We Must Mythologize Our Lives

Why Rationality Alone Is Not Enough

“If we don’t learn to mythologize, and give greater meaning to our actions, we will almost always pathologize and see everything as wrong, absurd, or requiring a change or fix before we can be happy.” — Richard Rohr

Mystery is essential to a life of meaning, because without mystery there can be no wonder, and even possibility itself shrivels and dies. A universe without mystery is suffocating to the human soul.

We mythologize our lives as a way to understand them and know how to navigate them successfully—without the need or compulsion to eradicate mystery. Rationality dissects the frog in an attempt to master it, but kills it in the process. Mythology seeks to understand the frog’s nature through observation and wonder. Both are ways of knowing. But only the second way reveals meaning.

“There is a Larger Story.” That's the place everyone must begin. The world is not as it seems. You are not as you seem. A veil has been pulled over your eyes. 

“By whom?” we might ask. Exactly. Now we’re asking the right questions. Now we’re on the path to meaning. It's not absurdity, as rationality would name it. It is the path to what all great mythology reveals: The Truth behind the veil we call reality.

Rationality and mythology are brothers to one another. They make great partners in the quest for understanding. In the company of a mythic soul, a rational mind draws out insights that only add to wonder and to mystery. But rationality alone cannot import meaning. Stripped of its essential union with the mythic truth, rationality bleeds meaning from the universe. Conversely, a mythic imagination that is void of rationality leads the human soul into the chaos of fickle fantasy and baseless speculation.

Just as our two eyes are essential to the depth perception we need to navigate the physical world, so we need both a rational eye and a mythic eye to correctly discern the true depth of our own existence.