We Bloom Myth
“Either everything is sacred, or nothing is sacred.”
I'd been antisocial all summer. Half-feral in this apartment, losing my mind in slow motion, pacing back and forth. So I decided to go IRL into the wilderness of human life and see what's happening out there in the universe.
There's a temple near the river where I'm staying in Thailand. One of the local portals. I thought I'd go sit near it and tune myself to the frequency of the great unknowable thing.
I hired a guide to drive me there. I had to wear a helmet. I had also gotten extremely stoned beforehand, which made the ride itself feel like some initiatory passage through the screaming machinery of Bangkok.
Every intersection felt like a negotiation with death. By the time we arrived, I had already left my body twice.
Then I walked into the temple and felt more like I walked into a fever dream. There was a little Ganesh. A rabbit taking a selfie. Jesus standing above the scene with Buddha and Mary. Punk-rock saints with mohawks cutting demons free from their chains while angels gathered around and Jesus and Buddha looked down like they had wandered into the wrong dimension.
Batman was there.
An Egyptian sphinx. An actual fairy. Two dragon lovers holding hands, their bodies wrapped together in some reptilian eternity. Pinocchio. Mickey Mouse with boobs, giving a thumbs-up.
And Che Guevara, smoking a cigarette, carrying a gun, carved into the side of a Buddhist temple.
I love this place so much.
Standing there, in the middle of this impossible parliament of symbols, I became convinced of something:
Either everything is sacred, or nothing is sacred.
/maxresdefault.jpg)
Because why do human beings keep producing these forms? Why do we make gods, superheroes, demons, saints, winged beings, cosmic lovers, tricksters, monsters, martyrs, and enlightened men beneath trees?
Maybe imagination is less like invention and more like secretion. The bee produces honey. The flower produces perfume. The human nervous system produces myth.
We bloom symbols.
Something inside us is always trying to push these forms out of us.
Again and again, across cultures that never met, the same psychic weather appears.
That is saying something about us.
I don't think human beings know how to look at the world directly. We look through language, memory, fear, desire, myth. We never encounter raw reality.
And maybe human beings produce stories because that is what consciousness does when it encounters the impossible fact of its own existence.
We look out at the world and do not see something mundane. We see a mystery. We ask why anything exists at all.
And the rational mind tries to tidy the situation up. It gives names to things. It explains chemical reactions, biological mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, orbital systems. All useful and correct, probably.
But none of it explains why there is something rather than nothing. None of it explains why existence feels the way it feels from the inside.
Think of everything the universe had to do for this one moment to happen. The stars had to ignite. Galaxies had to collide. Suns had to explode and scatter their guts through space. Carbon had to learn how to dream. Oceans had to become nervous systems. Animals had to crawl from the water and begin asking questions.
“A person becomes the universe looking back at itself.”
And then suddenly here you are, watching a YouTube video, while I sit in front of a temple in Thailand with Che Guevara smoking a cigarette on the wall.
It is absurd. It is completely ridiculous. And somehow it feels holy.
We are blooming, and myth is simply the kind of flower we are.
I don't know whether another animal watches the sunset and feels eternity pressing against its chest. But we do. And that is strange.
Whatever is wrong, whatever little catastrophe I am dragging behind me, whatever obligations and confusions have captured my attention, something beautiful is still taking place. And I am inside it.
That is why myth happens. That is why poetry appears. That is why you can look into the eyes of someone you love and suddenly understand the entire origin of religion.
For one second, the ordinary thing is revealed as impossible.
A person becomes the universe looking back at itself. And no rational explanation can contain it.
The more we try to make the world purely rational, the more we amputate ourselves from the thing that makes life worth enduring. We need irrationality.
The courage to stand before existence and say this makes no sense!! Hallelujah, I love you.
Don't listen to me, though. I'm just some guy traveling around on the internet, getting stoned before visiting temples and nearly dying on the back of a motorcycle. Do not trust the messenger. I'm only asking you to go out into the world and have the courage to say: What is this?
I have no real updates for you, except that the big unknowable thing is still happening.
And I hope you're paying attention.