[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Sunbug

No it was not a solid light as in stars or the moon, or the sun or the GPS. In the sky and all along as the light followed me, it looked like a dimly illuminated cloud.  This dim cloud became strong and bright in the driveway, about a few feet away, it was large, bright  and numinous…if you can imagine some invisible person holding a flash light high above, you can’t see the flash light, you can’t see the person, just the light on the grass, and wherever else it follows. As if it has eyes and ears too, but no smell, no heat. It had eyes because it followed my car and later me, and ears, because it heard me when I pleaded for it to leave me alone..….more like our wi-fi, that can pick up and transmit sound but has no smell nor heat, but add another dimension to the wi-fi, that of laser beams.

Norland writes, “So rather than determining the literal definition of the concrete in opposition to the metaphoric, we must learn to see in the symbolic order the literal and concrete meaning of our lives. There is neither the symbolic nor the literal but only the becoming-symbolic of the literal. Time is the thing that melts them both within..” Indeed so true Norland, time has dissolved and de-concretized  my particular experience.

Also, with  time,  advances in astronomy and cosmology have given us new eyes and ears and perhaps reason to interpret things that are directly in front of us. How different our world is today. For  now reading Campbell’s aeroplane to moon walk stories seem to talk about our changing cosmology.

Quoting from Myths to live by.   “I remember when I was a very small boy my uncle one evening brought me down to Riverside Drive to see “a man,” as he told me, “flying in an aeroplane [as they called them in those days] from Albany to New York.” That was Glenn Curtis, 1910, in a sort of motorized box-kite he had built. There were people lined along the low wall at the westward margin of the city, watching, waiting, facing into the sunset. All the nearby rooftops, too, were crowded. Twilight fell. And then suddenly everybody was pointing, shouting, “There he comes!” And what I saw was like the shadow of a dark bird, soaring in the fading light some hundred feet above the river. Seventeen years later, the year I left Columbia, Lindbergh flew the Atlantic. And this year, on our television sets, we have seen two landings on the moon.” (Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell (p. 248). Joseph Campbell Foundation.)

“All humanity,” Buckminster Fuller once said, in prophecy of these transforming forces working now upon our senses, “is about to be born in an entirely new relationship to the universe.” Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell (p. 249). Joseph Campbell Foundation. Kindle Edition.

I just picked a few gems from Dennis Slattery’s Mythblast, “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is Within Reach” The following two paragraphs are so relevant to the way we establish a sense of identity  to the images.

Quoting from Dennis Slattery’s Mythblast:  “Interpretation is a fundamental act in learning. As he creates a unique form of such meaning-making, Campbell uncovers “an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (81). Life itself is dramatic, but to miss the experience because of an obsession with meaning is to miss the action that is before us and within us. “

Dennis, I think I missed the experience because I was lost in the reification of the object.
From Dennis’ MythBlast “A brief example may suffice to unfold such a distinction. In their book Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox offer that “a myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another” (xi). Same animal. One cultural myth perceives it as sacred, the other reaches for it in an act of consumption”

Sunbug, the above paragraph  resonates with me, at the time of that particular experience, I was clinging to the idea of REAL UFO objects, and forty years forward, this new mythic perspective and our new cosmic reality with a million more stars blinking in the sky, has made that experience  very SACRED! And to borrow your words, like “Sacred doodling”.

Shaahayda (in gratitude to Joseph Campbell, to jcf, to all the members)