Choose Your Temple: How Mythology Can Help You Spend Your Remaining Time
Choose Your Temple: How Mythology Can Help You Spend Your Remaining Time
By Jonny Thomson | Published: 2025-01-24 16:44:00 | Source: Thinking – Big Think
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The name is cage. It connects you to a genre and throws you into it this Role or as Which person. It withers your complexity and turns it into an artificial vice. A name that says to the world: “This person is this The thing, and this is what I will call him.” But no person who has ever lived is just one thing. Even the full names we give to each other will only capture a small part of our depth. As Walt Whitman famously wrote: “I am large, and I contain multitudes.”
The world is often cruel to this kind of Whitmanian complexity. It may be easier than ever to “just be yourself,” but that means there is only one “self.” It means that you have a core – an authentic thread of who you are that defines your identity. So, being happy – and being fashionable – means staying true to yourself.
But life is not like that. A person cannot be explained by a name or buried under one identity. We need a better way to understand the contradictions and diversity that exist in an individual’s life. We do not need to find a life story, but rather the many stories. To the world of myths Martin ShawStudying the ancient, outdated folklore of our ancestors is one of the best ways to understand ourselves and what it means to live.
Personal to attend
Growth is a time of change. Whether you want to understand it in the neuroscientific sense of neuroplasticity or in the psychoanalytic sense of identity formation, the basic truth is the same: very few people are the finished item by the age of 16. We try, we work, we turn and we fly. We are finding our place in the world, and this necessarily involves an element of existential restlessness. He says it like this:
“When you’re young, it’s very important to have a fairly flexible personality because you’re always exposed to mild or severe threatening situations like going to school, forming friendship groups, and the rest of that. You have to know that you can play well with others, and that includes personality to some extent.”
Then you grow up. You don’t wake up in one day as an adult. There is no signature on the adult charter. I’m just starting to petrify a little bit. You move less and stay in place more. Maybe you stop arranging to meet up with that group of friends or stop buying that kind of book. You start listening to the same bands and prefer some conversations over others. For Shaw, growth is about recognizing and accepting your personal limitations and developing your presence.
“The big question now, of course, is what on earth is presence? What does it mean when you say, ‘This person didn’t say much, but he had presence.’ I had a feeling from them.” And what’s interesting to me is that the people with the most presence have often made a covenant with boundaries somewhere in their lives. They’ve decided that instead of constantly striving for growth, they’re going to replace some of the growth with depth. And they sort of circle the areas. And most of it is actually attracted or demanded, rather than drawn to, as we know now.
Commitment to the temple
What does “making a covenant with boundaries” have to do with mythology? What is the relationship between attendance and fairy tales? Shaw argues that the stories we tell about heroes, gods, and little girls lost in the woods are not just stories, but “temples” of life—particular ways of living that come with a pantomime circus of costumes, scripts, behaviors, actions, and, most importantly, values.
“I always ask my students when they start working with me, and I say, ‘What temple do you serve in?’ And they say, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ And I say, ‘Where do you pour out your offerings? Creatively, philosophically, energetically, where do you spend your time? Are you sitting in the gym all the time? Are you mostly interested in getting a raise? You know, and I say if you’re not happy with the temple you’re in, how can you leave while causing minimal damage? Do you need to change? “Your job? Do you need to make another move in your life? So, yes, I think it is naive to assume that all stories wish us well.”
When Shaw says, “Not all stories wish you well,” his point echoes those that philosophers, psychologists, and mythologists have put forward for thousands of years: How He thinks We want to live not always how we are He should Be alive. We might spend all our time in the temple of Aphrodite, clinging desperately to faded beauty and measuring happiness by sex. It may make you happy, it may not. We may sacrifice the beautiful days of our youth in honor of Hermes, the god of business and labor. Some might see this as a sacrifice – a libation – well made. Others may regret it.
So, for Shaw, the wisdom in reading stories and hearing myths is not simply that they are fun—and they can be a lot of fun—but rather that they give us an idea of the kind of life we want to live. They are messy and complicated, as life really is. They will not say: “This way and this person is the way to live,” but they will give us options to choose. The mission of life is to recognize the temple to which we belong.
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