Why Atheists Need Mythology - Archetypes and Muscle Dysmorphia

[WillCameron]

A Rational Guide to Personal Myth

As an atheist, I believed that the steady collapse of Christianity was entirely beneficial. I definitely still believe that dogmatic religious belief must be brought through the filter of rationality and deconstruction. However, I’ve come to learn that there are real consequences to the loss of mythology. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has connected this loss to a "meaning crisis” that emerges as anxiety, depression, and loneliness. As the Jungian psychology D. Stephenson Bond says, “what is myth but the meanings that structure our lives…myth gives our growth the flavor of a plot.” In this article I’m going to argue for why atheists should adopt a personal mythology as an antidote to nihilism.

In my last article, “ The Evolutionary Necessity of Myth ”, I argued that myths are not simply “false stories” that were failed attempts at primitive science. Instead, they served an evolutionary purpose because certain myths are more adaptive for a culture depending on the environment they find themselves in. For example, if you lived in Ancient Greece, you likely needed myths about Achilles and Zeus in order to survive those violent times.

As I asked in my last article – given the environment you live in, what stories are going to help you become a better person who can navigate that environment better?

When we look around at most of our myths, it becomes obvious that they tear us away from reality, from living good lives, and from science’s ability to understand that environment. Holy texts are full of lines that directly contradict what science has revealed and contain moral codes that are now considered blatantly unethical. These myths fail utterly at adapting us to our modern world, and this is precisely why so many of us feel anxious, feel depressed, feel nihilistic, and feel like our lives have absolutely no impact on a world that is completely meaningless anyway.

So, if myth is so important, and if we are left without any legitimate myth that could give our lives meaning, to orient us through the present and into a desired future, it seems like the obvious path is to develop a personal mythology. This is the ethos that Carl Jung dedicated his life to articulate, that once a cultural myth fails, it is up to the individual to pick up the mantle of myth. Now…how do you actually do that?

You can find out more tomorrow!

Edited August 25 by WillCameron
Too much content too soon.

[WillCameron]

The Rational “As If” of Symbolic Consciousness

The writer Brendan Graham Dempsey says that an essential component of personal mythology is the “as if” mode where you pretend “as if” your life has meaning, where you pretend “as if” things happen to you for a reason. This is what gives your life a sense of forward momentum, a sense of plot, a sense that this is happening to you for…a reason, and that reason can be almost whatever you want. You can believe that everything you do is completely meaningless and there’s no difference between staring at your bedroom ceiling all day or getting up to something…meaningful, enjoyable?

Now, you might interject and say, “I see where you’re going with this. It’s more motivating to give my life a bigger ‘reason’ because then I’ll actually live more of my life. I’ve heard this before and I can get why that’s probably better for your mental health. But…that doesn’t change the fact that reality is meaningless. Objective, material reality doesn’t care about us and we have to come to terms with that.”

Okay, fine. We do have to come to terms with nihilism. We have to realize that “meaning” and “reasons” may just be things human beings come up with to make ourselves feel better in order to survive, but more importantly, to thrive…like…you can actually do that too.

Whatever the truth of meaning and nihilism, as I’ll talk about in the next article, we have to come to grips with rationality and deconstruction because of the very real dangers that come with myth. There is a filter of rationality and deconstruction, and however personal and atheistic your mythology may be, you still have to take it through that filter.

However much you may pretend that the things you experience have a reason to them, you still have to make sure those reasons are…reasonable. Remember that a myth is meant to effectively adapt you to your environment, and so a myth is made profoundly more adaptive by rationality and science.

D. Stephenson Bond refers to this rational “as if” mode as symbolic consciousness and says that it is a balance between objectivity and subjectivity, between logic and fantasy. We live in a myth while knowing we’re in a myth. However “meaningless” it might be to choose between staying in bed or getting the fuck up and living life, I know exactly which I’d prefer to do. However quickly my “meaningless” life and relationships will be forgotten after I’m dead, I know exactly how much I enjoy them while I’m actually here, living them. The “as if” mode of pretending that all of this has a reason is because it gives you a reason to live this brief life you have in a way that you’ll actually enjoy while you’re here.

With that being said, the rationally filtered “as if” mode is not simply about giving our lives any reason. It might be easy to assume that the goal is to live life to the fullest in terms of pleasure, but as the psychologist Victor Frankl says, “When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” A life in which our present is full of pleasure and oriented toward the pursuit of more pleasure is not meaningful, but that is exactly the solution many of us have already fallen into.

Instead, you want your personal myth to highlight the most important elements of your past in order to orient yourself in a present you can navigate so that you can envision and move toward a future you actually want to create. You want to have a life narrative that is true to the facts, that is rational and understood with healthy, critical thinking, but one that actually helps you create the life you want to live and to have an impact on the world that you consider meaningful.

The point is – if you can connect your life narrative to reasons that motivate you toward a purpose that in turn helps you bring your vision to life, then you’ve successfully used rational “as if” thinking. I’ll be giving you an in-depth example of this in the article after the next, where I’ll be giving a definition of MetaMasculine.

Here though, you may be wondering, why call this a personal mythology? So far this just seems like understanding your personal history in a healthy, motivating way. This is where Jungian archetypes come in. The philosopher Robert M. Ellis defines the archetype as, “any symbol that helps maintain meaningful inspiration over time.” In the creation of a personal mythology you want to identify symbolism that energizes you, that mobilizes you toward your growth as a person as you learn to better adapt to the environmental conditions you find yourself in.

To get a better grip on why archetypes are important, I want to introduce you to the four archetypal functions that Ellis talks about:

1. The Heroic Function
   • To live and develop as human beings in the long term we need the ability to make plans and see them through to fulfill goals.
2. The Shadow Function
   • We need to be able to identify and avoid or eliminate long-term threats.
3. The Anima/Animus Function
   • We need to be able to develop relationships with those who are different from us, but who may have complementary qualities. Think of this as an antidote to narrow specialization where we’re looking for qualities we don’t have.
4. The Potentiality or God Function
   • To remind I am an atheist, I do not believe in God, and so that’s why I’ve named this the Potentiality function. This is probably the hardest to wrap your mind around, but the general idea is that we need to be able to maintain a vision of the possibilities for our own individual long-term development and that of our communities, while keeping ideals in mind for how things could be as well as how they are. When this function works well it is about opening ourselves to real potentials that exist beyond us.

Again, this is symbolism that is meant to mobilize our energies to perform these functions in our lives over the long-term. When you watch an inspiring movie, you have had your Heroic function energized. When you watch a romantic movie, you have had your Anima function energized. When you watch a documentary that opens your eyes to some aspect of reality that you knew nothing about, widening the potentiality of your feeling, thinking, and acting beyond prior limits – that would be your Potentiality function.

Regardless of which function has been energized by the whole package of symbolism in those movies, the point is that they inspire us to move in meaningful directions over the long-term. And that’s actually the issue. I say movies because they are good examples for understanding how archetypes can have the energizing power they do, but they are a bad example as far as motivating us toward something legitimately meaningful long-term.

Sure you can watch a beautiful love story that motivates you to connect more deeply with your girlfriend, or that motivates you to go out to actually get a girlfriend. However, it’s highly unlikely that these movies inspire action toward these things for very long. Often enough we lose motivation and then go back to living our meaningless lives as usual.

I know that last sentence sounds harsh, but a meaningless life is harsh and in the digital age we are constantly being bombarded by symbolism that mobilizes us in random directions. Often these directions are defined by whoever can afford to get the right symbolism in front of us. What this leads to is a projection: put simply, this means that your own inner power becomes hooked onto and then corrupted by these symbols. We are sent in random directions and prevented from redirecting ourselves.

The key takeaway is that you are already being given archetypal mythologies by big corporations who are only motivated by the desire to make as much money as they can from you. These are the mythologies you are already living by.

The next part to be released tomorrow!

Edited August 25 by WillCameron

[WillCameron]

Archetypal Projection in Muscle Dysmorphia

Let’s take a look at a specific example. In recent years muscle dysmorphia has increasingly become a problem for young men. Growing up I had severe body image issues and they eventually manifested as muscle dysmorphia. While I never purged food, I would binge on unhealthy foods and then go on a 2 hour bike ride to burn those calories off. This was after having already taken my bike to work, stood all day at work, and then weightlifted before biking back home. I would then deprive myself of sleep just so I had the time to do all of this.

To “motivate” myself I’d go on the subreddit r/bodybuilding and look at images of guys who were clearly taking steroids. They were muscular, shredded, (seemingly) confident, and badass. In other words, they were everything that I wasn’t and so, I was deeply motivated to become just like them. Surprise, surprise when this led, at 23, to my own use of steroids. I only used them for a single cycle of 16 weeks, but saw a huge increase in muscle and strength – and fat. By the end of the cycle I was struck by how little I now liked the way I looked. One of the things I always heard on the subreddit is that there is no such thing as one cycle, and seeing how I looked after only one, I now knew why.

Fortunately that was the only time I have ever done steroids and my relationship to my body is far healthier. I’ll probably go into that in a future article on male body dysmorphia. However, the major point that I want to make with that story is for you to notice how I projected my own power onto the images of the Olympian physique. They served to mobilize and then ossify several of the archetypal functions.

Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, is the fact that seeing these images mobilized a Heroic projection. I had a series of goals and looking at these images motivated me to stay true to my exercise routine and, when I binged on food, they motivated me to take no prisoners and conquer myself by “working the failure out of my system” through compulsive exercise.

They also indirectly mobilized an Anima projection because they represented the body I needed to attain in order to deserve positive attention from women. Shamefully fat as I was I didn’t deserve any positive regard, but by imagining myself muscular, I could also feel myself motivated by how many women I would be able to “get”. And finally, these images mobilized me against threat – through these images I was taught to hate my body, my impulses, and my current self.

You can see here how motivationally complex even a single symbol can be – they serve far more than one function and are related to a wide array of beliefs and emotions. However, they also shaped and formed my beliefs and emotions. They taught me certain beliefs and reinforced beliefs I already have in regards to my goals, about what it takes to attain women, that women were something to attain, that my body was inadequate and I should hate it unless it was perfect, and so on. All of my own inner powers were hooked and then caged by the way in which these images affected me.

Many of the men who were posting themselves only wanted positive attention for their own achievements or to motivate other people. If any of them knew that somewhere out there a young man was destroying himself with these images, many of them would have felt awful about it, and so I don’t mean to blame them at all.

This is all related to one of the most important points I hope you take away from this article – you are already living a myth that is defined by archetypes existing out there in the world. These archetypes are mobilizing you toward goals that they themselves influence you to value and give you specific beliefs and strategies.

My Heroic projection was in how I could only be a Hero by achieving this Olympian physique. Of all the ways I could have achieved something meaningful, my options were hyper-narrowed and fixated on this one option, and so it was inevitable that I would do anything necessary to achieve that. Again, just so I could have some sort of positive self-regard.

Of course, these symbols come up against the beliefs you already have, so it’s not like they influence in you in a vacuum. I already believed that I wasn’t enough  and so when I looked at those images they reinforced that belief, and then that belief was warped into thinking that the only way to like myself was by attaining that body through the use of steroids. Someone else with body image issues might come along and be repulsed by these images, and instead wish to be as skinny as possible. Another person with good mental health may view the same pictures and be inspired to workout in healthy ways.

Even though archetypes work with your prior beliefs, the point is that they do have an effect, and so they can take advantage of the dissonance within your own belief system. If you would have asked me whether women only liked muscular guys I would have told you that this isn’t true because many women liked chubby guys. However, I had also been bullied for being fat while I was growing up and so I learned that being overweight meant pain and social ostracism. Muscularity was the only way I would be able to prevent that pain and social ostracism because I would be celebrated for being muscular just like those guys on r/bodybuilding, and I would be accepted and loved by all those women who did like muscular guys.

The last update will be tomorrow!

 

[WillCameron]

Reclaiming Your Archetypal Mythology

Let’s connect the dots I’ve outlined so far. I had a certain life narrative about my weight that informed the reasons for why I wanted to become muscular. At the time I self-identified as a nihilist, but I clearly lived “as if” my overweight was the reason for why I wanted to become muscular. I was then confronted by the archetype of the Olympian physique and this mobilized my energies toward the creation of my own Olympian physique. However much of a nihilistic atheist I was, I was clearly still living a mythology and it was quite literally threatening my life.

As such, if you’re already living a mythology that influences and is influenced by the archetypes that exist out in the world, then it simply stands to reason, rationality, and logic – that you should actively, consciously start creating and living by your own personal mythology. This would be a mythology that is defined by your actual life narrative, but interpreted in a way that gives reason for who you want to be as a man and the life that you want to live. Additionally, rather than being pulled by archetypes that you compulsively view because you hate your body (or however that manifests for you specifically), you are instead motivated to seek out archetypes that mobilize your energies towards growth that would be healthy for you.

With all of that being said, I know this all seems very abstract. Given the length of this article already I don’t want to go into too much depth. I’ll be applying this to specific archetypes, such as the succubus, in the future. However, what I’d like to end on is how exactly archetypes can be used to promote our growth. This is called the process of integration6.

So let’s return to the example of the Olympian physique that motivates young men to have muscle dysmorphia and unhealthy lifestyles. Let’s say that you’re one of these young men. What you want to do is to start feeling into a wider context that allows for more possibilities. One strategy would be to start a meditation practice to cultivate awareness. Your increased awareness allows you to begin connecting your underlying beliefs and emotions related to the archetype with the archetype itself.

Even though I didn’t understand archetypes at the time, once I realized how r/bodybuilding was affecting me, I immediately stopped using it. Awareness of the problem itself was the only curative I needed to stop my daily worship of the Olympian archetype. Within a matter of days the desire to use steroids again began to vanish. For yourself, whether you experience muscle dysmorphia or not, meditation can help you notice how the various things you engage with mobilize your energies toward emotions, beliefs, and lifestyles that you no longer wish to have.

Meditation also helps to, “soothe [us] by relaxing the body enough to allow alternatives to emerge in our awareness.” In other words, rather than being knocked this way and that by your desperate need for the perfect body as a salve for your inadequacy, you’re able to find some sort of calm center amidst that still raging emotional storm.

Ellis further describes meditation as a way to illuminate our mind so that we can actually see what’s going on in our mind. You’re now not so tightly bound to one way of feeling or thinking about things, and thus, new connections can be made. For example, you can create more reasons for self-compassion rather than mere self-hatred or self-denial. This would allow you to respond to your failures in ways that make sustainable success more likely. The reason I kept bingeing on food despite my desperate desire not to, was precisely because I punished my worthless self with compulsive exercise, rather than forgiving myself and loving myself.

Again, if you’re also someone who struggles with muscle dysmorphia, you can begin to see how weightlifting can be an avenue for health and accomplishment rather than merely attaining some perfect ideal as a condition to finally love yourself. You can become aware of how the compulsive exercise is hurting your body and instead make room for something that relaxes your body, whether that’s some easy yoga or a hot bath with a good book. You can see how these moments of rest and recovery are as important for improving your body as a heavy workout in the gym.

In other words, through the process of mindfulness you can begin to integrate, or bring together, the various elements of yourself that have been rejected based on old beliefs and unresolved emotions. By becoming aware of the archetypes that are already mobilizing your energies you can begin to challenge and change them, or perhaps drop them altogether for a better alternative. In either case, you are able to expand your understanding of yourself, your goals, and the world.

Now, obviously the process of integration is far more complex than this, but you can already see how powerful something as simple as meditation can be for this process. Like I said, in the future I’ll be going far deeper into specific archetypes, as well as how you can identify your own and learn to connect with others that are more empowering. This was merely an introductory piece to demonstrate the importance of personal mythology and the power of archetypes in that mythology. You are already living a myth, likely one that has been given to you without your conscious awareness or consent. If you want to live a myth that supports you, you need to bring consciousness to the myth you’re already living and then transform it into a myth you’d prefer to live.

On my substack I will be giving you all the theory and exercises you need to make your own personal mythology, but I will also exemplify the theory by offering my own personal mythology. If you connect with the symbols and narratives, then by all means use them, change them, adapt them to your own mythology, but also be open to finding other archetypes that suit you better.

At the end of the day, personal mythology isn’t just an intellectual exercise. Bond says this well, “mythological consciousness comes from the need to live in a context. Fantasy coalesces into a ritual that moves our bodies. Play evolves into work that moves our hands. The game becomes a style that guides our lives.”

As such,, I wanted to give some pointers on how you can take up a meditation practice if you haven’t already. One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make is to assume that it’s about having a perfectly clear mind. When they sit down they immediately realize they’ve just spent the last 5 minutes lost in thought. They think “oh damn I must be doing it wrong – I don’t have a clear mind! I guess meditation just isn’t for me…”

This isn’t what meditation looks like when you first start. Instead, meditation looks like setting a 5 minute timer, sitting down in a chair with your back straight, and then doing your best to focus on your breathing. Then, in less than a minute you suddenly realize you got lost in thought. This might be frustrating, but when you first start meditating your first lesson is that you cannot control your thoughts. Every single time you become aware that your mind has wandered and you bring your attention back to the breath, you’ve won! The more you catch yourself lost in thought the more you’re winning because that means you’re becoming more and more self-aware.

Over time you eventually gain the ability to become more self-aware faster. Connect that with what I said above about identifying emotions, beliefs, and archetypes. To be able create your personal mythology you must first become aware of the mythology you’re already living and how it is affecting you. Again, meditation is one of the best possible skills for doing that. I cannot recommend meditation enough.

So, to be clear about how you can start:

1. Set aside some time to meditate, I recommend every morning after your shower.
2. Set your timer for 5 minutes. This is a good length to start with because you don’t want to overwhelm yourself. It’s better to start small and work your way up to 20-30 minutes because consistency is way more important at this point.
3. Count your inhale 1, exhale 2, inhale 3, exhale 4 up to 10, and then start back at 1.
4. Each time your mind wanders, try your best not to judge yourself, and then compassionately bring your attention back to your breathing, starting at 1.

Two very important rules to follow are to number one – always sit for the entire session until your timer goes off. However difficult your session may seem during it, you will almost always gain the most by sitting it out. Even if your mind is wandering constantly you are always getting better at meditation as long as you do it consistently for the full time. Secondly though, you also want to cultivate compassion for yourself. A really cool piece of advice I learned from Vervaeke is to view your thoughts like puppies. When you notice the puppy has wandered off, you compassionately bring it back to you. You never get mad or hurt the puppy. That’s how you want to view your thoughts when they wander off.

Either way, that is enough for today. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more articles and conversations that go very deeply into masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a meaningful personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.

References:

1 – John Vervaeke (2019) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—YouTube. Retrieved August 2, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ

2 – Bond, D. S. S. (2001). Living Myth: Personal Meaning as a Way of Life. Shambhala.

3 – MetaMasculine. (2024, August 15). Why Myths Still Matter: The Evolutionary Role of Fantastical Stories.; The Evolutionary Necessity of Myth—By Will Cameron. (n.d.). Retrieved August 17, 2024, from https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/the-evolutionary-necessity-of-myth

4 – Dempsey, B. G. (2023, June 14). Building the Cathedral | 2. Drafting [Substack newsletter]. Brendan Graham Dempsey. https://brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com/p/building-the-cathedral-2-drafting

5 – Quote by Viktor E. Frankl: “When a person can’t find a deep sense of meanin...” (n.d.). Retrieved August 13, 2024, from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5738688-when-a-person-can-t-find-a-deep-sense-of-meaning

6 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.

7 – Cerea, S., Bottesi, G., Pacelli, Q. F., Paoli, A., & Ghisi, M. (2018). Muscle Dysmorphia and its Associated Psychological Features in Three Groups of Recreational Athletes. Scientific Reports, 8, 8877. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-27176-9

8 – Meditating with John Vervaeke—YouTube. (n.d.). Retrieved August 17, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8VujAHvDA482SXF1cJTQrwlx3