[Shaahayda Rizvi]

Dennis,

So many thanks to you for your generous response as you prepare for your talks on “Myth and Healing”, and on “Mythology of Belief”.

You wrote, “Belief as myth; belief as ordering principle. This is my area of exploration these past months: “The Mythology of Belief” and I will be offering some retreats on it.”   Dennis, I love the topic, and one day, I hope to attend your retreats. Where is this one being held? I searched your website for recent events and found “Myth and Healing”  (keynote speaker)  July 30-August 1, 2021. Is this an online event? I could not locate “Mythology of Belief”.

“We are in a terrain today where fundamental local and national mythologies are breaking down; what rushes to fill that void is fantasies, alternative facts and fictions to bolster ideologies”

In a nation with such a diverse population, people from all over the world, with their own beliefs, rituals and rites, and then there are so many economic classes, the working class, the middle and the upper and then the billionaire class – a unifying myth seems many mythic years away, and as you so well expressed, “So, a unifying myth may not be possible until a further collapse of the condo of our national identity becomes more acute…….. We are in the in-between state right now, as Ishmael says of Queequeg; he is neither caterpillar nor butterfly; he is in between, as we are now.”

Joe said, “And when you think of this! The number of men who are in fact responsible for the condition of the world right now could all be contained in this room, and they are acting as though there were no way of common understanding. The world is in chaos simply as a function of their inability to assume the middle position in a conversation.”  We could begin a dialogue of a unifying myth.

“Becoming transparent to transcendence–JC’s language– is one way towards that end, fortified as it must be, with compassion as the new cement to hold it in place against hurricanes, seas and other challenges to its skyward push.”  And the transcendence may shine through all of us too, through the spiritual things we talk about.

I am so happy to hear that you and Sandy plan on watching the “Human Stain”.  Please if you have time, let me know what you and Sandy thought and your analysis of Coleman’s personal myth, the conflict and the chaos vis a vis the inner laws of the myth.

Shaheda (in gratitude)