The Ocean of Being 🌅

Published 14 days ago • 3 min read • Consciousness, Myths & Dragons, Philosophy of Living

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 108

My main notion of the world in a nutshell: Consciousness allows us to compress infinite complexity (the quantum soup around you) into something navigable (a room with furniture). We do not experience raw reality, but an abstraction on a useful scale. It’s built to guide our actions - by evolution, the greatest designer of the world. Here are some fun features:

The world appears to us not just as a place of things, but as an arena of action with a narrative structure (get out of my head, Jordan).
The world is a participatory process, we are observer and creator at once.
The world we navigate is based on three eternal questions: Where am I? Where should I go? How do I get there?
The world built from our answers to those questions is the ever-evolving story of our lives.

The last point is at the center of therapy as well: We live in a story, and either we make conscious choices about that story, or we inhabit whatever we have absorbed by chance so far.

I also think this is a central aspect of the modern mental health crisis. We were supplied with stabilizing stories by our communities throughout human history. Not saying we should bring all of them back, but it’s important to realize the impact of their absence.

“Every individual seeks—indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane—to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience.”
— Rollo May (The Cry For Myth)

Or in other neat words from You Will Not Survive the AI Age if You Don’t Have a Personal Myth:

It is highly likely that your guiding values differ from some of your neighbors’ or colleagues’ values. Well, that would be inconceivable in societies of the past where everyone shared the same guiding myth.

However, the lack of collective myths doesn’t mean our situation needs to be tragic.

In the past, people had the benefit of order in their consciousness being established from the outside. But this also meant a lack of authenticity and individual freedom. In most cases, a person’s entire life was designed by someone else.

Today, we have the responsibility but also the opportunity to direct our own lives and write our own stories.

I’ve been consciously tinkering with my own world model for a while now, and I can testify to the resilience it brings. But so far, trying to grasp the basic dynamics of consciousness has been a very technical endeavor for me. Ironically, it has taught me that stories are the best way to convey knowledge about experiential mechanisms.

That’s why I started building The Realm, a narrative archive to interact with my personal mythology. It feels like world-building for a fantasy book, only it isn’t about a made-up world - it’s about my world.

Here are some features I found of creating a well-founded personal mythology:

Offers stability during crises (by making pain meaningful)
Gives life direction and hope (by putting something at the top of the value hierarchy, acting as both aspiration and judge)
Cures nihilism (by incorporating the mystery of consciousness as a central miracle of the world)
Connects to an old form of truth (without denying any modern scientific truths)
Explains fundamental psychological dynamics (by combining validated knowledge with ancient symbols)

Today, I opened the gates to the Ocean of Being, the first of currently six areas in my mythology. I will keep you posted about the process. Check out The Realm if you’re curious.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “In the faraway song the cold sea sung. In the calm whispers of winds afar. It lies, calls and awaits” -Insomnium (Song of the Week 👇)

🎧 Song of the Week: Insomnium - The Primeval Dark

The Primeval Dark

Insomnium

PREVIEW

Now I’d love to hear from you!

Did something in my writing catch your attention?
Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
Or is there a question that’s been on your mind related to these topics?

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.