Mystery is the Message

If you object to me rewriting the Bible, I admit that my fanciful story about Adam and his family is absurd. However it sets me to imagining ideas that would otherwise never be thought. 

I think that in the beginning there was no idea and no word; it was what it was. Much much much much much later came consciousness, experience, ideas and words to describe them so that children might learn from the elders how better to survive in a dangerous world. 

Myths promise adventure, victory, safety, comfort, control, meaning, purpose, passion, rules, methods, approval, discipline, and easy answers to hard questions. Whatever we think from within such bubbles of potent promise, reality is what it is: a beautiful, dangerous mystery. The universe rolls the dice and we play the odds with a little help from our myths. 

In spite of all that, we make a mess. We can't help it. That's how it works. Call it original sin or entropy depending on where you get your myths. With the help of myth, we may be wise enough to survive for awhile longer if we don't make too much mess. Otherwise, what will be will be.

We think such thoughts not because myth provides answers but because myth is so absurd that we must question it. 

What's so absurd about Adam being the first man? Since Darwin, Dawkins and Dennett, and survival stochasticity, now we know that the minimum viable population (MVP) of a vertebrate species is approximately four thousand, give or take a few thousand. There was never a first human. There were always ancestors by the thousands reaching way back to FECA, the First Eukaryotic Common Ancestors. Before FECA were millions of billions of bacterial and archaeon ancestors. Was there ever a first, an initial singularity? Maybe. Even scientists need a myth to raise new questions.

But will there be a last?

Myth is not the message. Myth gets our attention by pointing to the mystery hiding within layers of absurd narrative. Tell me a story. Tell it again again again. Let me feel wonder and curiosity. Let me question the discrepancy of experience and metaphor. I want mystery.

Mystery is the message.