Dancing With The Gods

Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.

All the Gods are alive. They are not supernatural; rather, they are our inmost natures. They power our dreams and our art and our personalities.

During the next several months I went through a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view as I assimilated what I have just related here. There was simply no way it would fit in either the religious categories I'd grown up with or the comfortable, naive materialism I had constructed for myself. I clung to the conviction that I live in a rational, ex... See more

The mode of the religious is faith. The mode of the mystic is experience. We do not enact rituals and promulgate dogmas to express our `faith' that the sun rises in the east, because it is a fact of experience. No more does a true shaman or mystic invest faith in the god(s) he or she invokes; they too are facts of experience. The elevation of `fait... See more

I constructed a world-view in which the forces I experienced fit within the natural order of science, as what Jung called "archetypes of the collective unconscious". I rejected supernatural explanations, but learned to believe in magic -- the magic of the human mind and hand and heart.

By identifying the Gods with shared features of our psychological and inter-subjective experience, but being willing to dance with them on their own terms in the ritual circle, we can explain religious experience in respectful and non-reductive ways without making any anti-rational commitments about history or cosmology. Scientific method cannot ul... See more