Brian Swimme, RalphAbraham, Stanislav Grof,Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, LynnMargulis, Terence McKenna, and WilliamIrwin Thompson present their ideasconcerning the evolution of consciousness.
The impact of ancient myths upon contemporary scienceTwilight of the Clockwork God embodies a vision of the interface between science and myth. The two spheres have been separated from each other since the 19th century triumph of technology scared away all the ghosts, devils and gods with the incandescent gaze of the luminous yellow eye of Rationalism.
I was an undergraduate English major who knew nothing, nor cared anything for the unimaginative worldview of science. I happened to have the good fortune to come across the works of the great comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and the more I studied myth, the more fascinated I became with what Campbell used to call "the cosmological function" of mythology. And this function, which involves the imagination of the cosmos through the lens of a particular epoch, is what science handles for us today.
The student of comparative mythology is normally taught that the impacts of science upon myth--of the mythos of the Bible, in particular--have robbed mythology of all outward references to the cosmos: the seven great scientific revolutions--the Columbian, the Copernican, the Newtonian, the Kant-Laplacian, the Huttonian, the Darwinian, and those of General Relativity and quantum mechanics--have simply shattered any mythologically inspired visions of the architecture of the cosmos. What cosmology does now, we are taught, is render "facts" shorn of mythic references, while myths themselves, as the result of the work of Freud and Jung, have been cast down, like Satan in Dante's epic, to the core of the human psyche, where they are supposed to have originated to begin with.
But since evolution tells us that the mind is the flower of the body, and the body the three-dimensional record of the history of the cosmos--and if myths originate from within this bodymind--then it must also be the case that they are coming to us from "without" as well, from the nether reaches of the farthest galaxies, and from the inner reaches of the smallest quarks. The cosmos, it turns out, is made of myths, since it is impossible to describe what the cosmos is doing without telling narratives about it. In other words, without evoking ancient myths of our cosmic origins from the stars. After all, when we peer inside our DNA, the very carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen which compose its chemical lattices were themselves manufactured in the stellar furnaces which illuminate our night skies, and in the moment of the Big Bang itself. We are such stuff as the stars are made of, just like the old myths tell us.
And so, my book explores how a new generation of scientists have come along who are drawing great inspiration from mythology in their scientific practice. Chaos theory, the Gaia hypothesis, morphogenetic fields and contemporary astrophysics are resonant with echoes of the myths from earlier, more archaic traditions of the human phylogenetic tree. And so, we are presently finding that myths have more to say than scientists, or mythologists, have previously thought. And my book is a contribution to the study of the impacts of myth upon science.
--John David Ebert
