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We cannot understand ourselves in material terms, but only by mythologizing ourselves. And we can only do so by first mythologizing our society, environment, and history — all self definition is relational and builds upon what has come before.

There are two ways of understanding another person. The first way is to mythologize them, and to understand what they mean to you. The second way is to discover how they mythologize themselves.

All people draw on myth to understand the world, and manifest archetypal behaviour. The quest is not to create myth where it does not exist, but rather to articulate it, draw it out of the subconscious, and in doing so develop both control and acceptance.

There are countless moments in each day that never enter our long term memory: idle thoughts, flashes of emotion, even absences of consciousness. How many of these moments constitute suffering (in the Buddhist tradition)? And how many of these moments are experiences of the transcendent?

It may or may not be that there is something that it is ‘like’ to be a bat. However, it is evidently true that there is something that it is like to be a person wondering what it is like to be a bat. Would Saint Anselm have argued that this itself is evidence of ‘bathood’? And what should we make of such an argument?

The beginning of a lifelong journey into the transcendent is to systematise the process, to find some regular method of approach. The culmination of this journey is precisely the opposite — to cast away the ladders we placed, and instead to simply appear at the destination by some unknown process, completely absent of thought or navigational will.

The ease of forming a seemingly (or farcically) wise aphorism is itself a clue to the nature of wisdom. One may seem a Nietzsche or a Wilde simply by observing a truth, and then the equal truth of its negation, and allowing the reader to perform all the actual work of reconciliation. Both author and audience miss the real wisdom therein; that the hallmark of the transcendent is this very resistance to our attempts to understand it, and our true pursuit is to rest in that moment when we have first read the aphorism. The later moment, when we feel we have now ‘understood’ the sentiment and gleefully abandon it, is a red herring in the truest sense — sustenance, true, but ultimately a diversion.

All useful myths and images are simple, in the same way that a dam is fundamentally simple. Too complex an idea will invite a flood of associations into our thoughts, drowning out the original concept. Only an uncomplicated myth can be held firmly in the mind’s eye, to the exclusion of all others, while our senses and perceptions and actions learn to play the role the myth demands of us.

The art of thinking in myth is timeless. In adopting a myth or symbol as your own, or contemplating one, you feel how your peers through history must have felt; a seedling struggling in the rain is as emblematic of life to us as it was to the Romans.