Written June 24, 2006

David Hume says we are bundles of perceptions, structure and convention guide us. Alan Watts says we follow logos, defining, labeling trying to separate to understand things. Mythos however brings us into harmony with flow and reality. The Great Stream. The rapture as Joseph Campbell would call it. Mythos is a medium for us to touch the divine. In almost every mythology including the bible when a mortal asks to look upon the face of the divine he is told he will certainly perish, but the divine reveals itself in indirect ways and so a mortal may withstand some physical connection and not die. Rumi the Muslim poet said a story is like water in that it is heated for a bath. We only touch the water, not the fire that heats it; therefore water is a medium for interacting with the fire but not getting burned. In physics we study the particles that make up life. We see patterns, flux and no defining lines between us and the sky, us and the animals, us and the desk and chair you sit at. Everything in constant motion. We continually denote things, giving them words, symbols so that the thing and the word become interchangeable. Connotation allows us to see reality in-between the lines and all the things going along with the word we have given something. So it is impossible to encounter reality, which is everything not just, sectioned off into one thing through denotation/logos we can only reach it through mythos/connotations.