures that are workers in secondary creation range from beings like invisible gods, to organisms, like us humans, to beings like atoms. Another Myth Model theory shows how one form applies to all beings which work with God together in Creation.
The next insight is the conviction that all of these beings have experience (maybe vastly different, but of the same general nature as human consciousness) and that physical science cannot explain the essence of the experience of any being. All that physical science can to is show the tight correlation of physical activity with experience. Recently, the news reported that a prominent neuroscientist lost an important bet to a prominent philosopher. The bet was against the scientist's assertion that in twenty years, physical science would have explained consciousness. Recently, at the end of the bet's twenty years, physical science was no closer than at the beginning, when the bet was made, so the scientist paid up.
Thirty years before that wager was made, as a graduate student, yours truly came to the philosopher’s conviction. I had to decide whether or not to become a neuroscientist. I choose not to, because of the deep (to me) insight that neuroscientists could never explain consciousness. I understood then, and still do now, that consciousness is the essence of human experience, and that animals, like snails and worms, also work through their lives by making sense of some kind of experience. My sense was that we use experience (consciousness) to understand physics, therefore it can’t work vice versa.
So, within the Myth Model, is a theory which, in concert with its other theories, models what's common to the experience of all creatures from gods to electrons. Yours truly knows how few are those who will want to get into this space. Do you?
The next insight has much to do with the success of modern science to accomplish the things which it has accomplished. This may seem like the reverse of the conviction of that neuroscientists cannot accomplish their goal, but physicists have accomplished their goal. The Myth Model incorporates particular insights into the essence of physicality itself to make use of this accomplishment. This insight into the essence of physicality is hard to lay out, because it involves a perspective on how scientists themself work as scientists, but I’ll try:
All scientists are implicitly committed to making measurements (observations) that can be certified by physicality. That is, all that is true by scientific standards is supported by observations (measurements), which are in the experience of scientists and known to be in the past (personal and historic) of all scientists living or dead and all who accept scientific results and work with them. One might think this a duh comment by yours truly, or smell the rabbit hole, which it is. It is the rabbit hole of assuming that extension and duration is the primary sense under which all other senses make sense.
The Myth Model has a theory to account for how things are made past to the present experience of creatures. The the completion of a measurement establishes a point of being to be made past. This theory works on the assumption, I'd say, necessity, that the stopwatch time, of scientific and common sense measure and observations, is only one arm of real time. Of these two arms of real time, speaking very broadly, stopwatch time is associated with doing, and the other arm of real time is associated with meaning. The Myth Model has much to say about how these two arms are related.
Now we can go back to the first Myth Model insight that all things are connected. These connections are expressed in the Myth Model as relationships that are acts of joint secondary creations by beings and primary creations by God. Beings' interactions evolve as a function of their their experience of present and recently made-past interactions. Present interactions become potential relationships, and then, concurrently through primary creation, become actual relationships. Actual relationships are then established as past realities, and this is where Myth Model thinking gets tricky.
This trickiness is because real past relationships are past in both of the arms of real time at once. This means that the complete loss we naturally feel over some past events, because we were deeply related in them, is not truly complete loss. Actual relationships potentially remain with us in the kind of relationship we have with the past.
Consequently, the past is alive in the Myth Model, and it can be brought transformed, but whole, into the present, or vice versa, because in the other arm of time, the past exists substantially, tangibly, and is immediately open to the gods' present by means of which past actualities can be brought into the present.
We continually keep and work in actual relationships with gods and all the other workers of creation, only a handful of which we perceive directly, and with none of whom we share identical experiences. So we dwell with gods and myriad other beings in the movements of ever-growing relationships.
From the beginning of creation (for which there is a Myth Model theory), up to our present moment which also has a Myth Model structure and dynamic. But an authentic future does not exist.
Primarily creation continuously works to make the weave of relationships real. The Myth Model theory of this ontological process accounts for the creation of real non-being which opens the potential for good and evil in the experience of all beings.
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John the Thought Verser
© JBSPalmer 2023