Myths and Mythologies

In the words of Deepak Chopra, I was brought up in India, a land that is imbued with a living mythology. Very early on in my childhood, it was my mother who told me that the word “inspiration” literally meant to be in spirit. The spirit, in turn, was the spirit of God, who breathed into the dust of the earth and animated it with consciousness. The most fundamental factor of existence, then, became the awareness or consciousness of existence.

 

Since it was impossible to imagine God as an infinite being, our collective consciousness used symbols to express divinity. These symbols were literally the gods and goddesses in our mythical stories. Long before I became aware of Joseph Campbell and “The Power of Myth”, I was already deeply immersed in the stories of these magnificent mythological beings who had supernormal powers that went beyond human capacities. Everyday my mother would read to me and my younger brother Sanjiv stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Indian epics equivalent to the Odyssey and Iliad. Here I learned of the great archetypal energies of Saraswati, the goddess of wisdom, Lakshmi, the goddess of abundance, Krishna, the cosmic alchemist, Ganesh, remover of obstacles.

 What is interesting here is that all cultures and I mean all cultures have myths and mythologies around which their culture, language, rites and rituals, and values are built. 

 

As I grew up,  Chopra continues, I was immersed also in the lives of mythical characters in our own times: Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Theresa. Their stories and their lives were extraordinary not only because they were great storytellers, but they actually lived their stories.

Several years ago, I listened to an audiobook entitled:  Don’t Know Much About Mythology by Kenneth C. Davis, and what I found out was that in ALL these different mythologies from ALL over the world, similar myths about creation, virgin birth, a great flood, afterlife, were part of their belief system, even though they may have used different words to describe the person or the event.

HOW CAN THIS BE?

It is this question that I have asked myself over and over and over again because my upbringing taught me that the great flood described in The Holy Bible took place (I guess I had assumed) on in that region…  so, how could a great flood also be described in the mythologies of South America and Australia?

This really does beg the question as to the truth and validity of all the myths and mythologies that we were lead to believe were exclusively our own…

But, on the other side of the coin, if these events happened all over the globe then one might just have a tendency to believe that they are TRUE…  for a race of people, not just a few…  and, was this not the point of Gandhi, Mandela, King, and Theresa?

Monster Revealed

 

Legendary beast, or harmless geological activity?

 

That is the question raised after a scientist's surprising theory about the Loch Ness Monster resurfaced recently.         

Italian geologist Luigi Piccardi first floated his theory in 2001, telling a meeting of colleagues organized by the Geological Society of London and the Geological Society of America that seismic activity may underlie the majority of supposed monster sightings around the Scottish lake from which the fabled creature takes its name.

The first claimed sighting of "Nessie" occurred in the sixth century, according to Scientific American. Legend has it that the creature appears along with earth tremors and bubbling from the bottom of Loch Ness, one of Britain's largest freshwater lakes.

Formed as a result of a long-ago collision between the northern tip of Scotland and the rest of Britain, the loch sits over the 62-mile Great Glen fault line. Piccardi argues that this position may have fueled centuries of Loch Ness Monster rumors.

"Loch Ness is exactly on the fault zone," Piccardi said in 2001, according to The Telegraph. "When there are small shocks, it can create a commotion on the water surface. Along the fault there can be gas emissions, which can create large bubbles on the surface. There are many surface effects which can be linked to the activity of the fault."

But Piccardi's theory is not without critics, especially among Loch Ness Monster enthusiasts like Gary Campbell, president of the Loch Ness Monster Fan Club in Inverness, Scotland.

"Most of the sightings involve foreign objects coming out of the water. There's two most common -- one's a hump, and the other is a head and neck," Campbell told ABC News. "At the end of the day, there's still sightings that are inexplicable. There's something physical in there."

Some of the more recent sightings of the long-necked "monster" include Marcus Atkinson's 2012 sonar images of a large object that he claimed followed his boat around 75 feet beneath the lake's surface. That same year, Scottish Nessie expert George Edwards snapped a picture of an unexplained hump-like object that eventually sank back beneath the waves -- though skeptics say he probably just saw a bobbing log.