[Published 26/12/2025]

ON THE REDISCOVERY OF MYTHOPOEIC LIVING

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The imagination scares our culture. We don’t think it does. We think we champion it more than any previous age. 

It can feel like that, especially as our society is producing more creative content than ever before, and creative expression has never been more accessible. But this abundance is itself demonstrative of the way in which true imaginative life has been repressed in favour of decorative expression.

This has created a problem. Our culture has become congested with competing mythologies of self, all searching for external validation while laying themselves open to commodification by consumption. We know collectively this is a problem, and many of us keep diagnosing it from the inside. Still, we need a way out, not an instructive solution that pushes back, but a simple way out. A reintegration of the imagination offers us this.

***

But what is the imagination? 

It might be easier to begin this investigation by discussing howthe imagination operates at the level of experience. From there, we might start to see what it actually is. By nature, as we shall see, the imagination resists convenient definition.

In fact, we are safe to define at the outset, precisely because this definition will not satisfy our traditional understanding, and that is crucial. 

The imagination is experience. This does not meet our learned expectations, which require all definitions to isolate experience and keep it contained. Instead, this definition opens us up to experience in its fullness. This keeps the imagination alive as something to inhabit together. 

***

Yet, experience can be a lot. It can overwhelm us and threaten to destabilise the ground beneath our feet. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you view it—the most solid ground life can offer us is that of experience itself. We need to feel the solidity of experience, across all vicissitudes, so that we might realise it is safer to stand on it than run from it.

***

The truly destabilising orientation is the one that has come to characterise our culture: We think that experience can be made safe by categorisation. We choose understanding over centred dwelling, and that prevents us from ever acclimatising to our own lives. There are many ways to describe a house, but only one way to feel at home: by living inside it. 

The imagination, then, as the house of our experience, has been waiting patiently for us as a culture to exhaust ourselves by our own fear of it. We continue to think that if we understand our experiences enough, we will one day be able to get on top of them, to stand above them, clear of the immediacy that gives life its flavour and variety. And so our experiential language has become increasingly clinical. Objectivity gives us the illusion of distance, and while this may provide momentary comfort, it only increases the scale and fear factor of the imagined bogeyman knocking on the carefully labelled door. 

This is the repressed imagination that now scares our culture. It is the totality of experience waiting to be inhabited fully, and without combative understanding. The intellect is an aid to descriptive experience, not a replacement.

***

Our culture is suffering artistically from this orientation. In a culture that embraces experience, preferring to dwell within it rather than stand apart, artistic output is nurtured into richness by direct encounter. 

This is true across all cultures. It is the origin of culture itself. The earliest civilisations emerged with such fruitful intensity because they were pre-rational. This is not to say that rationality and speculative thought were not needed for the advancements that would bring human beings out of existential darkness and into material stability, but it would be false to claim that our modern world is any less superstitious than our primitive ancestors. 

Superstition as a concept arose because we found such comfort in reason and understanding that we forgot our roots. In a pre-rational culture, there was no beyond to believe in or argue over, only encounters to be had. We used to dwell in the imagination collectively, and so while we lacked true individuality, we nevertheless found unity in experience.

Our culture today is navigating a kind of superstitious whiplash from centuries of valuing rational investigation as primary. But what is feared to be a dangerous and primitive resurgence of irrational thinking is really a well-timed knock on the door from an experiential life that never left us.

We can see this in the slow decline of art. The oldest cave paintings, while crude, carry the unmistakable charge of immediacy and experience: the mundanity of animal life is captured with significance intact. The grand architectural feats of multiple ancient civilisations demonstrate an inescapable sense of transcendence: we would not have built such magnificent structures for the gods without the kind of certainty that comes with contact—even if that contact was slowly becoming a memory and not a present truth.In literature and early scripture, too, our world was shown to be populated with many gods, whose life had yet to be calcified into mere childish characters.

As time marched on, we began to lose all memory of what it was like to be shaped by the tender hands of the Demiurge. Like our gods, we too hardened into a stiff detachment from our source: immediate experience. And our art followed suit. Through the centuries, we still produced divine works, but the beauty and care gradually became more about pointing towards divinitythan remembering anything of its essence. In a kind of unconscious admission, one of the greatest divine works ever produced involves a man straining towards an act of contact with the divine spark, not dwelling in it. 

Since our expulsion from the paradise of direct experience, our free will retained our capacity to choose the path of return; yet we drifted so far from the living memory of home—unfiltered experiential life—that we ended up debating even the concept of free will itself. We forgot what it was to be human, and so we began to question whether we ever had the choice of being it in the first place. 

With the rot of forgetting truly set in, our art continued its decline. Divine works were still produced, but no longer by the collective feats of entire cultures. Art fragmented, and rich, luminous works only emerged when singular figures—novelists, poets, painters, philosophers—allowed themselves to stay inside their experiences long enough to remember. 

Meanwhile, religion continued its descent into lost memory. Our once fully experiential species, the same species that produced the cave paintings, now only knew the fact of life itself as some distant, singular figure. When all experience had been forgotten, and all multitudes of gods had been drained of their living essence, a personalised, monotheistic God emerged: the fully named and fully mourned original craftsman. We might have become real, but our frivolous, sensory roamings always left us quietly yearning for Gepetto, who had been swallowed into darkness in his loving desire to bring us back home.

So our religious buildings became symbols of that yearning, holding places for that absent God. And with the unrelenting stomp of Reason making the world all the more habitable, those buildings started to look sillier and sillier, until even they would become caricatures of what they once were. 

Our artistic output mirrored this shift. Explicitly religious art became shallow and almost childish in its simplicity. In contrast, radiant mystic writing—the home of true religious spirit—was inevitably ignored by a culture so severed from its primordial roots that direct articulation of divine experience could only appear dull and empty.

Modern art then exploded into its dominant form: the relentless expression of the individual human experience. What had once been a collective endeavour—philosophers attempting to charter human ethics, composers producing universal symphonies, and novelists acting as the omniscient narrators of many lives—became increasingly about the individual. Philosophy burst open the gates of relativism; music sprawled into short declarations of singular human struggles; and literature rediscovered its experiential voice in the first person.

In this current period, many lament the lost centre of art. But, as it was often prophesied, that old centre could not hold. And in the absence of presence, those who remember the necessity of collective divine expression can only reproduce its likeness. The stylistic flourishes of the most skilled painters and writers now feel more like well-executed prints than living moments captured mid-experience. 

For now, where artistic life remains is in honest individual expression, however self-oriented or melodramatic. This is what may be considered, unfairly, to be ‘low culture’. But high culture was only possible when our primordial experience was alive in the collective memory, at least as something to point towards. Once fragmented, producing a work of high culture entailed an enormous existential risk for the individual. They risked isolation, misunderstanding, projection, and more than that, they risked the sheer experiential pain of dwelling in life. In the Age of Reason, still rampant, this is what we might consider ‘divine madness’. It is not madness. It is human life, fully lived, and without the presumed safety of distance.

Most modern art is now caught between the sharp-edged rock of individual melodrama and the blunt, uninteresting hard place of supposed divine printmaking.

***

Dwelling in the imagination, in experience, entails risk. If an artist produces a work that resonates today, they have risked, at least, a direct confrontation with their own personal experience. In this way, they might be said to dwell in the personal imagination, which is a kind of home, but also a kind of estrangement.

That is the problem of the modern world: it is too personal and lacking in space for the other. Again, we know this fact collectively, and there are many people still trapped inside the problem who articulate it with grace and integrity. As a culture, we are too concerned with the self, and we know that a return to community is not only desirable but necessary. But this return cannot be forced through. To construct a community with good intentions is akin to the divine printmaking: it leaves us with a lifeless replica. 

We are then left with a choice of two evils: dwell in the personal imagination, which may be real, but is isolated and, in the end, narcissistic; or leave ourselves behind, and walk soullessly back into a makeshift community space. Neither one is preferable, but at least we can experience life in the self. Perhaps that is why our culture cannot escape it. 

***

In fact, our culture has tried to escape—or solve—this problem. We think we can incorporate the personal imaginative life, where individuals dwell in themselves, into the wider world community. In a sense, there is something true in this ideal: it is an attempted union of opposites, and a noble one. 

But as we know, this very ideal has created the bloated artistic landscape we now find ourselves in. This, as discussed earlier, is the modern world: a champion of creative expression, a futuristic heaven of opportunity and scalability… and it is failing. 

Because self-expression, in its current form, is not about a person creating freely from a state of located dwelling, but striving towards that long forgotten collective home of experience. Ultimately, that striving speaks to something in all of us, and so it is marketable. What starts as a personal dwelling becomes universal selling, and so the human experience itself has been commodified, over and over again. 

***

So why does the imagination scare our culture? Because it is the one thing that cannot be commodified. Personal imagination, personal dwelling, can be resold to a world of lonely people and subsumed into the ongoing story of longing. But a reintegration of the imagination collectively creates a home for all of us, and this renders commodification obsolete. Why lean into marketing when there is nobody left to win over?

***

Of course, this is a slight oversimplification of the fear. The commodification scare is really an unconscious value judgement made by an economic system that only knows how to do one thing: consume and resell. In this sense, economic dehumanisation merely exposes the limits of our current epistemic paradigm. 

We want to build a system that doesn’t lead to inevitable commodification, but the reason we refer to “late stage capitalism” has less to do with systemic analysis and more to do with a deep intuitive sense that we have reached the end of something. We see this same problem in the sudden societal obsession with conspiracy theories across the political spectrum. The distrust of knowledge itself signals not a system in need of rebuilding but an epistemic house that has become a prison. We’ve outgrown it, and we are desperately looking for the exit. Conspiracy theorists are not hoping to find new facts to satisfy their discontent; they are hoping to find the door that leads out of an untrustworthy world. 

***

So we need a way out. But that very way out is what scares our culture the most, and it has to do with necessary vulnerability. 

As we’ve seen, individuals are capable of dwelling in their own personal imagination, but it means risking inward vulnerability to the storms of experience. To an extent, we are willing to suffer this—it is part of living.

The deeper problem lies in the translation of inner truth and vulnerability to the world. Currently, we find that to exist vulnerably in the world as we do in our own imagination, to experience the world as we experience ourselves, is impossible. We find this because the world does not offer us a place for our vulnerability to land. Singular, unfiltered, human experience threatens the rigid categories that the world has learnt to function on. 

We do not lean into categorisation to gain distance from our own experience—we know in our hearts that we can never escape our experience of life—instead, we lean into categorisation because it makes life feel liveable in a world that can’t hold human truth directly. The systems cannot hold it. Our communities cannot hold it. Our families and friends cannot hold it. Worst of all, because we have to accept categorisation to be held as ourselves, we cannot offer it to others, even when we think we can. We exist as part of the problem because we feel we cannot exist any other way.

So when we acknowledge that the imagination scares our culture, we accept that it scares us as individuals. Culture is cumulative. It is not something that arises out of collective nothingness but grows to reflect the universal experience of the individuals who form it. We know that the world outside of our own minds is not hospitable to human experience, and so we stay hidden. Yet we all know we are hiding, and we know that eventually someone is going to have to walk out into the open and simply exist. Worst of all, at that point, most of us will reflexively reach to categorise and reduce, not because we hate, but because we are not yet brave enough to love back. Whoever steps into the light of day must withstand the hurt and know that their existence, however misunderstood, continues regardless. 

And this act lays the ground for others to step through. One person inhabits their own experience not just personally, but in the world, and in the act of staying, the world becomes inhabitable. The imagination itself is reintroduced to the collective as presence. It is no longer a personal hiding place for lonely souls but a communal space for everyone to inhabit together. The world stops needing distance from experience because experience has finally been shown to be the one thing that unites.

The imagination, then, is the place where human beings truly meet.

***

Now, with the foundations sufficiently laid, what is mythopoeic living? 

When seated in the centre of our own lives, with no labels for comfort or categorisation for distance, we naturally reach for language as a way of honouring the life of our experiences. We reach for this language not because it makes our existence legible to others, but because it is accurate to the experiences themselves.

Many thinkers, profound and sincere, have come to see language as the original enemy. This is understandable. The development of language enabled the long and necessary process that has led us to our current epistemic blockage. The moment you can name a thing for reference, you create distance from that thing. 

Pre-linguistic cultures dwelt in the immediacy of their experience, but without reference, we could never have progressed enough as a species to provide safety and longevity, let alone comfort. But having progressed, and with safety and even relative comfort obtained, our language became so sophisticated that some of our greatest minds began trying to pin down the ‘thing in itself’ again. If he were to understand it—which, of course, would defeat the point—a primitive mind would laugh at such a ridiculous concept as a thing in itself.

So for those worried thinkers, the fear around language is really a fear of distancing ourselves further and further from the human experience we know must be returned to at some point. But as discussed in the preceding sections, language is not the problem; it is the way we use it.

Thus mythopoeic living—the act of narrating one’s own personal myth—is a natural by-product of staying with experience, living it fully and openly, and using language to preserve that experience faithfully. 

***

In fact, we only need the term “mythopoeic” now because we have become so detached from life. We are at an epistemic turning point, and so the language we currently use to describe the experience of the return will one day be historical. In a future culture, where life is lived truthfully and described richly, we will not even consider ourselves to be “myth-making”—we will simply be living.

However, we cannot skip ahead, and so this period of transition will be defined by people courageous enough to stay true to their experiences, using whatever language enables them to live openly without reduction, while being simultaneously ignored and projected onto by a society that lags behind.

***

And what might this look like in practice? 

Well, what follows compiles months’ worth of experience lived truly and narrated faithfully. Integration demanded that the narrative play out publicly, and so reality itself became the key witness. 

The great irony of living in this way is that, no matter the external noise and panic surrounding the well-being of the individual in question, such expression is the only way to ensure the person’s subjective truth remains intact. 

A healthy human life requires both the subjective and objective to coexist in direct relation.