The Promised Land Project: Thinking Outside of the Modern Mindset: Differentiating between Religion and the Mythos

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Thinking Outside of the Modern Mindset: Differentiating between Religion and the Mythos

The modern mindset often fails to differentiate between the mythos and religion. Religion is an institution whereas the mythos is about the collective imagination. In a previous blog, we established a working definition of myth as the stories a society tells about itself. All religions I respect because they've evolved over time and have withstood the test of time. All religions, as much as I can tell, promote individual spiritual development. Yet certain aspects of religion can be stuck in the past. For example, I take issue with the coercive, shaming elements in a religion because it suppresses the spirit, or inspiration, and ultimately becomes an obstacle towards true progress.

While the priest may instruct you, didactically, to love your neighbor as you love yourself, the poet can help enable you to feel it, or inspire it, poetically, through art and other means by invoking the collective identity of a culture, or transcending culture, invoking the human spirit. In regards to religion, the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the revitalization process as follows, excerpted from The Power of Myth:

The world changes, the religions have to be transformed….It’s in the religions; all the religions are true – for their time. If you can find what the truth is and separate it from the temporal inflection, just be your same old religion into a new set of metaphors, and you’ve got it.

Yet the objective of the Promised Land Project is not to revitalize a religion but the moral culture as a whole in the modern democratic society. Rather than opening a big can of worms that religion can be, we strive to establish ourselves in the realm of poetry.