Myth: The Origins of Learning

In The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of Soul in Corporate America David Whyte (see also Crossing The Unknown Sea) reminds us that, "Learning, partnership and the ability to adapt are at the core of life, at work or at home." And these capacities for living are grounded against the mythic, the place where the soul resides. Throughout this intensely terrifying and yet ultimately compassionate book arises a persepective on learning that is essential to embrace with heart and mind. Many of the entries here in EDN have taken on an orientation toward this mythic energy that drives us. This energy points toward the origins and primal scream of learning itself...

If learning is one of humankind's greatest resources, and it is, then it must have its origins in "opening us to a mature appreciation of the hidden and often dangerous inner seas where our passions and our creativity lie waiting." Although David is not referring directly to learning here, I believe this statement captures an essential and all too often ignored aspect of learning. Much of our time spent in learning by the way of education or training pulls us away from this unavoidable pull in our hearts, and in doing so confines our attention to that which is imposed.

In referring to Joseph Campbell, Whyte builds on the core idea that, "If you do not live out your place in the mythic pattern consciously, the myth will simply live you, against your will." For example, later in the book Whyte quotes a poem written by a woman in one of his seminars:

Ten years ago,
I turned my face for a moment...

And it became my life.

The courage to reach so deep into one's heart and share it in a corporate setting is remarkable. It is not the act of turning away that leads to regret, but the realization, often sudden and much later in life, that we did in fact turn away, not from the world, but from ourselves - "I turned my face for a moment." In fact it may be that we leave ourselves behind in order to join the world we have been conditioned to believe in. I don't know whether or not this anonymous woman had read Dante's Commedia, but there is a striking parallel:

In the middle of the road of my life
I awoke in a dark wood
where the true way was wholly lost

Pink Floyd's On the Turning Away echoes this sensibility:

No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?

Here the question mark is the key. This is a song that was written in the midst of the dark wood and it serves as a startling reminder for the need to turn and face the coldness inside. In other words, we must open ourselves "to a mature appreciation of the hidden and often dangerous inner seas where our passions and our creativity lie waiting." If we have turned our face, we must turn it back and face what is now there.

This turning back is intimately linked to silence. Not silence in the sense of quietly meditating on some isolated mountaintop, but the silence of turning off the world so that we embrace the feeling of being alone in it - so we can hear ourself:

Whatever our difficulties, learning to sustain this inner quite is perhaps one of the more harrowing experiences the human soul can go through in its quest for deepening. -David Whyte

This is not unlike the idea of stopping the world as described by Don Juan via Carlos Castaneda. In that silence, where the world is turned off, we face a universal - and that universal is death.

And the intensity of Peter Gabriel's Fourteen Black Paintings echoes:

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
From the people come the power
From this power come the change

The deep sense of mythic energy in this music is enlightening. Peter is a life artist, a soul that is respectful but not afraid to penetrate the "dangerous inner seas where our passions and our creativity lie waiting." This kind of musical artistry is rare in an age when so called "stars" sing endlessly about frivolous things they clearly possess no meaningful sensibility of. But the commercial genocide of musical artistry has thankfully not been fully successful in in its pursuit artistic cleansing. There are those that stand apart, and Peter Gabriel is one of them.

"From the pain" can be seen as a metaphor for the face that had once turned away but has now realized the dark wood. And it is a terrifyng silence that immediately weighs in - the pain of what we have done in the face of what our heart tells us we should be doing - the silence of facing ourselves - on the turning back - the world stopped - the presence of that universal companion, death.

Or, as David Whyte wonderfully puts it, "Above all, he [i.e. - Fionn] learns how to see, to listen, and to feel." This is not unlike Aldous Huxley's call to to turn back in Island, Attention. Here and now.

Yet against this immense power of the mythic soul is a world which proceeds under neurotic ideas about progress - a progress in which we sacrifice ourselves to routine. And the real insanity of all this is that we, as in the socially acceptable we, expect people not to become burnt out, angry, mentally ill, violent, depressed or suicidal. While reconnecting ourselves to the heart aroused, to the underlying energy of the mythic in humankind, perhaps we can provide some degree of respite and retrieve a sense of progress that is more distinctly humane.

Learning does not equate to an education about pathways to bliss, it is unavoidably immersed in it.