Why are You Mythic?

Welcome to Mythic U! In our first episode we define mythology as deeply meaningful stories and ask: what does it have to do with you? Each of us lives in a web of myths - spiritual & religious stories, family stories, national stories, historical stories. Our stories are our beliefs are our myths are our identities. Topics covered include Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, Carl Jung, the consciousness of plants and growing up in the Bible Belt, as we explore core concepts of thinking and living mythically.

Show Notes and Links
Power of Myth - free access to the entire Power of Myth PBS series featuring Bill Moyers interviewing Joseph Campbell
Power of Myth - companion book
Tiger/Goat story - as told by Joseph Campbell
The Secret Life of Plants - drawn from remarkable research, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird cast light on the rich psychic universe of plants.
Fantastic Fungi - website exploring the world of fungi. Scroll down for the documentary exploring how mushrooms communicate and connect.
IKAR - IKAR is working to reanimate Jewish life, to reengage text and tradition not only so that we find personal meaning and connection, but also to help us decipher what it means to be a human being in the world today.

We want to hear from you! Please rate and review us wherever you find this podcast. Join our Patreon: patreon.com/yourmythicu

Transcript

Karen Foglesong: 0:00

A story to which one feels a particular attraction is an invitation to the imagination.

Erin Branham: 0:25

Dwelling in a story related to one soul has potential for creating new insights and feelings. Margaret Meredith, The Secret Garden. Hi, and welcome to Mythic U.

Karen Foglesong: 0:37

I'm Karen Foglesong.

Erin Branham: 0:39

And I'm Erin Branham. Today we're talking about Why are You Mythic? Or what the hell we're doing this for!

Karen Foglesong: 0:48

It's about learning to attend to your inner life, and your spiritual life, and finding meaning in a crazy world while trying to survive.

Erin Branham: 0:58

We're here to explore and discuss practices for discovering the stories that animate each of us with the goal of learning to choreograph your own unique way of attending to the needs of your soul. So Karen, when you think of myth, or mythology, what does that mean to you?

Karen Foglesong: 1:15

It means to me stories that humans have passed down from one to another to describe the indescribable. And that's in any form, sometimes they have social meaning. Sometimes they may not have to be carried out in the social structure. But so for me, that's the working definition that I think of. It's not necessarily an academic definition, but

Erin Branham: 1:47

Well, we're not doing an academic podcast, so that's fine. I think in general, when you talk about this, it's good to sort of make the distinction between the way that we casually use the word myth in language, when somebody tells you something that's BS, and you go, Oh, that's just a myth. Right? It's an interesting thing, because there is truth in that definition - what you're really saying is 'that's a story that I don't think is true.' And myths are stories. And stories are never exactly true. Right? Because they're symbolic. I was thinking about what this was - the map is not the territory.

Karen Foglesong: 2:34

Oh, yes. That's a good analogy. Yeah.

Erin Branham: 2:37

Story is a map of the human soul. That's not the same thing as the territory.

Karen Foglesong: 2:43

Right. I would agree with that.

Erin Branham: 2:45

So there is a way, there's a way when you say, oh, that's just a myth. That's just a story - that's dismissive. You're calling attention to the fact that a myth is not a set of facts. That's not what it's about.

Karen Foglesong: 3:00

Right? Well, yeah.

Erin Branham: 3:03

But there may be more truth in speaking symbolically than there would be in the dry set of facts.

Karen Foglesong: 3:12

Yes. Right. I would agree with that. I think it's difficult for people when we hear the word story, we automatically think 'fictional.' But if you really pay attention to the popular, like what sells what grabs attention today, it doesn't matter. Even if it's a scientific premise that we're trying to get across - if you relate it in story form, rather than a list of facts, you're gonna get more attention than just the list of facts. For most people. There are some people that are like, I don't need to know what you're wearing. Just tell me the math problem.

Erin Branham: 3:57

Definitely. But for most of us, you know, it's been said by many a scholar that we are narrative creatures. Our brains, at least the part of our brains that we're aware of - the prefrontal cortex, the big brain- that's good at math and language and spinning things out- facts, our prefrontal cortex loves some facts. But it also likes to feel like there's not enough room for all of them, right? So we create these maps, we create what are called schema inside of our brains, to compress the information. And that often comes out in kind of a story when you create a narrative. That's just what humans do. We just make stories about everything and that's one of the key things that we want to talk about in this podcast - how we are still very myth driven. People even in the Modern world - we just don't really call it mythology anymore. But you have a family myth, probably you have a story if you meet somebody, Karen and I are both in our in our 50s. And so if you meet somebody and they say, you know, who are you? What's the story of your life? You have one!

Karen Foglesong: 5:21

Well, then I, and then I...

Erin Branham: 5:23

and in that story are high points and low points, and things that shaped you. Well, that's a myth. That's a myth. That's the mythology that you're creating. Right. And we have a family story, we have a personal story, we have a national global story, we have a story about science. So I think when we're talking about this, we're really interested in unpacking how these things do still function as mythology in our world, and how that gives us the power to, to weave them together in a way that makes sense for us.

Karen Foglesong: 5:59

That works for the individual. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, I didn't mean to ever step on you. Yeah, I got me excited. It works for the individual, you can make your own story. And that's hard, often, because you're told that you can, that you somebody needs to bless your interaction with spirit. And that's not true at all.

Erin Branham: 6:27

And that would be part of why I think Karen and I both are not - I've never been big on organized religion, because that issue of sort of having to have somebody bless, or that you need to bring your space into an existing mythology. We weren't either one of us was really raised in one. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But the reason we want to talk about all this is because we if you can understand your own stories, your mythologies, the things that are animating you. One, they control us whether we realize it or not. So becoming aware of them can be super useful, and becoming more healthily involved with yourself and your world and all of the people that you interact with. But it also gives you the ability to go ooh, do I like that story driving my values? Do I? Do I really believe that? Is that really the mythology that I'm holding dear to? And I have a few that I all of a sudden realized was like, Whoa, that's a whole mythological system right there that I just bought into and was like, yeah, that's makes so much sense to me. And then one day, you're like, Whoa, step outside of it. So you get to have more control and more choice, when you become aware of the mythologies that are working in and around you.

Karen Foglesong: 7:51

I think some people don't want the responsibility for that. And that's fine. There are many - whatever religion your parents gave you, if that works for you. That is amazing. We're talking to the people that it hasn't worked for, we want to make sure you understand that. It's okay.

Erin Branham: 8:13

And I will say, I know people who are deeply into a faith tradition, and yet are able to do this that we're talking about. They are able to choreograph kind of their own spirituality. Like I know some feminist Christian witches, like those are some pretty fulfilled individuals. Yeah, right there, you know. So there are interesting ways. And I, you know, we're gonna talk a lot about different faith traditions through the course of the podcast, because there's so much wisdom and so much to be learned there.

Karen Foglesong: 8:45

Man, that's hard to say - Christian witches.

Erin Branham: 8:53

It's true, though. It's a whole, it's a whole group of folks. And I think we also think of this as sort of mythological because as Gen Xers who grew up in the Bible Belt, our gateway drug to spirituality beyond Christianity was Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, which was released on PBS the summer of 1988, which was a summer I graduated high school.

Karen Foglesong: 9:16

Wow.

Erin Branham: 9:19

It was so funny. I know. But it was so funny that like, we all - like there's this little group of sort of weirdos from where we grew up, who found this and then found each other. And you would not think this was something everybody was gonna love, like, especially teenagers. It was literally two old guys talking for six hours.

Karen Foglesong: 9:39

And I've listened to it over and over and over again! And I've read it when I can't listen to it, I read it. But The Power of Myth is a great opening a door, opening into that world because he's touching on it. Bill Moyers doesn't really understand this is a new field of study. And, and Campbell is explaining as clearly and succinctly as you can. So you end up with this very clear story about story.

Erin Branham: 10:17

And I would say the appeal of the show, at least for me, was that he's a great storyteller. Right. Joseph Campbell for all his flaws and issues now, and we'll talk about those throughout the podcast - he was a tremendous storyteller. I still - I tell my kids stories exactly fashioned after Joseph Campbell. They can tell you about the tiger and the goat story, because I think it is so meaningful. And you have to tell the way that Joseph Campbell told it. That's how it works.

Karen Foglesong: 10:53

I never got to hear Campbell live by I've gotten to hear Jonathan Young, who was an assistant. I guess he started out as an assistant, but then ended up being a person that worked with Campbell on his studies and in different projects he was working on.

Erin Branham: 11:10

And he runs the foundation, right?

Karen Foglesong: 11:12

Yeah. Well, he's part of that, helping get it started.

Erin Branham: 11:15

But yeah, I met him once at the Mythic Journeys Conference in Atlanta. Oh, wow.

Karen Foglesong: 11:23

That was when you met Neil Gaiman, too, isn't it?

Erin Branham: 11:26

No, that was a different trip.

Karen Foglesong: 11:28

Okay. Nevermind. Sorry. But yeah. And when he's telling the story, he can stop in the middle of it. And he can go and the horse went down the lane, and it'll just stop and you'll go. So what does the horse represent? What is the lane, you have this 20 minute discussion with everybody going in different directions. And then he takes that and brings it right back in and then the horse is going down the lane. Here we go. So beautiful, gives me chills just to talk about it.

Erin Branham: 11:56

Definitely, at the end, he presented this idea that I had never - I was raised up on a lot of Greek and Norse mythology, my mom loved that sort of stuff. My mom was actually a comics reader, which I think is very modern mythology. And I'm sure we'll chat about that at some point, too. And she loved Native American stories, and you know, so I was it was all right there in the kind of story way, but he really comes out and he starts talking about mythology and helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Oh, I'm 18 and my mind just going - therein lies your eternity. That's the kind of stuff Joseph Campbell would say.

Karen Foglesong: 12:42

Yeah.

Erin Branham: 12:44

And, and I was definitely looking, right? Like I said, we grew up in a place where your options were basically Protestant Christianity or be a minority of people. Even Catholics were considered like an inch away from heathens, right?

Karen Foglesong: 13:01

Yeah. Episcopalians were an inch away. They were even closer, I guess, cuz? I don't know. Because being like Catholics. And then I remember listening to old ladies talk about how evil the Episcopalians were because they didn't get far enough away from the Catholics.

Erin Branham: 13:19

Yeah, so there's a very, there's a very dominant cultural religion where we grew up, what was it about the 13 churches?

Karen Foglesong: 13:30

In my small town of like, I don't know. 1200 people? There were 13 churches.

Erin Branham: 13:36

Wow, that's less than 100 people per church. Right.

Karen Foglesong: 13:45

And I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There are probably more churches that I didn't know about, because those were the white churches.

Erin Branham: 13:51

Ah, absolutely. Right. That's a very good point. It's probably at least that many more Black churches. Yeah, absolutely. No for real, like we're talking about growing in the Mid-South in the 70s.

Karen Foglesong: 14:08

And you weren't allowed. Well, it wasn't like, they won't accept you. Or maybe you could come and it just hadn't been done.

Erin Branham: 14:18

Well, what was it Martin Luther King said? The most segregated hour in America is Sunday morning. Right? Yeah. So that was something that was part of our world. I will say that was part of the cognitive dissonance that I dealt with growing up in the South - was that the culture all around us was constantly telling us that Black people were not as human as we were. And we had eyes and friends and knew that that wasn't true. Right? And it just was - that's all part of sort of the weirdness that happens there. So into this comes The Power of Myth. What was it about The Power of Myth that reached you, Karen?

Karen Foglesong: 14:57

The taking seriously of other other cultures and other names of God. I had been studying mythology since I was a kid, like I came home from the library with a stack of Greek mythology books. But I was punished for that. Because those were lies. Because I was already trying to develop this opinion that like, this is another way to describe God, and it's just somebody different. But Joseph Campbell gave me that idea of like, look at this culture and look at this culture and look at this culture and look at this one, and then look how they kind of meet or have a parallel, a similarity in that way. That was like, it's okay, what you're doing doing this comparative thing and understanding that God's name can be different in different languages, you know, that was, yeah, definitely. What was it for you?

Erin Branham: 16:04

I liked that he was talking about consciousness. And he was talking about soul in a different way than I had ever heard it talked about. I grew up with a Rational materialist, atheist, feminist mom

Karen Foglesong: 16:20

That's a lot of isms.

Erin Branham: 16:21

So it was the 70s. She was recently divorced, you know, so and she's really, my mom is a really, really smart woman. Like she just like, she grew up on a farm in rural Missouri. And she was, she was valedictorian of her class of 12. But she's truly like a really smart person. And so think about that you're a really smart person, you go to school with 12 people, and your high school,

Karen Foglesong: 16:51

and you got to feed the cow before you get there.

Erin Branham: 16:54

Exactly. And you have work to do and all, so when she got out of that environment, like she went all in. Like she was very sort of science based. I was really into science. And so to hear somebody talking about consciousness felt a little more accessible to me than religion, because like I said, my mother was an ex-Catholic. She was very anti-Christian. And that was kind of the only religion that was around. Yeah. So I had sort of rejected religion as a whole concept at the time. Because as you're saying, I didn't even know that there was a difference between religion and Christianity.

Karen Foglesong: 17:33

Right. That was the first definition you had to learn.

Erin Branham: 17:38

Yeah, to this day, people do that all the time. Right. They say, I hate religion. They always want to, you know, make you go to the priest. Do you know that's not everybody? Right? I hate you know, I hate religion. They're doing this. And they're doing that. And you're like, No, only Christians do that. Yeah, just the Christians.

Karen Foglesong: 17:57

Yeah, that's true.

Erin Branham: 17:58

But people don't realize because when they say that, they just mean what's around them. So you know, when he (Campbell)'s saying this - And going, Oh, right. There are all these other places. They're all these other ways to think about God. They're all these other ways to think about so. And I particularly loved that he points out that - we were talking about that prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain that talks in words and chatters at you all the time, and it's analyzing everything and that worries and all that stuff.

Karen Foglesong: 18:29

Yes,

Erin Branham: 18:30

And this really emphatic way he goes that it thinks it's in charge, but it is a secondary organ. And, and right, like I just melted down at that point, I was like,'What?' my noisy brain said noisily. 'How dare he say I'm not in charge, right? I'm clearly in charge. And not just because I sound exactly like your mother!'

Karen Foglesong: 18:54

Very good. Yep.

Erin Branham: 19:00

There's actually this whole thing going on throughout your body, throughout your body and in the back part of your brain that is experiencing this world in a completely different way that doesn't have anything to do with all that chatter. And that linearity, you know, A leads to B leads to C leads to D, it's experienced in the world, like full on all the time,

Karen Foglesong: 19:21

which is why stories speak to that part, because the story is full on out there. You know, that's very true.

Erin Branham: 19:30

And I mean, art in general is like that, yes. It speaks to that experiential, symbolic part of ourselves. Yeah, that doesn't get fed a lot these days - in this day and age.

Karen Foglesong: 19:45

It's true. And you can see this too. If you're going through an art exhibit to me, and I could be proven wrong. I don't often get to talk to the artists themselves. But to me, it feels like the people that are plugged into that mythic storytelling are the ones that suck you in, you can't walk away. Because you can be a brilliant illustrator and there's no soul. And your irises or whatever, you know, they're brilliantly executed, but there's no story in them. And we walk away from them.

Erin Branham: 20:18

Definitely. That is very true. And that was what was so, again, so great about Campbell. He also took it beyond humans, right? He didn't just talk about body consciousness, he talked about plant consciousness. He does his whole little bit about Heliotropism and plants moving towards the light. And the plant, even the plants are alive and have souls, which was something I had always felt deep in my understanding of the world and there was no space for it.

Karen Foglesong: 20:45

Not in science, that was your rescue and not the people around you. Right? Yeah.

Erin Branham: 20:51

Science has come along since then.

Karen Foglesong: 20:53

Yes. Well, there's that book, The Secret Life of Plants that was put out in the 1830s. And that was scientific experimentation that proved consciousness of plants. But we didn't like it. I mean, there's experiment after experiment documented in that book. It was out of print for years. They're just recently reprinting it now, I think.

Erin Branham: 21:14

That's awesome. Let's be sure to link that in the show notes. I will also link you to some places where you can find The Power of Myth for free online. So if anybody hasn't seen that, you can get a chance to take a look.

Karen Foglesong: 21:29

And there's the Joseph Campbell Foundation that you can access online. And then Joseph Campbell's works are at Pacifica Graduate Institute, right. They have a lot from his house and I was such a big geek when I walked in there. Oh my god, there's his ruler.

Erin Branham: 21:50

No kidding. I love those things. We talked about this earlier that one of the things I loved with Joseph Campbell, and Bill Moyers, in the second episode, which is called The Message of the Myth, he leans over, and he's like, so why should we be interested in mythology? Joseph Campbell goes, well don't if you don't want to, just let it go. I loved that, because, well, I loved it, because he wasn't selling it, right. We live in this, like deeply consumerist capitalism, where even knowledge and meaning has become a commodity. Right? And so to hear him go, this may not be your thing and that's okay. It was just - it's radical. It was really radical. And then he says, But, you know, if you listen, this may catch you, this may capture you. And, you know, I was like, I was already captured at that point. So I was like, yes. Tell me more.

Karen Foglesong: 22:43

Please tell me more.

Erin Branham: 22:45

Yeah, but I mean, right now we're dealing with, we have a whole host of problems in the modern world. Political, it's like our political system is blowing up. We don't know what's going on. Just everything's crazy. community cohesion is breaking down. We're dealing with a pandemic, climate change, education systems under attack, all these things that are so difficult, how is mythology going to help with all that?

Karen Foglesong: 23:08

I think it has to do with tribal identities. So I think that's a big piece that's missing in our psyches right now. So if you're, if you're a Christian, if you're born into a Christian religion, and you're raised in a Christian religion, you have like a network of people that if your auntie gets sick, somebody is going to bring some casseroles, you know. Yes, those things happen secularly. But mostly that happens within your church congregation. And that gives you this larger than family sense of tribal community. And I think that's what we're really missing. And if you can figure out your story, then you can figure out who has similar stories. And you can create a kind of loose tribal identity so that you have somebody to bring you casserole when your auntie is sick. And they're not, there's not judgment attached to it. There's not you know, it's it's an easy bring me a casserole, you know, if it's, it's not like a neighbor down the street that you don't, that might be a little bit alien to you. It's part of your - we all talk to God in the same way kind of tribal identity unity.

Erin Branham: 24:17

I think community is a big reason why I didn't understand that. Because like I said, I was raised in a very sort of anti-Christian household. And then I moved to a small town in southern Arkansas, and was able to see how the churches kept the community together. Right, just like you were saying, I had not really had any experience of that, the way that they support, you know, members of the congregation and do things and all that. That was my first real coming in contact with it. And that's a place where I met some really true Christians. Yeah. Meaning people who actually follow the teachings of Jesus,

Karen Foglesong: 24:53

they walk the walk. Yeah,

Erin Branham: 24:55

yeah. Because there's I mean, as we will know, there are so many who don't. How do you think that growing up in the Bible Belt shaped your relationship to mythology? Because for me what it was, people are yelling at me that I don't believe this stuff. And they don't really believe this stuff. Yeah. I'm so confused, right?

Karen Foglesong: 25:16

Pick and choose, you know that this person wants you to step behind your father and this person is. I don't know, I don't know how to give the examples. But yeah, like, like one of my youth director at one of the biggest, most popular church in my little town, ended up being brought up on charges for pedophilia. And it went on, you know, it went on for years before that happened, we had to get to the age of time where we could even have the discussion. Yeah. But that's not- it's not one of the 10 commandments, Thou shalt not touch your children, but it's pretty clear in there.

Erin Branham: 26:03

Well, but is it? I mean, that's, that's one of the issues, I think, with Christianity is that there are examples of terrible, terrible things. And I'm pretty sure there's some pedophilia, they didn't have any problem with marrying off a 12 year old girl, I'm sure.

Karen Foglesong: 26:25

Well, she wasn't considered a child.

Erin Branham: 26:32

But the point being, like, I saw a really wonderful rabbi who works here in Los Angeles, and is very much working on creating a super inclusive congregation. And, and she just said, Look, we have to acknowledge that within our sacred texts are things that can be interpreted to do great harm, we have to acknowledge it. Also, within our great sacred texts are things that are of great wisdom. And I just loved the authenticity of her coming forward and saying, we, we all do this, pick and choose and all the things that we say, well, that doesn't really count anymore. But that does. And just like I liked to hear her come forward, and say, I'm going to just say it straight out, there is some stuff we need to leave behind. And some of this stuff we need to emphasize. But I think part of the reason we see all this despair and things sort of falling apart is because there is a crumbling of some of the older mythological systems. More young people say that there are not affiliated with any religion. The issues of you have to cherry pick, because so much time has gone by, from the time of the sacred texts that you can't just wholesale apply their social rules to us anymore, right? And look at how many fights we're having over that. Right? Why are people in America against LGBTQ? It's because of Christianity, and they will tell you that. It's not just like, I don't like it - they say it's against God. And therefore we're gonna start enacting laws based on it, so that's a good reason to just like be mad about that. I don't want to just dismiss that and go, no, what you should be worried about is that people aren't mythologically engaged at all.

Karen Foglesong: 28:22

No, right now. Yeah, you can hold both. Yes, absolutely true.

Erin Branham: 28:27

But I think that's our problem, right? There isn't a replacement. At the moment there's nothing, there's no story big enough to contain our new global society and all its chaos right now.

Karen Foglesong: 28:45

All of the systems that we have previously were very much black and white. And we're all realizing that there are a million shades of grey in between there. They're not even shades of grey, you can pick shades of purple or blue or you know, like really seeing the rainbow for real now. And understanding that.

Erin Branham: 29:04

Well exactly. Yeah, I think that has to do with it too - when I grew up there were Christians I knew, I had a vague notion of the difference between Catholics and Protestants only because my family was Catholic

Karen Foglesong: 29:17

It had something to do whether Jesus was on the cross or not.

Erin Branham: 29:25

But the big difference is Mary. When I did the when I did the Cakes for the Queen of Heaven course at the UU church in Little Rock we did a whole session on Mary. The difference between the people who came from Catholic backgrounds and the people who came from Protestant backgrounds was striking. We should do a whole thing on Mary. We should do an episode.

Karen Foglesong: 29:46

Yes we should. The Black Mary too. The Black Madonna.

Erin Branham: 29:50

Ooh, yes, the Black Madonna. Oh my god. Yes. There's a lot of richness there. My aunt has become Marian which is a whole thing you can do in Catholicism. You can say I'm into Mary - Jesus was cool and everything but Mary's where it's at. Very interesting. It's very interesting thing about that. So part of what we're doing here is that with all this breakdown, we sort of have no choice but to create our own mythology living in the modern age, you know, a personal mythology, because it's not like there's going to be some fabulous new religion that emerges and unites us all anytime soon.

Karen Foglesong: 30:28

Well, and to be fair, I would be highly suspect.

Erin Branham: 30:34

Well, again, we're Gen X. We're not joiners.

Karen Foglesong: 30:38

Not joiners. No. But I really enjoy finding people like yourself where I can interact, talk about the story behind the religion. And sometimes, you know, like, when we were young, we did bash Christians a little bit, because that's where we were coming from, you know, that's rebelling. But that's not what it's about. It's about figuring out the pathways to that energy, that make your psyche whole, right? to be the healthiest individual you can be, to not be freaked out, stressed out all the time.

Erin Branham: 31:18

Right? Absolutely. And that's one of the great advantages of doing this is when you can construct stories that make a lot of sense to you. Look at mental health studies and they will tell you that people with faith tend to be more emotionally resilient, because that gives us the thing that Jung said. We have this quote here. So this is Carl Jung:"Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals, which are not of real importance. Thus, we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions - our talent our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims. And the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand and feel that here in this life, we already have a link with the infinite desires, then attitudes change." And for me, that's what this is about. It's about creating a relationship to the infinite.

Karen Foglesong: 32:30

Absolutely!

Erin Branham: 32:32

Do you feel like you're related to the infinite, you feel like you have a sense of being related to something infinite?

Karen Foglesong: 32:39

I do. And I really, we've talked about this before, but I really love Einstein's, what's the Einstein quote about, we're all made of the same star stuff. Because there's only so much matter in the world, and it just keeps getting recycled. So I really find great power in that I am part of that huge cycle. Like that's how, how much more awe-inspiring does it have to be? you know, there's a piece of a star right there. Can you see it?

Erin Branham: 33:17

I was saying that the iron that is in your blood carrying oxygen in your blood right this minute was forged in the heart of a star, like that is scientific fact. It's amazing, it is amazing. And we'll get into that, right, in our next episode we were going to talk about the the essential functions of myth, matching knowledge with the infinite but yes, I think this search, this creation process that we talked about - choreographing your own spirituality helps keep you related to things that are infinite and living symbolically, really being in touch with symbols. Thinking about that. Living symbolically does that for me, like a hummingbird took up and nested on our patio last year.

Karen Foglesong: 34:06

I remember that.

Erin Branham: 34:08

I talked to you about it, Karen. Yeah, the first thing I did when I realized she was settling in was... Do you want to guess?

Karen Foglesong: 34:15

Look it up!

Erin Branham: 34:16

Yes! I looked up the symbology and they told me hummingbirds are powerful symbols. They're all over the world. They have very specific meanings. And I was like, Yeah, all right, like I just was able to and now every time I look at her I have that sense of being related to something infinite, and touching something bigger than myself.

Karen Foglesong: 34:37

Absolutely, absolutely. The book Why God That's absolutely what your looking for. The Buddhist monks Won't Go Away talks about how people - you were talking earlier about how we have evidence that shows that faith who are able to achieve really intense meditative states, they helps to keep a psyche well and they talk about the fact that the brain needs something bigger than itself to believe in to feel complete. And whatever that bigger thing is needs us to believe in it or it doesn't exist. And they track people that were praying and meditating and whatever other words you can use to talk to God or plug into the infinite. And all of those people shifted their brainwave patterns. And it reduced the negative effects of stress and you feel connected to the world in a way that feels healthy and natural and organic. show that the part of your brain that creates your sense of self- all of the blood and the activity goes out of that to these other spaces in your brain- that's part of why you really lose your sense of self and not through your talking prefrontal cortex that keeps telling you that it knows what's happening. And really, the action is behind that. And that's really the reason like, that's what I'm in this for. I love that, I actually love that, like there is this whole part of myself that's deeply creative, in touch with the infinite, and it's working all the time. And I do have to do some work to get it up into that chattery front part of my brain. But that's okay, because it's fun work. And you could turn it into art and stuff. Art and stuff. I love that answer. I feel like we need to get hats made for each other. They just have a little patch right here that says "Hush."

Erin Branham: 37:01

All right. Well, I think we have pretty much covered everything we were going to talk about today. This is our first episode. So we don't really have an established wrap up. How do you want to say goodbye, Karen?

Karen Foglesong: 37:12

Thanks for joining us. And we hope that you want to come play with us. It's not about dissing on any one religion. This is all about, like, we've been talking and creating a community of people that are interested in discussing the possibilities of the infinite.

Erin Branham: 37:43

But absolutely, just drop some stories in the comments. Tell us about how you've built your mythology or your struggle with whatever religion you or faith or lack thereof, and what it does to how you relate to the infinite and, take care of your soul.

Karen Foglesong: 38:04

And if you want to, too, this is a thing that you can play with these things that we were talking about is write a story. Sit down and write a story from your past. Like what is, what is your family mythology? Is that okay, that I asked them to do that?

Erin Branham: 38:19

Absolutely. Because we've been talking about that we might drop some activities and things. So I think that's a really good one. Think of a story. Think of a story you tell when somebody first meets you. I know that by my age, like I got 10-12 good stories when I meet somebody, sooner or later they're gonna hear those stories. Write it down and take a look at it as a myth. See what the meaning of it is for you. That's a great idea, Karen, I love it.

Karen Foglesong: 38:46

Right on.

Erin Branham: 38:47

Alright, thanks so much. And we'll see you again later.

Karen Foglesong: 38:51

Bye