What is Real? Mytho-poetic Reality Part 1

Here is a piece of writing from Haida artist, poet, and writer Bill Reid that I read yesterday and really summed up several ideas that have been bouncing around inside my head:

"In the world today there is a commonly held belief that, thousands of years ago as the world today counts time, Mongolian nomads crossed a land bridge to enter the western hemisphere and became the people now known as American Indians.

The truth, of course, is that Raven found our forefathers in a clamshell on the beach at Naikun. At his bidding, they entered a world peopled by birds, beasts and creatures of great power and stature, and with them, gave rise to the powerful families and their way of life."

Reid then goes on to discuss multiple other common NW Coast Native mythologies of how people came to be in his part of the world and ends by saying something about that there is a little bit of evidence about the land bridge as well.

What strikes me about Reid's writing in his embracing of the multiplicity of truth. Too often when we hear ideas from something outside of our set paradigm (whatever our paradigm might be) we reject them as "myth".

In the scientific/materialist/rationalist worldview that is constantly shoved down our throats, the common myth of our cosmology is called the Big Bang. This is a myth! It's a story that explains our origins. It is a commonly held belief now, but it doesn't actually make it any more true than any other story of our origins.

But what about all of the scientific evidence that supports the big bang? It's still a theory and it will never really be any more true than any other cosmology because none of us was there when it happened (or maybe we all were!). We can't prove the Big Bang any more than we can prove Yahweh said the Word and the world was created. In fact, the more scientists "discover" the more they are creating new "theories" (read mythologies) to describe the phenomenon they have found. Hence dark matter, superstring theory, quantum mechanics, etc.

If we truly accept that there are a multiplicity of truths and realities and mythologies, what are the consequences for us at the moment and time in history?

To answer that we must first look at what happens when we all do believe in certain reality or paradigm...

More in my next post "Mythic-poetic Realities part 2-Paradigm and Power"