[FAO David Mathisen]
David, Let's suppose you're right. Myths worldwide have a similar underlying structure and we don't know exactly why that is -- could be some kind of connection that disparate populations have with the collective unconscious, and that connection could be flavoured by local cultural factors. Let's take seriously the contention that you have uncovered this similarity and are claiming that the myths are trying to tell us something important about how to make spiritual progress in our lives.
If there can be superficial differences providing glosses on an underlying commonality between the myths of Ancient Greece, Egypt, the Norsemen, societies in Middle and South America, etc. then it seems not unreasonable to suppose that the myths might be equally capable of evolving as human societies evolve. Who knows, the latest version of the myths may be cast in the mould of ETs and UFOs. If that's the case, then maybe that's telling us that the older versions aren't currently apposite to our situation (though one can see the value in documenting them and trying to find parallels with newer myths).
There is some evidence that the ET/UFO mythology is an updating of the mythology of the past. Read, for example, the book
Meaning In Absurdity by Bernardo Kastrup. In the first chapter, he gives a few examples of strange events, one of which is the following:
Springtime in North America, in the 1960s. A man steps out of his house and comes face to face with a saucer-shaped object hovering above his yard. A hatch opens and the man sees three entities inside the craft. The supposed aliens are small and dark-skinned, like certain types of fairies. One of the entities holds up a jug to the man, a gesture the man interprets as a request for some water. Space aliens, able to fly undetected across solar systems, needing to stop by and reveal themselves to a man in order to fill up a jug of water? What is the logic of that? Nonetheless, the man obliges, filling the jug with water from inside his house. When he returns, he sees one of the entities inside the craft frying what appears to be food on a kind of grill. Upon taking note of the man’s interest in their food, one of the entities hands the man three pancakes. Thereafter, the entities close the hatch, take off, and disappear. Naturally, it would be easy to dismiss such story as the delusions of a pathological mind, especially given the fact that no physical evidence could be found upon further investigation; that is, except for the pancakes, which were sent by the United States Air Force for analysis at the Food and Drug Laboratory of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Kastrup explains that the man was Joe Simonton, whose
case was analyzed and reported by respected French UFO investigator Dr. Jacques Vallée in 1970. As it turns out, the pancakes that the ‘aliens’ supposedly gave Joe were made of perfectly regular earthly ingredients. Puzzlingly, however, they did not contain any salt. As Vallée stresses, Joe Simonton was considered a very reliable, sincere, and trust-worthy man, this being the reason why even the Air Force took his original claims so seriously. Vallée then goes on to compare Joe’s experience with old fairy stories from Celtic folklore. As it turns out, there is a wealth of folk stories where the fairies either offer or ask for food. Interestingly, fairies never eat salt. Vallée makes an elaborate and convincing case for the relationship between modern encounters with ‘aliens’ and old fairy lore. He suggests persuasively that ‘aliens’ and ‘spaceships’ may be simply the modern ego’s interpretation of the same primary stimulus that inspired the original folk stories about fairies and elves.
Later, Kastrup says:
To Harpur, the calls of the absurd are protrusions into our consensus reality of phenomena anchored in the daimonic realm: a realm that is both material and immaterial; both fact and fiction. Thus, ‘daimonic reality’ is a kind of intermediate realm between the physical and the spiritual, between reality and imagination, embodying characteristics of both. Harpur identifies this realm with what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious,’ although Harpur – more explicitly than Jung – does not restrict the daimonic to the inside of our heads alone. In the realm of the daimonic, the imagination operates in its most natural form: through analogical – not literal – thinking; through metaphor, not causally closed modeling. Indeed, Jung has suggested that parables and similes are an older, more archaic mode of thought than linear logic and rationality. This archaic mode of thinking currently survives mostly in dreams.
Maybe it's not so much that the myths are trying to tell us something, as that human beings sometimes (perhaps more pervasively in the past than the present) have access to a "daimonic realm". It may or may not be actively trying to tell us something, but the point is, regardless, we may infer something about the nature of reality -- that it might be neither wholly logical/physical nor wholly "spiritual".
The "daimonic realm" may be one which has its own characteristics that we may sometimes be able to perceive, and we might ask ourselves whether, most of the time, we aren't experiencing a "reality" that isn't complete, but rather one that is prevalent in our culture. Ask ourselves if we're like someone walking around with a patch over one eye, seeing the world only from the physicalist viewpoint. Maybe others wear a patch over the other eye and interpret everything in spiritual terms. Maybe those most attuned to reality don't wear a patch at all and see the world "binocularly", so to speak.
We are creative beings; we may participate in, be co-creators of, the "reality" we perceive. For many in the West, that reality is physicalist and devoid of meaning. Others may be appalled by the nihilism and be seeking a world filled with meaning; one might say they're on a spiritual path. But both may be missing a possible truth: that either view on its own is deficient. With both eyes open, we may have a pathway to observing reality differently, and the potential to interact with it in ways most of us can't comprehend.