Building the Cathedral | 2. Drafting
Learning to Commit to Meaning
“A pile of rocks ceases to be a pile of rocks when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.” —Antoine Saint-Expury
FOUNDATIONS
The quest for myth usually begins after one has experienced a loss of meaning. A state of unquestioned assurance, orientation, and motivation is lost. Only in retrospect can it be seen that you had been living a myth, living mythologically—and that this was what had given your life meaning. Without it, you feel unmoored, adrift, without a core and without direction.
Jung spoke of his own crisis of meaning as a period of “inner uncertainty,” “disorientation,” and the feeling of being “suspended in mid-air”—all commonly-attested sensations. Compare Nietzsche’s description of manic disorientation after announcing the death of God:
Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?[i]
Or Tolstoy’s description of his crisis:
I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, and that I had nothing left to hold on to…[ii]
The loss of meaning occasioned by a loss of myth is experienced as a dissolution of foundations. A life that was once a coherent whole has been shattered into unrelated fragments without a common reference point. The single, fixed mark according to which everything else was related and assessed has disappeared, and now there is only confusion, radical relativity, and vertigo.
Of course, not everyone has this experience. While some undergo the crisis of meaning as a true rupture—a catastrophic break from myth to meaninglessness, with a clear “before” and “after”—for others there is no such fissure. A true grounding in myth was simply never a part of their experience to begin with. For a growing number of people, life has always been just a series of fragments, a progression of moments without any real thread connecting them. You did this, then you did that; maybe someday you’ll do this other thing; then, you’ll die. That’s basically what your biography amounts to. It may sound grim, but hey, that’s just how it goes. The only unity tying things together is the fact that the same bundle of atoms (i.e., “you”) has been experiencing them. Beyond that, there is no cohesion, order, or purpose to it all.
For the increasing number of people raised without any myth, the defining experience isn’t vertigo, then, but nausea; their prophet isn’t Nietzsche but Sartre:
Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.[iii]
Either way, vertigo or nausea, a loss of myth or a lifelong deprivation of it, the recognized reality amounts to the same thing: life is meaningless. Nothing gives it direction, nothing ties together the disparate strands into some larger design. Everything is fragments without place, pieces without a part to play or a whole to give it all purpose.
How, then, can the fragments become a whole?
This is precisely the first and fundamental task that personal mythmaking addresses. Dan McAdams writes:
What is a personal myth? First and foremost, it is a special kind of story that each of us naturally constructs to bring together the different parts of ourselves and our lives into a purposeful and convincing whole. …We attempt, with our story, to make a compelling aesthetic statement. A personal myth is an act of imagination that is a patterned integration of our remembered past, perceived present, and anticipated future.[iv]
Here McAdams relates two key features of a personal myth: We might call them the What and the How.
The What is, to reiterate, a special kind of story, which brings together the different parts of ourselves and our lives into a purposeful and convincing whole: a patterned integration of our past, present, and future. That is: an understanding of your life that sees not just a string of episodes, but one unified narrative—a driving purpose behind all of the important events, and not just chance or accident.
The How is in the verbs: construct, attempt, make—through an act of imagination. Note that these are not passive behaviors, but active, intentional, willed. The myth of your life cannot be imparted to you or found out through some kind of analytical or reasoning process. It is not a fact you encounter—it is a story you craft. Understanding and accepting this idea is crucial. It lies at the very heart of the How of personal myth. So let me say a bit more about it.
FINDING THE PLOT: CHOOSING MEANING
A personal myth can only develop after an individual chooses to see the events of their life not just as action but as a plot that connects those events and renders them meaningful. Without this conscious decision, nothing will happen. Adjusting your orientation to life is the first and most pivotal step in the process. You can’t hear the music if you’re tuned in to the wrong frequency. What’s needed, first and foremost then, is a shift in perspective.
When I was a child I loved to look at books of optical illusions. Sometimes, I’d get stuck on one. I’d stare at it for what seemed like forever, but I still couldn’t see anything. Then, all of a sudden, something would click. What I’d been seeing as a duck the whole time suddenly became a rabbit! Just like that. Nothing in the image itself had changed—only my perspective on it.
Adopting a meaningful attitude to your life is something like that. Nothing about the facts changes—only one’s subjective relation to those facts.
For example, say you lose your job and are deeply disappointed, then get another job which you like more. Is this how you tell the story? Or do you say that you were meant to leave your old job so that you could find the new? That you were supposed to end up where you did? The facts are the same, only your orientation to them is different. In one telling, the events are simply a disconnected series; in the other, they are integrated, one leading to the next along a path, with the positive outcome as the meaning of it all.
Chances are, you probably know someone who looks at their life like this. Chances are, however, that those people are rather naïve. They assume, without question or doubt, that that’s just how the mechanics of the world really work. For them, seeing their lives as leading, by means of some hidden design, from one thing to the next is the consequence of a rather unsophisticated and uncritical worldview. Perhaps they are a fundamentalist whose hidden design is arranged by a personal anthropocentric God. Or they are a New Age type whose hidden design is arranged by “the Universe.” Such folks are indeed living in a myth, but they have never experienced a loss of it. They do not understand the experience of meaninglessness, either as a product of disillusion or deprivation, vertigo or nausea. For them, meaning is naïve and instinctual. It is something “out there,” a force like gravity, that affects the events of their lives.
From the standpoint of true psychological development and personal and spiritual growth, this naiveté is a weakness, not a strength. By remaining ignorant of the condition of meaninglessness, they remain unconscious of the true nature of meaning. Ultimately, naïve meaning is not the same thing as what I aim to describe: meaning as choice, as a willed decision to see the events of one’s life as purposeful. Such a process does not simply seek to regress back to a state of blissful mythic naiveté, but to move forward, through conscious awareness, towards an even deeper connection with myth and meaning. The crisis of meaning is thus a necessary step on the path toward this fuller integration.
The very fact that you’re reading this book suggests you are no stranger to that crisis. As a consequence, you are in the position to appreciate the true nature of meaning. Having stepped outside of myth, you have gained the vantage necessary to see it for what it is. Unfortunately, such disillusionment is where too many end their search. The prospect of somehow regaining a sense of mythic meaning after critical awareness seems impossible. As you will see, though, this is not only possible, but necessary. It all begins—as so many things do—with that shift in perspective.
For a personal myth to develop, an intention must first be set: you must decide to orient yourself towards meaning, to choose meaning. This is the crucial initiatory movement, the metanoia (shift in mindset) that sets your consciousness on a new path. From a condition of meaninglessness, one chooses to affirm meaning in their experience—not, however, as something encountered, but as something constructed.
Adrift in meaninglessness, it is the will that breaks the impasse, not the reason.The consequence of this is that meaning, if it is to be found at all, will need to be found subjectively, initiated through an act of the will.
COMMITTED VS. CONVINCED
Of course, reflectively choosing to see meaning in your life is not the same thing as just immediately seeing it as meaningful. Nor will it feel the same. Simply asserting that your life is a meaningful whole does not suddenly change your perception of it. There is no sudden “aha!” of seeing the duck as a rabbit. In short, choosing to see your life as meaningful will not immediately mean you find the idea convincing.
Etymologically, the meaning of convincing is to be “overpowered.” One has, as it were, no option but to assent to some idea or proposition—you are simply convinced. Try as you might, your mind simply won’t allow you to assert that 2 + 2 = 5. Subjected to the proof, you submit to the force of the argument, and, by compulsion, accept. This is the kind of truth that scientists and many philosophers aim at—logical or axiomatic truth, following clear lines of deductive reasoning that lead, ineluctably and unavoidably, to a single, incontrovertible answer.
But this is not the only kind of truth. There are other realities that require bringing subjectivity to bear on determining the truth. Some things require a certain kind of subjective participation to become real.
Imagine, for example, that a pair of identical twins has been signed up by their parents to play on a hockey team. One twin loves hockey, but the other hates it. Who will be a better hockey player? Physically speaking, both are equally capable. However, an individual’s passion for a task will obviously influence their proficiency. Interest, too, is a cause. Here it’s the subjective state that proves the determining factor. The psychologist can sometimes answer what the physicist is blind to.
As the pragmatist philosopher William James has noted, our inner orientations and affects do not just respond to truths, but actively shape and condition them. The subjective influences the objective. Take, for example, the question, Do you like me or not? “Whether you do or not,” says James,
depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt … ten to one your liking never comes. …The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable of other sorts… [Man’s] faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification. …There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.[v]
So, examining your seemingly incoherent and meaningless life, you choose to assert, “All of this coheres; all of it is meaningful.” But you are not convinced. You are, however, committed. The experience of meaning, you see, is not in the thing, but in yourself. After a loss of naïve meaning, meaning may not be convincing, but it can be regained as a commitment.
This is true, first, because the proper locus of meaning needs to be grasped: it is an inner, psychic condition, not an objective fact. To see it as something objective is to engage in an act of projection: the psychological act of assigning an inner state to an outer object.
Projection is a very common psychological process. We do it all the time, and always unconsciously. For example, perhaps you’ve worked on a home improvement project that isn’t going so well. You struggle with your wrench to tighten a bolt that just won’t tighten. Again and again you try, but completely without success. Finally, face red, sweat beading, you reach a boiling point. Exasperated, you hurl the wrench down on the ground and stomp on it repeatedly, cursing. In reality, of course, this isn’t the wrench’s fault. But you’ve projected your inner psychic turmoil outward, onto an object. My inner frustration is experienced as This damn wrench! The two become confused, and, for a moment at least, the wrench is what’s bad, not your feelings.
Powerful sentiments very often tend to get caught up in projections. Think, for example, how people relate to a spot where a bad accident occurred. Even if nothing about the place is inherently dangerous, they may pass by it warily, feel “creeped out” by it, or tell people to avoid it. Inner anxieties are thus unwittingly projected outward onto the object, with the object treated as though it were the source and cause of the reaction.
Or think about how people relate to their country’s flag. Though just a symbol, when “desecrated,” it is not uncommon to see people act as though their flag somehow contains their country’s essence. If sufficiently roused, people can be willing to die for a flag as though it were their country—to die for a projection.
The same is true in naïve experiences of meaning. The inner, psychic sense of meaning is projected out of the subject and onto objective reality, as though meaning were something to be found “out there.” It’s not that I make sense and significance out of what occurs, it’s that God/The Universe has arranged things to be significant. It’s not that I feel a sense of meaning, it’s that life is meaningful.
After disillusionment, one experiences an understanding that this is not the case, that meaning is not so discovered “out there.” Such a disillusionment can be occasioned by any number of events, but usually occurs when one attempts to apply objective and rational investigative techniques to their presumed “objects” of meaning. A sense of vocation, one’s tenets of faith, the existence of God—such things turn out to be mere phantoms when considered through a purely objective lens. That is, they are not “out there” to be discovered. That is because they were never objective to begin with, but actually inner, subjective experiences projected out.
Since our horizons have changed so drastically, from those formed by myth to those formed by science, subjective and objective realities have become sharply divided. The objective frame has become the default and dominant frame for modern Western people; subjective realities are, by comparison, considered less real, as merely subjective. As a result, accepting that meaning is not objective is experienced as akin to saying that meaning is not real.
This is where choosing meaning enters in. By requiring the activation of the will—which is to say a conscious focus of the individual’s inner psychic energy—the experience of meaning is returned to its properly-recognized domain: the inner, subjective domain. The illusion of projection is broken and the source of meaning is correctly identified as coming from “in here,” not “out there.” The psyche is thus put into a new and more appropriate relationship to the apprehension of meaning. The faulty foundations of meaning built upon projection, which have disintegrated during the meaning crisis, are now rebuilt afresh on firmer ground. The psyche thus finds its ground within itself, not in illusory projections “out there.”
Once this is established, the second consequence of this volitional affirmation of meaning begins to take effect: namely, that the experience of meaning is a case where “a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.” If I am dead-set against liking someone, there’s no amount of kindness or flattery in the world that they could employ which would change my mind about them. The hypothetical future scenario of us being friends depends entirely upon me first opening myself up to the possibility of my liking them. In a similar way, if I am psychologically committed to the idea that life is meaningless, that everything is just a consequence of chance and necessity, then I have already chosen how my existence will be experienced. Indeed, it is very easy to be convinced that life is meaningless precisely because the presumption is that meaning is a fact like other facts waiting to be discovered (or not discovered) “out there.” When it is inevitably not found “out there,” my presumptions compel me and I am convinced: life is meaningless.
By asserting meaning through a willful orientation, one can still be convinced that life is meaningless even as one becomes committed to seeing it as meaningful. In fact, this is the first stage you will need to inhabit after choosing meaning and beginning the task of developing your personal myth. The key here is the effective navigation of a new attitude toward meaning and the world, a new orientation to your life.
Because there is an apparent tension between your objective convictions and your subjective commitments, you will need an attitude that can accommodate both realities. Such an orientation thus requires holding a “both/and” perspective. Through this perspective, both the objective-truth mindset and the subjective-truth mindset can coexist. This can be done if you learn to experience things in an “as if” mode. That is, if you can learn to experience them as if they were meaningful, as if they were connected, etc. While this may sound challenging, even paradoxical, it’s actually quite natural.
It’s called play.
PLAYING TOWARDS MYTH
Both the objective and the subjective mindsets have something crucial to offer us. We need both—the one to keep us from thinking our unconscious projections are “out there,” the other to maintain their reality “in here.” It is finding a workable relationship between these sometimes-incommensurable frameworks that becomes the challenge. As Jung experienced when he allowed powerful psychic material to well up from within, madness is never far from mythic meaning. As he observed, “the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient” is also “the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which had vanished from our rational age.” How do we break the dam of that mythopoeic imagination without losing ourselves in our own fantasy worlds? As D. Stephenson Bond reflects in his book Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life:
Objective consciousness has freed us from the tyranny of projection. Will it also forever imprison the imagination? That is the modern dilemma. With too little objective consciousness, we live in the tyranny of the unconscious—the loss of soul that makes us crazy. We are lost in a complete identification with the object. Yet with too much objective consciousness, we live the tyranny of objectivity—the loss of soul that makes us neurotic, for the loss of imagination is also the loss of soul. When you can’t feel the tug in your psyche toward a [magic] stone, something essential is lost: a connection, a sense of meaning, an imaginative spark. The touch of myth.[vi]
How, then, are we to regain the touch of myth without losing touch with objective reality? As McAdams suggested, the best way to engage this mindset is through an “act of imagination.” That is, we must learn, as Jung did on the beach, to play.
Play activates the infinite possibilities of the imagination within a set frame. It carves out of objective consciousness a demarcated zone, a special space or field for fantasy. When someone playing says that they’re Superman, we don’t worry that they’ve slipped out of reality into a psychotic state or lost all sense of reality. We know, and they know, that this playful attitude is operating with half an eye open to objective reality. They are Superman—but only within the field of play carved out of an objective reality that continues to exist in the background, and to which they can return as necessary. When applied to our lives, Bond calls this kind of playful mindset “symbolic consciousness”:
Symbolic consciousness…participates in the subjective process of fantasy while at the same time maintaining awareness of the process as an objective, autonomous factor. In other words, it lives in a myth while knowing it as a myth; it experiences the fantasy process neither as “reality” nor “illusion,” but rather as meaning. …The trick of symbolic consciousness is in allowing yourself to maintain the distance—I am aware that I’m pretending, gaming, imagining—while at the same time preserving participation.[vii]
Symbolic consciousness is unlike the fundamentalist’s and New Ager’s naïve engagements with mythic thinking mentioned earlier; but it is also unlike the critical, objective mindset that causes such naiveté to collapse into meaninglessness. The reason? Symbolic consciousness is volitional—one chooses to engage in it and is thus aware of the framework.
By contrast, naiveté isn’t chosen; meaning is simply accepted as a given (i.e., one believes the projection). Critical objectivity is also not chosen; one is convinced by its evidence and arguments—even, perhaps, while kicking and screaming—to abandon mythic thinking (i.e., one recognizes the projection as such and rejects it as illusory). Symbolic consciousness, however, chooses to engage in mythic thinking, but in a knowing state of play. One acts as if it were true. Bond writes:
As in a ball game, “I” have to assent and participate if this imaginative game is to develop. I have to “allow” my ego to play, assent to the fantasy that forms, and play as if the game were real—as if three strikes really means I’m out, and an imaginary line really means fair and foul. …You have to allow yourself to “get into” the game as if it is important. Then you enter symbolic consciousness. If you let go, you enjoy the game.[viii]
Critical awareness thus remains—it simply does not run the show. Recall Jung’s critical self-awareness as, reconnecting with his inner child, he played with stones. “Now, really, what are you about?” it demanded. “You are building a small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!” It’s easy to imagine him giving up right then and there, heading home embarrassed with himself and never mentioning the episode again. Instead, Jung heard this reflective critique from himself—but continued developing his myth anyway.
In playing towards myth, one must choose to believe in the face of disbelief. You choose to believe.
While that might sound like a paradox, it really isn’t as hard as it seems. We do it every time we watch a movie or, well, a play! For an audience, the so-called “suspension of disbelief” is crucial for the drama’s magic to work. No one needs to be told how to do this; it just comes naturally to us.
Such an attitude, then, is not just some tortured mechanism for disenchanted moderns to find their way back to myth. Rather, according to Joseph Campbell, something like this mindset lies at the very core of mythic engagement. For example, in many traditional or tribal cultures, special festivals are held, during which masked dancers celebrate mythic rites. It is understood that, during these dances, the participants do not just act like the gods and goddesses, but actually become them in some meaningful way. Campbell says of their serious play:
there has been a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic is that of “make believe”—“as if.” …Such a highly played game of “as if” frees our mind and spirit…from the bondage of reason… [A] principle of release operates throughout the series by way of the alchemy of an “as if”; and that, through this, the impact of so-called “reality” upon the psyche is transubstantiated. The play state and the rapturous seizures sometimes deriving from it represent, therefore, a step rather toward than away from the ineluctable truth; and belief—acquiescence in a belief that is not quite belief—is the first step toward the deepened participation…[ix]
Campbell refers to this as a process of “self-induced belief,” and it remains the way back to living water in our spiritual desert. Through play, one can discover a “second naivete,” in which the power of myth can again be allowed to work without a loss of conscious awareness about objective reality. Moreover, such play states can actually move us closer to reality, properly understood—a comprehensive reality beyond just lop-sided objectivity. Play opens us to bigger truths.
It is within such an imaginative and creative state that one must cast their gaze on the raw material of their experience and seek the myth in it. Like a kid gazing up at the clouds and seeing pictures, look back at who you’ve been and what you’ve done and seek the bigger picture. Let it take shape…
What is the story of your life? What are its decisive moments? Who are its main characters? What are its themes, its motifs, its potent symbols? So gazing, all that you are now comes into play. Your life is your canvas. And even failures, losses, and disasters have their significance. To become who you are, nothing was for naught. Even the worst betrayals and wounds—suffered, or inflicted—everything, through story, is redeemed, insofar as it communicates who you’ve become and marks the stages on your way. You stand today on a path you have been walking your whole life, much of it unwittingly. You were destined to be here, and it is now clear that your experience conspired to put you exactly where you are—in order to get you where you’re going.
So where is that? Your story has a destination it’s been driving at—which means you have a goal, an aim, a purpose. What is it? When you hit upon an answer to this question—one you like, one that works for you, that speaks to the warp and weft of your experience and directs it toward some goal—you’ll have put your finger on your personal myth.
Seen in this light, in the light of mythic meaning, nothing is wasted, nothing unnecessary. Everything matters. In this way, one can feel what Nietzsche meant when he wrote:
Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through—false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes—into your goal, with nothing left over.[x]
Try it.
Imagine purpose in your life. Pretend, if only for a moment, that things don’t “just happen,” but happen “for a reason.” That reason is you—who you are and where you’re headed. Make believe that, like a novel or a movie, there’s a plot you’re playing out—a running thread that strings together the many varied beads of your experience into a work of art, a “compelling aesthetic statement.” You didn’t know it then, but the events that set you on your course were laden with significance. As in a novel, there’s symbolism and foreshadowing—once you know what to look for. As in a great story, there’s a design—once you’ve gained the proper perspective on it (“only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together”).
Most books on personal myth include exercises to help you do just this, since the process can take time and require some guidance. For this, different writers employ different methods. These include writing prompts (Keen and Valley-Fox; Feinstein and Krippner; Slattery), biographical interviews (McAdams), guided meditations (Feinstein and Krippner), mask-making (Larsen), studying/meditating on traditional myths (Campbell, Chalquist), dream incubation/analysis (Feinstein and Krippner), and others. Such methods are diverse, but all alike in requiring that you activate your imagination through a playful state. Ultimately, though, while such books and exercises may guide you, no one can tell you what your personal myth is. Only you can do that.
LIVING MYTH
Once you’ve drafted your personal myth—fleshed out its narrative arc, hit upon its themes and motifs, envisioned a direction or goal to which it aims—there remains a final step. You must live it. Or, better put, you must live into it. Meaning is an orientation, a temperament, a proclivity, not just some creed or fact you passively accept. It is a way of life. Living your myth thus requires continual participation, always choosing the significant interpretation, always acting “as if” your myth is true. It means directing your behavior and activities in service of the end to which you’ve chosen to believe your life aims.
Like all activities regularly tended to, such things do not stay challenging for long. In time, if diligently performed, these choices will become habit—habit, as the saying goes, becomes character, and character becomes destiny. That is, from your commitment, a new sense of conviction can develop. Will and experience so fuse and inform one another, that myth and reality, the subjective and objective, harmonize. The dichotomy is synthesized, and only wholeness remains.
It is to this reclaimed sense of wholeness and meaning that personal myth leads. In the end, if you are able to shift your perspective and choose meaning, construct a story that integrates the different parts of your life into a purposeful and convincing whole through a play-like act of imagination, and live into that story as if it were indeed true, you will have succeeded in recentering yourself in myth.
Specifically, personal myth at this level succeeds in fulfilling myth’s psychological function, one of the four functions of myth mentioned above. Campbell writes that the goal of the psychological function is “the centering and unfolding of the individual in integrity,”[xi] carrying them through the stages of their life development in such a way as “to harmonize and deepen the psyche.”[xii] Or, as summarized earlier: to center the individual, carry them through the stages of development, and harmonize them with their world.
A working personal myth does this by rebuilding the foundations of a purposeful life and providing a sense of meaning and direction to one’s development. Such a life is no longer at odds with existence (i.e., either in vertigo or nausea), but acceptingly embraces the world as the stage for unfolding meaning. The troubled psyche—adrift, anxious, unmotivated—here finds relief. A new center is established, providing orientation and a basis of value. So all the increasingly pervasive symptoms of modern alienation—depression, anxiety, uncertainty, a sense of worthlessness, etc.—find a pathway to healing.
As I’ve said, most of the books written on personal myth since Jung focus on this sort of foundational work. And that makes sense. Modern people have been growing ever more estranged from myth as time goes by. With so much disillusionment, and so few compelling solutions, it is no easy task to reconnect with living myth and meaning in today’s world. Initiation is required—in a time of fewer and fewer genuine initiators.
But, once you’ve found your footing, so to speak, and are no longer so “suspended in mid-air,” you can begin to explore the landscape of myth a bit more and go still deeper. Having made a purposeful whole of your life, you will have developed a taste for myth—but there is more, much more, for those willing to keep up their serious play.
NEXT: 3. THE BLUEPRINT
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NOTES
[i] Friedrich Nietzsche (1887) The Gay Science (trans. Walter Kaufmann) (Vintage, New York), 181.
[ii] Leo Tolstoy, Confessions, quoted in William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin, New York), 153.
[iii] Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, 11.5.
[iv] Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By, 12.
[v] William James (1963) Pragmatism and Other Essays (Washington Square Press, New York), 208-209.
[vi] D. Stephenson, Bond (1993) Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life (Shambhala, Boston), 26.
[vii] Living Myth 18-19.
[viii] Living Myth, 19.
[ix] Joseph Campbell (1959) The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (Penguin, New York), 21-22, 28.
[x] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, §292.
[xi] Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, 6.
[xii] From the Lecture “The Thresholds of Mythology.”