Over 3 years ago I decided to release my YouTube “lecture” on my mythological and cultural discoveries. Thank you to all the feedback and interest. So far the response has been positive, with several people from universities contacting me, and interest from people all over the world. The search for “meaning” and purpose in life continues and appears to be a universal longing from lots of people today.

My original intent in my mythopoeia lectures wasn’t to try and pretend to be some literary or cultural scholar pushing some philosophical agenda on the reader. The original idea was to “reinterpret” myth and story from the point of view of a layman and neophyte, and my own personal search for spiritual meaning in literature which today has been almost completely lost.

What I found as a young man roaming the libraries and reading all this mythic material was that most of what Humanity in the past wrote about was based on a longing for Truth, where as today most of what writers and movie makers write about is their desires.

One of the central failings of Modern people is the idea that everything we must do should be about survival or defending our own religion or artificial cultural empowerment we all construct to derive meaning in our lives. Some choose family, others money or business interests, some politics, others marriage or relationships. We each have our own delusions.

But once you see the existential social play you participate in, and that your “roles” as mother, father, husband, wife, career expert, business person, educator, savior, king, or jester are just parts in that play, you then have the capacity to “break free” of that society – if but for a few brief moments – and see yourself for what you truly are. Then can come the spiritual moment that writes your own Mythopoeia….the story of the Endogeneity of the Soul from within. For seeing the illusions you created for yourself internally, the shades of society collapse around you, you know longer “need” or “want” but are free to see with joy the meaning in the world around you and in all others.

The idea came to me as a young man while at Southern Methodist University that I could be free of these chains I placed on myself and let society place on me, and venture out via writing to a spiritual plane, where human interaction, love, drama, struggle, and relationships, could be portrayed in story as but part of a bigger play within me. I rejected the idea idea however that life is but a Machiavellian “Game of Thrones”, mafia family conflict or fierce competition where the strong survive upon the landscape of American culture. For that is what animals perceive of their station in life. From that has come a massive influx of violent conflict in entertainment; mafia family drama, competition, sex, greed, and violence in Modern storytelling.

Instead what I saw in fantasy was the capacity for a much richer, deeper, more meaningful purpose for Life…..one where a divine Creator in union with the life summoned up from Nothing might find meaning in the conflict they created. And yet in their story could be seen some beauty, some grander, if more mysterious purpose, behind the bigger struggle.

It’s through history we as Humans have seen strange events that lend themselves to the deeper sense of tragedy we have about the life and death around us. The JFK Assassination, for example, has had a very transcendental affect on Americans. It’s seeing the double-edged sword of history…..it’s great joy at living expressed and yet it’s dire and very dark tragic ends, that hides what Mythopoeia and writing in spirit expresses best.

And that is what was attempted in this YouTube lecture – the need for Modern writers and movie makers to move beyond their own needs to write about sex, relationships, and violence and attempt something that lies way beyond their own life-sphere, yet which their minds secretly capture and feel everyday, if they would but seek a new sensitivity in their views of Life.

That is what drives my own writing today and what I hope will come to pass as I try and complete more books in my novel series, the Phantammeron.

— the Author, August, 2020