Reimagining our Collective Story: Integrating all that we know
It’s about the stories we live. The stories we peer through to understand our human experience, to relate to life and to be in relationship with life.
Our stories offer us a framework to understand and assess life. We base our reality on them, determining if we’re going in the right direction, or if an interaction is normal or not.
These stories reside in our consciousness, both individually and collectively. The stories are the myth intelligence; the complement to the rational intelligence. Myth intelligence lives deep in our psyche and allows us to circle concepts to know their essence; concepts we’ll never directly touch, concepts the rational will never pointedly know.
As it stands, our society highly values rational intelligence. Science and reason rule the day. Our sense of truth is defined by what science can “prove,” which has resulted in myth often being mistaken as something that is simply not true. This perspective denies the intelligence inherent in myth, and denies a form of intelligence that is inherent in all of us. Indigenous cultures have preserved the myth intelligence. Its value and practice have remained intact. This preservation provides insight to those of us who are seeking to re-imagine, regenerate myth intelligence for our current times. A reference point as we journey through the process of healing our collective consciousness, of re-populating our shared we-space with new stories.
For at this point in time, we are in transition in our collective story. We are straddling a wide open canyon, with one foot still on the rock that is “The American Dream” and the other desperately searching for somewhere new to land. As we continue to take in information and digest our reality we transform as new input makes us evolve.
Many of us are coming online to our materialistic, consumption-based approach to the world not working anymore. Our cultural “us versus them,” zero-sum mentality is no longer of service. I bow in honor of the role these cultural mentalities have played to get us where we are today. And now it is time for a new set of understandings to take their places.
For we live in a very different time than even a few generations ago. Much has evolved. As a society we have opened up, all of our corners and crevices are on display. Our knowing and understanding of the world has been deeply enriched, and with this complexity a sophistication has been born. We have more to integrate into our stories, more variables to consider. That’s why this reimagining process is so full.
The process requires going back to move forward. It requires learning about the web that I’m part of to understand what karma is held in my genes, what wisdom lies in my bones; and therefore what I’m consciously and unconsciously co-creating. The process of going back creates a sense of belonging. Who am I? Where am I from? It provides a container to couch and embed my human experience within; a larger storyline to reference and weave my individual journey of self in. A home in this vast, open world.
In a day and age when we as humans are evolving at lightning speed and have such a large amount of information about the world, the looking back process isn’t always easy. For many of us - or possibly all of us to some extent - it means looking at and forming a relationship with our ancestors’ participation in dysfunctional relationship with the Earth, dysfunctional relationship with Life, dysfunctional relationship with Self and Other. It requires being present with our families’ track records of rape, pillage, persecution and enslavement; for those of us who are of European descent, the colonization of the Earth and Her children. It requires being present with the way our ancestors have been raped, pillaged and killed. The way we still embody that trauma and unconsciously play it out.
If we are truly to embrace this new, ever-connected world then that requires integrating all of its realities within me; all of its realities within my human experience.
Can we just escape and not face the melody of what we participate in? Can we just ignore the fact that so much of our system is based on the exploitation of Earth and other? This computer that I type this on - how many examples of destructive dynamics do you hold? Between where and how your parts were manufactured and assembled, to the way you are made to break. The answer is yes, we can choose to ignore and play dumb to what we are engaging in. Many of us will take that path. And then one day all of the tipping points will be reached, planetary boundaries crossed and we’ll be forced to face the music. We’ll be forced to rethink how we’ve conceived the world.
Hi, I’m Liz Moyer Benferhat. Writer, facilitator, coach, and development practitioner dedicated to the subtle interplay between how inner transformation feeds the outer transformation we need in the world. Welcome 🌿