The word psyche is derived directly from the ancient Greek and is often translated as soul because it refers to the life principle, that which makes us alive, as compared to stones which seem not to be alive. In Greek, it also meant breath or spirit, but to the ancients spirit, breath and life were all one principle. In more modern usage, the term psyche has come to mean the sentient aspect of human life comprising such aspects of ourselves a personality, soul and mind and all the operations thereof whether conscious or unconscious. Psyche is to the body, first of all, its life and control system, and it relates to the body as one side of a coin does to the other. The psyche is the source of all our knowing, doing, thinking, evaluating, feeling etc. It is the life-center about which all of human existence revolves. The home of the body is the psyche. I prefer to say that one expression of psyche itself under the conditions of space and time is body.

The psyche is the key to knowing, and while philosophers have often investigated the ways of knowing, they seldom have considered that any such work involved the very nature of the psyche itself, the knowing instrument. Thus the philosopher often did not do the preliminary work of studying the psyche’s modus operandi. This area of study is the proper work of psychology, since it has split off from philosophy. Without a clear and conscious psychology, philosophy is unable to be critical of its own way of proceeding in the study of knowing. This process is so circular that it seems well nigh inescapable. Worse yet, in the 20^th century psychology has demonstrated that much, very much, in the psyche proceeds below, or beyond, the level of awareness and control of consciousness. Thus any adequate understanding of the human psyche must include its vast and mysterious unconscious aspect. The vastness of the psyche is well illustrated by a figure of C.G. Jung’s. He observed that if we think of ego-consciousness, our ordinary waking consciousness, as the visible tip of an iceberg, then the aspect he called the personal unconscious is the portion of the iceberg below the sea, and the vast ocean is the psyche as a whole.

The most promising advances toward knowing ourselves have come from those who have taken the products and processes of the psyche itself as the beginning data, and who have seen in the human psychic structure itself an analogy to the structure of the universe. A simplified statement of the rationale for these approaches is the view that the psyche, a natural process of the universe can be fruitfully considered as the universe being conscious of itself. The psyche, in this process of being conscious of the universe, of itself, has produced several schemes, several patterned ways of being conscious. One of these ways might be termed the cognitive, or scientific way of knowing, e.g., our typical western way of thinking about time and space. This view is founded on, or grew out of, the thought of Descartes, the French philosopher. Descartes said there are two kinds of substances in reality. One he termed the thinking substance and the other the extended substance. This dualistic view met instant favorable response, but soon his extended substance became effectively the only reality because there was no way to measure, or weigh, or scientifically evaluate the thinking substance. Many began to think it really didn’t exist at all and was just an artifact of extended substance.

The second way of being conscious is appropriately termed the mythic way. The term myth gives us a big problem immediately because we equate myth with lie, or falsity, or the purely imaginative, hence not real. Myth as it will be used here, however, has a quite different meaning. Myth is a story, symbolic in substance, which makes sense out of one or more typical human situations. Most primitive peoples had stories which explained their existence and its perceived nature. The first few chapters of Genesis are such a story; its symbols being God, the garden, Adam and Eve, and the serpent.

Each of the two ways of knowing are "natural" i.e., normal products of psyche, but are also highly cultivated processes of psyche. Mythmaking became a profoundly important art and the makers were held in high esteem. Just so, we consider scientists to be important figures of our civilization. Each form has risen to a very high level of sophistication in human history.

The older of the two forms is the mythic and I will argue here that it is the primary and the more important. It is primary in that every form of science, every form of cognitive knowledge is founded in myth. Certainly myth can benefit from feedback from its child, cognitive knowledge, to refine the myth, but some myth will always be the foundation of any knowledge. Thus myth is surely the most incredible and mysterious of all the products of humanity, especially for us westerners who have been reared to think cognitively and believe in science as if it were not mythic. We are so alienated from the mythic way of thinking that we do not even consider it a way of knowing, but a way of fantasy. Placed beside the scientific, factual or historical ways of consciousness and knowledge, myth is generally disregarded in the scholarly life of the west (and mostly now in the eastern world too since it has become westernized by importing western science.

Myth is by no means an invalid pattern of consciousness, but an inherent and critically useful one. The Greeks gave us the terms mythos and logos. Each of them was a term for the concept "word". Mythos implied the image-evoking power of the word, its metaphorical, symbolic power. Logos referred to the cognitive content of the term, its logical meaning/ the Latin term for which is ratio, from which we derive the term rational. Any word can, or most words can, function in either capacity and we may interpret them in either way, the rational or the mythic. These two forms seem to be the ends, or poles of the conceptual continuum represented by language in its various forms.

It is useful in considering the human psyche to be aware that such a language continuum exists. Each way of conceptualizing and presenting data falls somewhere on this continuum. Nearest to the logos pole is the system of science. Nearest the mythos pole is the realm of myth, religion and poetry. Myth is the more prevalent form for religion than is history despite the long standing preference of Christian thinkers for history. Alfred North Whitehead observed that the Reformation was an historical revolt, i.e. it based itself on the so-called "facts" of history, viz. the Biblical accounts. By terming them history, they could be used in the battle against the rationalistic doctrines and practices of the Roman Church of the day. Whitehead further argues that Francis Bacon’s appeal to efficient causes as against the Aristotelian final causes was another side of the same movement After these hundreds of years of usage and thought in this extroverted vein, i.e. emphasis on brute fact over against careful reason, considering only how things happen and not why they happen, we tend to interpret everything in this manner. Events are merely factual as the newspaper accounts give them to us. History, biography and media reporting are usually thought of as ideally near the logos pole, i.e., most accurate. Science is supposed to be the ideal of this form of expression, giving its results in mathematical statements. But, as will be demonstrated, science too includes many mythic presuppositions. The most purely mythic products we know immediately are our dreams, visions and other spontaneous presentations of the psyche.

For untold millennia humans lived exclusively n the realm of myth. Myth is a natural, instinctive product of the psyche and his little external, or conscious control in its shaping. Myth is somewhat like a collective dream. The story of myth, the history of myth, is the story of the development of the human consciousness, the flowering of the human psyche. This book will treat myth as the story of the inner side of human life, the adventure of the psyche. The spirit. As such, it is also the story of the religious pilgrimage of humanity, Homo sapiens, who might be better termed homo symbolicus or simply man (or woman) the mythmaker.

Now, we turn attention to the nature of perception. The thesis here is that the vision of reality that we call the world, or our world, is a mental construct. This construction of our vision of reality is both a social and a mythic process.

In the nineteenth and until the mid twentieth century, the general belief was that through the application of the scientific process we were in contact with the real, actual world. More yet, this real world was all the world that existed. Anything that could not be in some way measured, that was not in some way tangible, was considered essentially non-existent. Of course, in our practical life we went right on using all kinds of concepts that science could not measure, e.g. love, hate, morality, pain and pleasure etc. But in science, it was believed that the errors of human perception were so well known that we could correct for them. Through the miracles of microscopes, telescopes and other extensions of human sensory organs and the corrective work of the logical human mind, especially by mathematical formulae, we could arrive at an absolutely accurate view of reality.

This "corrected" view of reality has generally been termed "positivism", it may also be termed scientism. It was, and unfortunately still is, the general view of reality held in western civilization by the average westerner. It is the reigning myth of the western world and the rest of the world as their older views have been overshadowed by western modes of thought. Yet, as Whitehead noted decades ago, we have now arrived in science at the realization that most of the scientific presuppositions are either faith statements or are in error. Nonetheless, this is the most common worldview and the very idea that it is a human and thus fallible creation is heretical, abhorrent, literally unthinkable.

The basic content of this worldview is the Newtonian three dimensional space in which there are discrete solid, or more or less solid, objects occupying specific positions. The space itself is vacuous, without properties. The objects are related to one another only by gravity. This is our perceived reality.

This way of perceiving separates the knower from the known, i.e. the subject from object. The eye of the brain sees what is actually out there. The understanding of truth is that the object is accurately re-presented in the consciousness of the subject as that is refined by the mathematical or other scientific formulae. This is the one approved method of really knowing.

A major position of science has been the claim of impartial objectivity, freedom from personal , or even collective bias. Bacon believed that the scientific method would give this objective truth. He represents a major break with the general tradition of the Middle Ages which it inherited from St. Augustine. That tradition had no particular regard for objectivity because it believed as Augustine had taught that the mind inherently knew the truth of reality: "Go not out of doors. Return into yourself; in the inner man dwells truth." Bacon reinvoked the necessity of sensory information, the collection of data through careful observation, so that by the time we get up to William James we find him, as he finishes his magnum opus on The Principles of Psychology, writing to his brother Henry, "I have to forge every sentence in the truth of irreducible and stubborn facts." Whitehead terms this the new color or new tinge of modern mentality, namely its rejection of authority and mere rationality and its demand for letting the facts speak for themselves.

What has happened since James is another revolution in thought and discovery, by virtue of which we recognize our personal role in the creation of those "stubborn and irreducible facts." It is that role to which I refer as "The Construction of Reality: a social and mythic process." Consider just now the social and the mythic aspects.

The social refers primarily to culture. Culture is not the aristocratic sense of the elite, but a particular stage of development of civilization and the characteristics that typify it. We often speak of this today as the consciousness, or worldview of a people who recognize their commonness through that worldview. Theodore Rozak in his Where the Wasteland Ends says "Culture is the embodiment of a people’s shared reality, as expressed in word, image, myth, music, science, philosophy, moral style."

We are members of Western Civilization of the 20^th century by being acculturated into it. From mother’s womb and breast through college is an indoctrination process. Carlos Castaneda in his Journey to Ixtlan writes in the introduction that Don Juan said "The world of everyday life is not real, or out there as we believe it is. . .reality, or the world we all know is only a description. . . .a description that had been pounded into [us] from the moment [we were] born. He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. . . .from that moment on the child is a member. He knows the description of the world. . . .the reality of our day to day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common." This view then becomes our "taken for granted" construction of reality and any other way of viewing it is regarded as wrong or even crazy. This learned view is now our personal myth, or a dominant part of our myth.

Previous to the 19^th century, especially in the archaic world before the Greeks, myth was regarded not as it is now in the vernacular, ie. a story that is not true. Those ancient peoples simply understood myth to be the expression of truth about life. As Mircea Eliade notes the ancients thought myth "a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant". I shall be using myth to mean a pattern of consciousness, sometimes literary, which gives sense, meaning and value to life. Myth is a tool for constructing perception into a world. A person may or may not be conscious of this myth.

In particular myth addresses those most important questions of life to which science offers almost no contribution: What is the source and purpose of human existence? Why is the universe? What is life all about?

Science itself is dependent on myth in ways that are not often recognized. Whitehead describes on elements of this dependency as the contribution of the medieval Christian faith: "the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles." He credits this belief to the medieval faith in the rationality of God. Faith in the very possibility of science is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology!

I cannot in this brief overview give more than a few crucial insights into the rise of science, but rather give a more accurate insight than our everyday one of the process of creation of human knowledge. Every culture consists in the main of a stock of myths which guide its functions by establishing its characteristic way of perceiving reality and responding to it. This stock of myth is very resistant to change and virtually impervious to intentional change. Yet at the same time it is observable that we are in the midst of a major shift in myth which is already precipitating major shifts in the patterns of culture. Much of our cultural unrest is directly traceable to this factor.

Understanding the way language functions is of great importance to understand better the human psyche and its manner of creating reality and of functioning in general. Language is not only our principle tool for rational communication, but also for conscious thinking. My comments here will be restricted to the non-poetic form and functions of language, although the others are of great importance too. There are several elements to the non-poetic forms of language, but the major one for our concern is the sign. It is necessary to distinguish the sign both from the signal and from the symbol. A signal functions with or without consciousness to announce the event for which it is the signal. Thunder is a signal for lightning, as smoke is of fire. A signal has a determinate connection to its event, a one to one relation it could be said. Thunder doesn’t occur without lightning, but the lightning has no intent of producing thunder. The sign is an intentional communicative device (whether a word, gesture, grimace, or what) whose meaning is established by convention. Convention, of course, simply means the common practice of the users of the language. Conventional meanings are culturally established, or socially established and maintained through socialization. (I cannot here touch on the important subject of instinctive, non-learned communicative responses such as the smile except to note that there are a number and they seem to be common to the whole human race, but my concern here is limited to those learned signs.)

The symbol is a much more mysterious phenomenon. The symbol shares with the sign its material nature, i.e. it is a word, gesture, grimace, or some such, but there the resemblance ends. A symbol represents something which is significantly unknown and perhaps unknowable in any full sense, or in any objective sense. Jung says, "A symbol always presupposes that the chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown fact, which is nontheless known to exist, or is postulated as existing."

Jung was very concerned to keep the concept of symbol quite distinct from that of sign and allegory. He felt that such confusion was widespread, that it was reductionistic in nature and misleading for scientific thought. Freud, in keeping with his positivism in general, sought systematically to reduce symbols to signs. Because the Biblical material has many symbols and because the conservative approach to Biblical interpretation stresses Biblical literalism, there is great confusion about the meaning of many Biblical passages.

Paul Tillich in his Dynamics of Faith, Chapter 3 has indicated that there are six characteristics to a symbol:

• It refers beyond itself to something else; this is also true of a sign.
  
• The symbol participates in the reality to which it points. As an example he mentions the flag which participates in the power and dignity of the nation it represents. This "participation" is a difficult concept somewhat akin to the Christian doctrine of the "real presence" of Christ, or transubstantiation, in the sacrament of communion. Another way to explain the characteristic would be to speak of the symbol as making present the reality for which it stands. This character is a major source of symbolic power. In the presence of the symbol one is in fact in the presence of the reality; the symbol serving as a conduit as it were.
  
• The symbol "opens up levels of reality which are otherwise closed for us". The symbol here functions as a tool or key: without its representational power our minds have no grasp on the subject. Art takes us far beyond the realm penetrable by logic.
  
• This penetration is true not only for the world, but for the human soul as well. As Tillich writes "A great play gives us not only a new vision of the human scene, but it opens up hidden depths of our own being."
  
• Symbols are not created, nor can they be intentionally created. Rather, "they grow out of the individual or collective unconscious and cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimension of our being." For Jung, this aspect is expressed similarly, but with some added insight. He writes "An expression that stands for a known thing remains a mere sign and is never a symbol. It is, therefore, quite impossible to create a living symbol, i.e., one that is pregnant with meaning, from known associations. For what is thus produced never contains more than was put into it. Every psychic product, if it is the best possible expression at the moment for a fact as yet unknown or relatively unknown, may be regarded as a symbol . . .. Since every scientific theory contains an hypotheses, and is therefore an anticipatory description of something essentially unknown, it is a symbol." He also says the symbol is a product of the unconscious and that data from every psychic function goes into its making. Jung here has anticipated some of the insight of Kuhn regarding scientific paradigms, namely that they lie at the root of scientific theories and "facts" and are in themselves not directly known or knowable, rather are gifts from the unconscious.
  
• The final characteristic mentioned by Tillich is that symbols cannot be invented, rather "like living beings, they grow and they die". Jung speaks similarly, but with more data and detail about the birth and death. As we study the symbol in more detail there will be occasion to consider further its creation and dynamics.

One added note on symbols, this insight mainly from Ernst Cassirer, a pioneer in the modern study of language, symbol and myth. Without language, but especially without symbols there cannot be any organized or definite reality, any world, at all. Myth, art, language and science appear as symbols "in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own. In these realms the spirit exhibits itself in that inwardly determined dialectic by virtue of which alone there is any reality, any organized and definite Being at all. . . .the special symbolic forms. . . .are organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us."

The human religious pilgrimage, our journey to God, is essentially a symbolic journey. It is a venture lived out and understood in images. Indeed the life of the psyche is a life, a process, of images. But these images are symbols, making present the reality which they represent. So that God is present in psyche in with and under the symbolic processes.

The story of the human religious pilgrimage begins with the creation of consciousness, which is the principle differentiation between persons and animals (so far as we are able to determine the nature of animal consciousness). It appears that no animal enjoys consciousness of the same or similar nature to that of the human. Animals are aware of their surroundings, but respond to them largely or entirely on the basis of learned or innate patterns common to their species. These innate patterns are called instincts and are the foundation of animal character. I do not mean to deny that each animal may have a special set of characteristics which justify us in thinking that each has its own personality. Any one who has a beloved pet will attest to this fact. The principal limitation to animal consciousness seems to be the lack of language capability. One must note that our knowledge of animals is still very limited, so that we need to leave open the possibility that some may have and use language, e.g. dolphins and other large brained mammals. Animals do on some occasions give signals to one another, but these seem to be pre-programmed rather than intentional. A dog does not bark because he wishes to make a certain impression, or call for certain response. His bark is a programmed response to certain stimuli. The program is largely set by virtue of inheritance from the species, but is modifiable by life experiences. Hence, the possibility of dog training.