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The Mortal Realms newsletter expresses the scope and vision of the MYTHSEEKER Project. Excerpts from recent issues are offered below. The name "Mortal Realms" refers to the individual worlds we mortals have, and to the mortality of those same changing worlds. New writings appear here on a regular basis--innovative pieces by McCagie Brooks Rogers and guest writers. Information about subscribing or receiving a complimentary issue of Mortal Realms is available by selecting PARTICIPATION. The newsletter is available in hard copy form and will soon be available in electronic form as well. We offer you these excerpts.

WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE
FOUNDING A NEW PATH OF MYTHIC UNFOLDING
A WELCOMING VISIONARY WORLD--I
A WELCOMING VISIONARY WORLD--II
PRIMAL LANGUAGE AND WORLD-EMERGENCE--I
PRIMAL LANGUAGE AND WORLD-EMERGENCE--II
VIEW OF CREATIVE FANTASY

WELCOME TO THE FIRST ISSUE
This premier issue of Mortal Realms opens a portal to mythic, mystic places. That is its purpose. One wonders: Can a newsletter have a destiny? Can a collection of words and columns have a luminous goal, a luminous undercurrent? Is it possible for the soul of something written to coalesce into aspiration for the seeking reader? We believe these to be possible, suggesting that intuition is thereby quickened. One hopes in turn that this is so, that it will happen for you, the reader, in this and future issues. Infinity in a grain of sand translates to veiled mystery pointed to by imagery and text, focussing the reader's deepfelt exploration. Translation from infinity beckons one valiantly to advance from the realm of the ordinary to the sphere of the mythic soul via the domain of software harnessed for this abiding purpose. The process enlivens the worlds of destiny that are provinces of MYTHSEEKER.
Why "mortal realms"? Because, first of all, mortals certainly do have realms, each person carrying a continually changing world-realm of experience, endeavor, and potential expansion. That is the existential givenness and thrownness of life. And each of these realms is itself immensely mortal, tangibly endable--highly so--but perhaps with an underlying process allowing the grain of sand truly to be infinite.

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FOUNDING A NEW PATH OF
MYTHIC UNFOLDING

It is not a common occurrence to be founding--or to be a vehicle for founding--what may be a significant new path of mythic unfolding. Such is offered by MYTHSEEKER to all persons concerned. This is a marvelous opportunity and perhaps also a great adventure. How many persons have consciously been involved in such a juncture of circumstances? Few indeed, at least among usual and likely acquaintances. One ordinarily has little practice in this direction. Many persons have been and will be involved in venues mythic simply by happening to live at certain times in certain situations as spectators, even as participants. This involvement happens often in the unfolding of history and destiny--but rarely with any conscious focus on visible or anticipated mythic content. One might rely at such junctures on general openness to new shapes and forms of meaning, and on a vague sense that new mythic intensity may be occurring, apart from one's lack of full preparation for express midwifery in this regard. At issue is the shape of destiny for individual persons, nations; and some would say possibly even the Earth seen in its Gaia role.
New myth may come gradually or obscurely. In some instances there may be strong, sharp introduction of mythic shapings--on the proverbial very unusual day when abrupt circumstances change the world in fashions mythic. At the deepest level new world archetypes may emerge or old archetypes change their complexion.

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A WELCOMING
VISIONARY WORLD--I

It is worthwhile to picture a world where MYTHSEEKER is a natural facet of viewing all awareness and experience in mythic fashion. A world is envisioned in which every person's experience is understood to express creative purpose underlying human existence--purpose that brings about and shapes the tangibility of every person's life. Such purpose is attributed to creative presence in many ways by many and various systems of numinous exploration.
Unique Life Courses
In the envisioned world, each individual life course is recognized as a unique path guided by the underlying purpose even though the person's path may at times be hidden, even darkly, or may be only somewhat visible. We all have similar consciousness--at least in kind as our personal awareness--shaped as might be by inheritance, nurturance, lifepath experience, education, or culture; or as shaped by involvement with the myth-seeking process itself. Myth-seeking is the propensity, some would say the necessity, to seek meaning, significance, and substantive goals in mythic ways.
Mythic Systems Express Meaning
In the envisioned world, mythic systems are widely viewed as expressions of meaning and creative purpose. This is true whether the mythic systems involve traditional myth, or mystic cores of religions, or meditation of diverse kinds related to transpersonal experience, or numinous experience expressed otherwise. Such depth systems may be ancient or traditional, modern, or newly-emerging vehicles of mythic participation expressing changing circumstances of consciousness. The significance of an individual's experience is not limited to description by a single depth system however profound and nurturing it might be. The envisioned world commonly empowers numerous systems of myth to interpret the experiential lifeshapes of an individual; in result there can be rich enfolding of the individual's continuing experience, approached as a rich textured, sculptured tapestry of unfolding meaning. Depth systems are comparably potent for those who gravitate to them variously. The variety of depth systems may be used to reach beauty and power underlying them all--they comprise a numinous array of incomparable vessels into which the heady brew of life may be poured.
Personal Myths Are Messages
In the envisioned world, each person's personal myth, expressed in terms of emerging mythic shapes and mythic experiences, is recognized as embodying symbolism and mythic messages--sometimes clearly and sometimes not--that express purpose within each person's personal destiny. Mythshapes need to be lived consciously and worked through honestly to approach visionary personal destiny. In this sense each person is a mythseeker who by nature continually seeks to integrate and express his or her mythic experiences. Of such is personal destiny made and from such endeavor comes creative exploration of humanity's emerging contours.

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A WELCOMING
VISIONARY WORLD--II

Assistance by MYTHSEEKER Technology
In the envisioned world, comprehensive MYTHSEEKER computer technology assists the myth-seeking process in benign and non- intrusive ways. This is based strongly on models of the emergence process underlying each and every person's world. The MYTHSEEKER Computer System, with which a person interacts, (1) focusses attention on mythic life patterns, (2) clarifies ways in which existing myth-patterns can be continued or augmented, and (3) enables exploration of related mythic experience. MYTHSEEKER involves clarification and assessment of a person's tangible mythic experience, also enabling related exploration of mythic experience in virtual realities--mythic virtual realities that MYTHSEEKER creates as centered on the participant. MYTHSEEKER creates focussed virtual reality involvement with mythic imagery and sound as based on the interactive assessment. In this vision, worldwide MYTHSEEKER sites can communicate about emergence of new mythic symbols and patterns, creating ability to promote emergence and to make it available to broadly shared experience.
MYTHSEEKER Evolves Without End
In approaching the envisioned world, MYTHSEEKER evolves in consonance with the on-going, emergent nature of mythic life. MYTHSEEKER is a process perhaps to help the evolution of mythic vision and content, a process never static but by its very nature continually changing--a process that is archetypal and constantly present. The evolution of MYTHSEEKER may never end in its symbiosis with emerging myth. Persons affiliated with the project--as creative participants or supporters--are placed in touch with this symbiosis. They are thereby innovators, partakers of myth and its emergence; they help focus MYTHSEEKER in its applications and visionary influence.
Open Vista for Personal Destinies
In attaining the envisioned world, an open vista appears of persons freely seeking personal myth in ways anchored in the substance of individual, unfolding destiny. By nature they are myth-seekers: homo mythiens, the evolving focus of the proto-human becoming human, of consciousness expanding its awareness of the deep depths of itself. MYTHSEEKER assists this global process in ways possibly destined--helping its participants, persons who become capable of an incredible engaging journey--capable of dreaming elegantly and deeply within empowering circles of myth.

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PRIMAL LANGUAGE AND
WORLD-EMERGENCE--I

It is important to offer a connection between primal language and the emergence of individual worlds--the individual worlds of human beings. Primal language and emergence of worlds are closely related, and are related closely to MYTHSEEKER. Why and how is this so? It is because there is a level in the psyche common to both. One's world consists of phenomena--inner or outer--that are continually created at a deep psychic level, a stratum of conventions and nascent world-primitives that underlie the form and content of the individual's world. This deep level is taken to be numinous and magical. These primitives transform to become an individual world of a person's experience.
Primal language, as used here, refers to communication about happenings--events and processes--at the same deep psychic level from which emergence ensues. Since the present view suggests that emergence of an individual world refers to continual creation, it follows that primal language can be infused with numinous qualities of the place from which the world emerges; in short, there are forms of language that relate to and express the numinous root of worlds. This is all related to MYTHSEEKER since the process of myth-seeking--derived from assessment, facilitation, and enaction--interacts with patterns of mythic meaning and life-course that are entwined within the numinous level of emergence.
Primal language does not need to be primarily verbal, or even verbal at all, but can be visual, gestural, related to bodily motion otherwise, and perhaps can take place in ways not directly related to the five senses. Have you experienced the tangible inner presence of an enlightened spiritual adept, in any traditional system?
Cave Bear Clan Primal Language
I think immediately of primal language nuances in The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean Auel, if perhaps you've read the novel or seen the movie. It is a language verbal and gestural, nearly at the level of what might in our period be called the pre-logical or the pre-verbal realm that presumably underlies the more obvious, articulated surface of language. The point is not that it would somehow be desirable to live in the neolithic epoch, which was evidently in usual circumstances quite brutish and threatening (after all, who really wants to fight a Cave Lion?), or saying that such experience was somehow luminous and magical. Rather, the point is the extent, in that distant age, to which emergence of consciousness (with whatever ego boundaries and cognitive world shapes there were) was close to the inner roots of the emergence of individual worlds. After all, the ancient rishis of India, and high adepts in other ancient cultures and regions, based their cosmic knowledge, and yogic abilities, on experience gathered over long periods, even through aeons. This experience likely involved experiential closeness to the numinous level of world emergence. That's one psychic level I want to communicate about in regard to the nature of MYTHSEEKER. That level seems so deeply basic, giving shape via inward imagery to illuminating experience. It cannot be ignored during the emergence of MYTHSEEKER itself.
Rodin's Empowering of Emergence
In a related theme about primal language, there comes to mind Rodin's unveiling of the emerging of individual conscious selves from the great field of being. I think of the tangible hand of God arising from primeval Matrix; the torso of Adam emerging in the anguish of being created; the rending of being in focusing itself on itself. This is a potent metaphor for emergence from numinous level, giving tangibility and pain -- total existential thrownness--to the continual emerging of a numinous body and its derived world. It suggests the actuality of our bodily existence--so erotic, filled with struggle, yet god-like in its potential gradients. This speaks to the fulsome center of beingand to the still-point within the unfolding of worlds.
This may reveal the root for presentday roles such as web goddess of the moon cave or shaman as wounded healer, or other transforming mythic roles that appeal to you. The level issues pulsating energy for roles called the cyber-sex Aphrodite or the cyber-erotic Dionysus--pop images such as these can be the nuclei for emergent archetypal imagery.

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PRIMAL LANGUAGE AND
WORLD-EMERGENCE--II

Aboriginal Dreamtime
In still another illustration, it seems to me that the Aboriginal Dreamtime is also based in the same numinous level of emergence. With this interpretation the Dreamtime is a magical, shamanic metaphor for depth psychic levels where worlds emerge, where all species magically communicate, where spirits are, where all boundaries are translucent and permeable, resistant to derived precision definitions from the culture of Logic. The after-death Bardo is a Tibetan way of being within the archetypal with death as transitional discontinuity between an individual's series of immersive worlds. There truly is marvelous wonder in these way-down recesses of being, this closeness to Source, Matrix or Generatrix; this proximity to realms of the Divine Comedy, the Cloud of Unknowing, or wisdom teachings of so many traditions.
We imagine with beauty that Indra does indeed smile through His infinite net of luminous pearls each reflecting all the others. We picture the shaman beckoning souls in the Pleiades to greet new beings arising from this realm of wonders and sometime dark opposites. We empower the Arihant of the Jains beckoning karma-layered souls to rise with rapture to the top of the universe, to remain eternally in rapture. The Tao smiles as the glory and beauty of all buddhas fill worlds without exception, focusing the wonder of koans expressing the ordinary in exceptional ways..
Ancientness and Continuity
How many hundreds of thousands of years did that subliminal pre-human world last, with its palpable, thrusting, exploring consciousness? Have we advanced or have we fallen? What incredible continuity we have with that aeons-long coming forth of human awareness and individual focus! I think all of that subliminal power is here, inside, shaped by and infusing what we call the archetypal; it is in me, in you, in every person; great adapts have it, as does every person, including the darkest fascist torturing mind, although the latter neither knows nor wants to know. We say we've exceeded the primordial level in our advancement but actually we're only shaping it in greater detail than before, with more outer constructs and inner barriers, and could it be that our luminous power has diminished? Let us choose to the contrary, to assume the movement from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon was a fully useful one. In some ways I'm not so sure.
How little we know of the shapes of emergence! For instance, what can we say about the natural energy of thoughts as they arise and recede? Or of flashing numinous images coursing as shakers of our private worlds? What do we really know of turnings of inner movements? Or even yet of margins between numinous realms and wondrous spheres? And yet we are learning swiftly about these in terms of meditative endeavor and exploration into shadings and roots of consciousness. Current research suggests these are based quite possibly on quantum-physics-like phenomena with collapsing of the wave function; and focus on microtubules. Of course these processes and structures are "based" on deeper energies approaching the level of Mystery we know so very little about. But consider also the message of Deepak Chopra.

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VIEW OF CREATIVE FANTASY
There are two views concerning the Source of Worlds. One is that the Source is "within," residing within and perhaps as the human psyche. The second view is that the Source is "without," residing at a special external place or realm. There are many variations of these points of view that have been explored for millennia the world over--and may be explored for yet millennia more. The former view is primarily eastern, the latter primarily western. Joseph Campbell characterizes the eastern view as involving a primal energy as ultimate Mystery, energy from which all else coalesces or emerges, including gods and goddesses themselves; whereas the western view involves a single God as source of all, with nothing "behind," but possibly with subsidiary divine beings such as archangels, for example. These are both marvelous views. What matters here is that the goal and purpose of MYTHSEEKER can be stated based either way.
In either view MYTHSEEKER places the participant in touch with a personally-chosen mythic path expressive of primal myth, referring to the level of myth that shapes the nature of world and nature and path of the human being. Such myth may--and certainly often does--give rise to ritual or ceremony as ways to partake of it; in this fabric blendings are involved of archetypal life patterns within world myth and the great systems of meditation and inner quest.
We posit that there is a luminous matrix of energy deep within the psyche. It can be meditatively experienced in many ways--for instance as beautiful, variegated white light; or as luminous blackness; or as intense color; or as marvelous sound with melody, or harmony or rhythm. The matrix is said to be self-luminous and can be experienced on the liminal level viewed as existing beneath full consciousness, where liminal processes continually create a person's world. This matrix is taken to be intelligent, expressing the deepest fount of spirituality. Indeed it is the source and extent of each person's awareness.
The matrix expresses archetypal energy within each individual as creative fantasy--creative intelligence, the source of each person's world of experience and of all individual endeavor. Creative fantasy changes ones world in ways to deepen spiritual participation; not necessarily that the person is "being spiritual," but rather in the sense that all experience is ultimately guided. This views creative fantasy as fundamental energy by which a person's world is created and by which that world can be changed in desired ways and fashions.
The matrix continually creates each person's awareness of being an individual entity, continually creating involvement in an individual world or in different worlds over time--although "time" is itself a construct. Indeed, the matrix creates the fabric of time, space, centeredness (groundedness) for the person, all aspects of this world comprised as it is of pairs of opposites. The matrix is fully aware of one's nature, one's needs, one's degree of openness to spiritual endeavor and striving; and it guides the person in accordance with spiritual purpose. The seeming total presence of the emergent world is called maya. The matrix, the emergence of worlds, the roots of primal energy, the nature and role of primal myth--all these are closely intertwined.

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