Myths are not false stories about the ancient past. They are symbolic motifs that represent and dramatize perennial patterns, the structures of meaning that are always with us. Myths allow us to bring these intuitive, implicit patterns into consciousness to make them shareable and allow us to internalize, ritualize, and apprehend them in more

The loss of these relationships, inward and outward, somehow seems connected to the loss of our relationship to reality itself, our ability to resist the blandishments of bullshit, and to keep in touch with some more ultimate value.⁠9

So you might say that the purpose of the living being—your purpose, if I may—is autopoiesis: to enhance your self-organizing capacity to be more of yourself, to develop your character and become the kind of being you have the potential to be.

Each of these movements is responding to a crisis of meaning, a disorienting sense that we have forgotten some essential dimension to reality and lost our relationship to what is good, true, and beautiful.

As a cognitive scientist, I think this is a doomed strategy; overwhelming evidence says mind and consciousness are emergent from your brain and dependent on it.

There is some controversy about dating Homo sapiens, but conservatively we have existed since at least 200,000 BCE. Around 40,000 BCE a radical change occurred within this evolutionary continuum. We have come to call it the Upper Paleolithic transition. Human beings began doing things they were not doing before. They began to make representational

Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, whereas foolishness is a lack of wisdom.

The shaman does not simply mete out advice but induces changes in your participatory, perspectival, and procedural knowing. Their presence can therefore enhance your ability to trigger your own placebo effect.⁠25 All

flow,⁠11 a state of heightened attention that sharpens our consciousness and competence while deepening our participation in the world—the feeling of “being in the zone.”