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Myth and Math

The mythic and mathic are two great realms of meaning and knowledge. For 500 years we have largely ignored the mythic and regarded only the mathic as real. Today, we are slowly groping our way back to the mythic and away from the arid intellectualism of over-emphasis on the mathic.

The mathic is sensory, and literal, and objective, and defined. The mythic is interior, and symbolic, and subjective, and archetypal. The arts are mythic, the sciences are mathic. But Thales holds that the world is best known and best expressed by the complementary use of both approaches. It is the same reality, whichever way you come at it. The scientific method of posing testable hypotheses, of being fair to alternative hypotheses, and of putting everything to the test of experience is the same in both realms, but everything else is different.

In the outer, you define the meaning of arbitrary shapes and sounds; in the inner realm, shapes and sounds already have meanings, which find by intuition, meanings which are emotional and experiential and motivational as well as ideational. The full play of this symbolic intuition is what is meant by being subjective. In the inner, the more subjective the better, the more universally valid your conclusions.

Absolutely anything, from physics to psychonics can be both experienced and expressed in either way, and our fullest understanding requires us to pursue everything in both ways. Here, for example is some mythic physics, a poem which Paramahansa Yogananda wrote about one of his cosmic Samadhi experiences, from AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI, pp. 153-4.

"....Present, past, future, no more for me (fig. 1), But ever-present, all-flowing I, I, everywhere, Planets, stars, stardust, earth, Volcanic bursts of doomsday cataclysms, Creations molding furnace, Glaciers of silent X-rays, burning electron flood....Oceans stand revealed, shining electrons, Till, at the last sound of the cosmic drum, ....A tiny bubble of laughter, I Am become the Sear of Mirth Itself."

Similar experiences are had on the fourth level of LSD trips.

If we wish to be analytical, we can classify all sciences into mythic and mathic, and cross classify them according to whether their problems are explanatory, evaluative, or linguistic/conceptual. The science which Thales has revived are put into such a schema below. But remember that experience is a seamless whole and specialization has its dangers.