How a Myth Can Change the World

During the Copenhagen climate change conference, I am looking at the energetic underpinnings of the problems in the world.

I work with the energies underlying patterns. I look at the root, core movement of things to discover where the true lever of change lies.  And I do magic to move that lever in the right direction.

If we only work at the level of surface reality (politics, policies), and never challenge the underlying stories and myths that have driven us for millennia, the face of the policies and powers may change, but the dynamic of profiting from cruelty will not.

When I look at the energetic underpinnings of the problems in the world today, I see a wave of cruel, destructive energy that seems rampant and unstoppable.

It calls to me the story of Pandora’s box.

Pandora Got a Bum Rap

In brief: Pandora has a box, and she’s told not to open it, but she’s so curious she can’t help but open it. And all the evils of the world are released. Only hope remains in the box.

That’s what it feels like, when I look deep beneath the world’s problems: it’s like somebody unleashed evils upon the world.

So I went back and read up about the Pandora myth. And I found some things that surprised me:

First of all, the name Pandora means “all-giver”.

Secondly, “box” is a mistranslation. She actually had a jug.

Let us think about her name and her jug for a second, before we get to the myth as we know it.

She is an all-giver with a jug.

Jugs of course are for carrying water. And water is life. We look for water on Mars because if there is water there is life. The mythic jug represents the source of life. Pandora is the all-giver source of life.

The Goddess who is the source of all.

How the Goddess Became the Villain

The first known writings about Pandora are by the ancient Greek Hesiod. According to Hesiod, Pandora was not a goddess. Hesiod says that Pandora was the first mortal woman. To boot, she was responsible for all the evils of mankind when she opened this jug of hers.

Therefore, he concludes, all women are to blame for the ills of the world.

How do we get from Pandora being the bountiful giver-of-all, source of everything, to being the cause of the evils in the world?

And if you check in any history, book, you quickly see that the people out doing evil on a grand scale have pretty much always been men.

So Hesiod’s revisionist Pandora story is beginning to look like a shell game.

Hesiod split Pandora’s gift in two. She used to be the giver of everything. A Goddess of multiplicity – the source of all that is.

But Hesiod split “everything” into “good” and “evil” and left poor Pandora only with the “evil”.

So, to recap: here I am, looking at the energetic underpinnings of the great problems of the world, and I see a Pandora’s-box kind of energy there.

And at the heart of that story is the gifts of the all-giving Goddess being split in two:

Evil and good.

The Rift in our Myth

It strikes me that the heart of the source of our problems is in fact this dualism. Dualistic thinking.

Separating “everything” into “good” and “bad”.

Us vs. them.

Winners vs. losers.

Mind vs. body.

Humans vs. the earth.

Nations picking sides in conflicts.

It's already changing

But there are signs everywhere I look that we are leaving dualism behind.

We are seeing that we have to work together to save our climate, to save humanity. There is no more “us” and “them”.

Kids are thinking in multiplicities. They talk, text, watch videos and surf simultaneously. This is how they are thinking.

All around us we are mixing more and more our heritages. Most people I know are “mutts” of one kind or another. Soon there will be no more “white” and “black”.

Science shows us that the air I breathe out is the air someone in Africa breathes in. Molecules from me become molecules in you.

Men are honouring more feminine qualities in themselves; women are doing things only men used to do. Some people identify as multiple genders.

We are entering the age of multiplicity. Not either/or but both/all. Ambi/Omni.

And I say Pandora is getting her “all” back.

Let's Heal the Rift

Let us heal the fracture caused by Hesiod’s dualitistic thinking.

Let’s honour Pandora as the source of all.

Sing with me: Pandora, you are the giver of all.

Pandora’s fractured jug is healed by these words.

By this song, the river of evil that is said to have come from her jug is bound together with all-that-is. Diluted. United. Integrated.

Myths are powerful. The myth of women-as-the-cause-of-evil was used to oppress women for millennia. Let us revise the Pandora myth again. Let us say, we are all in this together. We are all one. Dualistic thinking was a shell game. Pandora is the all-giving goddess of the earth, and everything on this planet – you, me, George Bush – are a part of her.

And so comes the healing of the world.

And the healing of me and you. 

How Your Imagination Can Change the World

Every single creation of humanity began in the imagination.

It all starts with a story.

I have tasked myself with the creative imagining of a world in which humanity thrives in balance with the planet. I am self-identified storyteller of the New Story.

My work lies in the field of imagination. My heart and soul tell me that humanity can and will change, and that there is hope for us. These days, it seems to me to require a certain kind of courage to have hope. But first, all that’s needed is imagination.

These are the early beginnings of my imaginative exploration of this world, and I invite you to share in its storytelling. I ask you, rather than looking for inconsistencies or impossibilities in my story – and I am sure there are many – that you look instead for possibilities and for opportunities to imagine.

Can you imagine this world with me?

You are walking in the city. Every car, bus and truck that passes is quiet and emits no pollution into the air at all. As a result you can breathe the fresh air of the trees, flowers and vegetables grown in urban farms you pass.

There is barely any garbage in the street at all, because there are barely any things that can turn into garbage: everything that we make is contained within a cycle of re-use of all materials. There are no extraneous materials that cannot be reincorporated into something else, because everything we make and use has been designed that way. To be completely recyclable.

Factories – where things are made – emit no pollution into the atmosphere. Their by-products are recycled and used by other industries. Everywhere you look there are alternative forms of energy in use: windmills, solar panels, sources of power we haven’t ever imagined before.

Our rivers are coming back, the fish are growing healthy again because we are not overfishing. Everyone is mostly vegetarian, because when there are many of us on the planet we know that we must each tread lightly, and being vegetarian is much lighter a footprint than eating meat.

There are methods of transportation over vast distances that do not have the carbon footprint of airplanes. We were able to discover and implement them because governments in the world realized that these inventions were crucial to our survival, and had to be funded, supported, and encouraged to thrive. And so they did.

We are no longer spending all our money on wars over resources. Humanity has learned the difficult lesson that survival requires co-operation, not competition. When everything is kept within a cycle of reusing, there is no scarcity of resources. Your garbage is your goldmine. Just as the excrement of the animal nourishes the plants which emit oxygen which the animals breathe, so have humans learned to behave.

There is universal health care and education. Most countries in the world are now peaceful and prosperous. And prosperity is defined by the good standard of living of all inhabitants and their health and happiness, and the peace in which they live. A prosperous nation is no longer one that grows in wealth at the expense of its own citizens, or of those in foreign countries.

This is a world where, in order to survive, you must care about the ramifications of everything you do. This practice has habituated us to act in the long-term interest of all beings. We have become used to making sure there were no negative impacts from our materials use, and that has taught us to behave in ways that do no harm to anyone or anything. Peace has followed. Peace between neighbours, peace between countries, peace in our hearts, because before, underneath, we always knew we could do better in our actions.

We are that powerful

This blog is subtitled “Art, Life and World Transformation” and yet I haven’t talked about world transformation here, until now. So far my articles have been about the transformation of my personal and artistic life. The imagining process I speak of in this article is no different than the methods I have used to imagine my life into the beautiful form it is now.

We are that powerful. We can choose to imagine a world where humanity thrives.

This is an early story – or perhaps the germ of an idea of a story – of what it will look like when we succeed. Let it live in your imagination for a while. Allow it to gestate and reform. Permit a vision of a happy, thriving future for humanity and the planet to percolate in your being.  Allow yourself – even just a part of yourself – to imagine that it might be true, that the imagination itself might be so powerful. Because it can.

And then imagine what it will look like through your eyes. And begin to tell the story your way.

As we each begin to tell and share this New Story of ours, it can fire the imagination of others, as so may it become a living story, shared between us.

Every single creation of humanity began in the imagination.

It all starts with a story.