An Essay Complete
I just finished the most difficult essay of my academic career thus far. It wasn’t really that hard. It was just a second year paper on a Celtic myth. In fact the prof even gave us a list of questions we could choose from to answer–and as a cognitive science student I haven’t had it that ‘easy’ as long as I can remember. But it was not something I could deal with.
I never understood myths. When I was very young I could never understand the parables in the Bible. I learned in Sunday school that one of the most amazing things about Jesus was that he spoke to the people in a way they could understand—but that always confused me, because he seemed impossible to understand: “Why did he not just say what he meant?” I used to wonder. All this about seeds on paths and in thorns and in good soil, why not just talk about people who were or were not open to hearing and accepting the word of God? The Trinity was not a difficult concept for me even as a child, but Jesus’ sermons were impossible.
Then as I got older my mother used to try to share her love for Roman and Greek mythology with my brother and I. Again I was baffled. All these stories about all these people doing all these different things and I just could not understand what any of it was supposed to mean. Addition, subtraction, eventually algebra, biology and physics I could do, even philosophy and philosophy of religion—but myths, and legends no way.
Last year I took a psychology course in personality that opened my mind to a whole new world of understanding. Relatively unconventionally Jordan Peterson taught us personality from a historical perspective. In a field where many have stopped actively teaching the thoughts of Freud and Jung, Peterson took us even further back. He showed us slides of artifacts from Egypt and medieval Europe exposing us to fundamental notions underlying the religions and myths of various cultures and how they could be related to Freud and Jung and modern personality theory. He made us watch Pinocchio analytically, pausing it every few minutes to discuss archetypal characters. Peterson helped us to understand that evolutionarily speaking the mind has not changed much in the past 250,000 years—and that we have a lot more in common with the ancients or those living in the middle ages than we may have previously thought. We began to look at myths as people’s attempts to explain their experiences in life. Just like the art of today, we began to understand myths as people’s insistence to struggle to put the ineffable into words. He uncovered for us the wealth of information myths communicated to people within the societies they became popular in, as well as the wealth of information they have the potential of communicating to us if we look deep enough into them.
And it got me all intersted and stuff. So I’m trying–my damndest. And I’m learning alot. But I think Peterson’s courses on the psychology of all of this will always remain my strong suit.
Add comment January 10th, 2007