Myth and religion

The idea that humans are “meaning makers” is widely accepted in psychology, as part of the notion of a universal human “will to meaning.” At the individual level, this process is generally described as an unconscious need to make sense of one’s experience and to feel that one’s life has significance and purpose.

Culture is not merely the sum of all of the variables that are operative; instead, those variables are all interactive in a complex web, and a culture and its meanings are understood through a process of description by the symbols within that web that constitutes the interconnected whole. Cultural meanings are found in the symbols in that web space, and there seems to be little developed human life without them.

Yet the specific understanding of what it means to say that humans have to make meaning is difficult to specify. There appear to be four needs that are met through meaning making – a sense of  purpose, value/justification, efficacy or control, and self-worth but this does not tell us how the process of meaning making works.

It can best be understood in terms of two interrelated processes: meaning construction and meaning appraisal. Meaning construction is the process through which organisms perceive wholes where the stimuli are actually parts; make pattern, connection, or implication out of ambiguity; and extrapolate continuity where it is unclear that there is any. Meaning appraisal is the process through which organisms assess new information in light of the way they have processed past information (i.e., their past experience and the implicit meaning system already in place).

These interrelated processes are operative in perception, learning, development, social interaction, personality development, and all healthy human psychological functions, and also in the more highly elaborated beliefs, practices, values, and worldviews we associate with religiousness and spirituality.

Three general types of myth have been central to human societies and continue to influence the way we think, speak, and act today. Creation myths tell us where we came from, how things began. They are our primary  myths, the first stage in what might be called the psychic life of the species. Creation is almost always linked to the concept of Deity, one of the strongest but most corruptible expressions of our collective being. Deities  are metaphors, or dreams of our future society and psychology has taught us how important our mental depictions and memories of our  parents are to any real understanding of our own identities.

The story of the Hero is the most human and overtly psychological of the dominant myth patterns. Hero stories can be said to be metaphors for our personal and  collective progress through life and history. Creation, Deity, and Hero all  seem to lead inevitably to that very strangest and most mystical expression of the human imagination, the concept of union, which, depending upon era and tradition, has been called by many names, of which nirvana,  individuation, self-identity, and wholeness are a few.

The definition of myth as false belief or superstition develops naturally enough from the more accurate understanding of the word as a fabulous and obviously untrue narrative of the deeds of heroes and gods – characters such as Odin, Pandora or Pallas Athena. But whereas common usage myths of the under the ladder sort are for the most part products of the secular world, mythic narratives are the sacred stories of religions.

All cultures and religions have sacred stories that the common sense of people in other cultures and religions recognises as myths. The carrying off of the maiden Persephone by the god Hades is a fanciful and untrue story of someone else’s religion. We call that story a myth. It is difficult to believe that the Buddha was conceived in a dream by a white elephant, so we call that story a myth as well.

But, of course, stories such as the parting of the Red Sea for the fleeing Hebrews, Muhammad’s Night Journey, and the dead Jesus rising from the tomb are just as clearly irrational narratives to which a Hindu or a Buddhist might understandably apply the  word “myth.” All of these stories are definable as myths because they contain events that contradict both our intellectual and physical experience of reality.

Traditionally, religions have been the repositories and interpreters of sacred stories – of myths – and the creators of rituals to express them. But as religions become institutionalised or associated with secular political power, these collective sacred metaphors and the religions themselves tend to be distorted for self-serving or political purposes.

One need only look at recent events in the Middle East, in India, in Indonesia, in the Sudan, in Sri Lanka, or in Northern Ireland, to mention only a few examples of the politicised misuse of religion. Historically, the phenomenon in question has by no means been limited to extremist fringes or extremist religions. The history of mainstream Christianity, for example, contains glaring examples of repression: of the feminine principle embodied in Mary and the Holy Spirit, of the Jewishness of Jesus, of the “truth” revealed in the apocryphal gospels, of the essential message of peace conveyed by Jesus himself, and of the human mind’s natural need to interpret its intellectual and physical environment.

The distortions of fundamentalism are, of course, more obvious and more marked by literal interpretations for political purposes. The militant self-righteousness of fundamentalist Christianity and of fundamentalist Islam and Judaism, too, are clearly in contrast to the tolerance expressed in the New Testament, the Qur’an, and the Torah and in the compassionate teachings of the founders and prophets of the Abrahamic religions.

If we think of religiosity as an aspect of our quest for psychological wholeness, the misuse of religious myth is analogous to a conscious editing of our dreams or a denial of their real metaphorical meaning in order to deceive ourselves and those around us. In the process we block the path to enlightenment. Historically, as cultures, we have done just that, misinterpreting our myths to justify, for example, arguments for gender and racial superiority and economic privilege, thus precluding social wholeness.

Twentieth-century Western totalitarianism in its various forms owed much to the messianic and Utopian aspects central to the Judaeo-Christian tradition and created de facto religious systems, complete with ritual and dogma to support the artificially created myths in question. Communism, dominated by the “trinity” of Marx, Engles, and Lenin, promised a utopia based on a communal bonding that would not have surprised or offended early Christians.

Military parades before the assembled leaders on the balcony above Red Square took on the aura of religious ritual. In China the cult of Mao included myths of the leader’s almost superhuman intellectual and physical power. In Hitler’s Germany, too, the Führer was glorified as a culture hero, and the justification for German dominance owed much to ancient myths such as those contained in the Niebelungenlied and the operas of Wagner. In mass meetings surrounded by the mythic symbols of national symbolism the Hitler Youth expressed devotion to their hero in a style that suggested religious fanaticism rather than political loyalty.

Perhaps the best indication of the beginnings of the acceptance of a new mythology is the relatively recent recognition of the common purposes and understandings of the old enemies, religion and science, spirit and reason. At the progressive fringes of even mainline religious traditions we now find people who not only no longer speak of our patriarchal right as a species to conquer nature and rule the world but rather of the importance of human consciousness as a functional aspect of earth and of creation itself. These people are concerned with better understanding the myth of God in light of our deeper understanding from physics and biology of the inter-relatedness of all aspects of creation.

A human being does not have goals or purposeful motives, let alone more lofty spiritual

strivings, in a non-meaning-laden vacuum. Even a goal defined in relatively immediate terms, such as caring for a sick loved one, depends on factors  beyond itself, such as the degree of love shown to the caregiver by the sick  person in past times, skill to perform the necessary tasks, and the availability of help, all of which contribute to the person’s evaluation of the desirability, practicality, and possibility of performing the task at any given moment.

The same point can be made with respect to what may appear to us as more microlevel processes common to humans and other animals. Thus, for example, we can consider (a) the way other animals learn to respond to ambiguous stimuli and learn the location of food in a maze (or their natural habitat).

In the first trial run in a T-maze, a rat is in a completely unknown environment and has no clue whether food is located down the left or the right arm of the maze. After several trials and errors, however, it has made the “correct” meaning out of the ambiguous stimulus series to which it has been exposed and has learned to turn left at the choice point to receive food reinforcement (i.e., it has “connected the dots” between running down the runway, seeing the choice point, executing one turn and not the other, and food in the goal box). Altering behaviour by reinforcing  conditioning, thus, is an instance of meaning making.

At a yet more microlevel, (b) we can consider the way neurons generate patterns out of an ambiguous barrage of bits and pieces of information, some of which apparently create consciousness. Similarly, (c) neurons in the retina of the eye receive certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, called light, which set off neural impulses in the retinal receptors and from which the visual system eventually makes meaningful perceived data.

Finally, (d) even the phenomenon of human memory is based on meaning making. It is now known that a memory is not “retrieved” in the form in which it was initially stored, but is instead “reconstructed” (i.e., a meaning-making process) and can actually be changed by that very process, i.e., the meaning that was made and called a memory can be reconsolidated and stored in a new form. These are meaning assessment and meaning making processes, and it is hard to imagine human or animal functioning at an ordinary, healthy level without them.

A similar argument applies to religious conversion and spiritual transformation. A person does not accept a different belief or begin a new religious or spiritual practice without at some level – conscious or subconscious – appraising his or her current needs and the degree to which they are being met and evaluating that appraisal in relation to the perceived alternatives and the anticipated effects of making a change. The person’s final change or lack of it depends on his or her appraisal of the status quo in comparison to the perceived match, and benefits and costs, of sticking with what is or changing to something else. Technically, we can say that the person is responding to the meanings he or she makes of the options, not to the options as such.

Consider also the phenomenon of spiritual struggle. Whether or not a person feels spiritual conflict between, for example, option A and option B, depends not on the two options as raw stimuli but on the person’s perceptions, processing of those perceived ideas, and evaluation of the consequences of his or her possible choices in view of the higher order spiritual principles, purposes, or being(s) held in a superordinate position, possibly in a position of ultimate concern. Thus, a person does not experience spiritual struggle or solve one by merely recognising options but by working through a process of assessing what they might mean within his or her overarching meaning system.

This leads to the concept that every person perceives his/her religion, or lack of one based on how he/she views the surrounding environment. We are all different, hence our religious experiences are different – not right or wrong. Maybe we should be more tolerant of others’ views – who they put on a pedestal and why. If we try to alter this our actions could have far-reaching effects.

The word spirituality stems from a “Pauline neologism” used in 1 Corinthians 2:14–15 and elsewhere in the Apostle Paul’s letters. He was not contrasting spiritual with material, or good with evil, but rather “the person under the influence of the Spirit of God” (pneumatikos) with the “merely natural human being” (psychikos anthrôpos).

The contrast was essentially between “two ways of life or attitudes to life.” The meaning of terms is related to the Latin religio from the third century B.C. to the mid-18th century A.D., when the English term religion acquired its major modern meanings. Beginning in the time of Cicero (106–46 B.C.), religio denoted piously and meticulously offered state-supervised acts of public worship of the Roman gods. Over the next 15 centuries, the term generally retained its core meaning of public ritual.

In English since the 16th century, religion has been widely understood as denoting (1) a particular system of faith and worship and/or (2) the human reverential recognition of a higher or unseen power. These meanings have been fairly stable since 1750, and appear to have clear parallels in other European languages. However, people have not agreed on how to define religion. At the start of the 20th century, psychologist James Leuba identified 48 distinct definitions, and the profusion of definitions has abated neither in psychology nor in the larger culture.

Toward the close of the 20th century, a new, more restricted meaning of religion emerged. In this new usage, which is increasingly common but far from universal, religion connotes especially the organised and institutional components of faith traditions, as opposed to the more inward and personal sides, often now referred to as spirituality.