Because life reveals itself to us as a tale unfolding, the arrangement of the words evolves into the arrangement of the narrative (or incidents). We imagine it, we ‘signify’ it, we decide what is ‘significant’. Myth is not, as some claim, the mystery of the unknowable. Myth is the process of spontaneously deciding what is significant.
And yet, we are dissatisfied with this, for it implies a kind of closure, a narrowness to myth. We go back to the word: myth also finds its root in the Lithuanian ‘maudzu’ or ‘mausti’, to yearn for. There persists an element of longing in this way we imagine our world, a longing to reach beyond the limits of the self, to open to the world. The more one opens to the world, the more possibilities there are for finding significance.
For the narrow imagination, significance is found only in the churn of daily life. A kind of myth, nevertheless. The narrow imagination finds significance only in those events that affect itself – love, success, family, fear, money, fame, illness, death, and so on.
The imagination could open to the possibility of absolute significance. No decision need be made. The effort of deciding what is significant is dropped. All is significant. All remains, nevertheless, empty. Only against an absolute emptiness can an absolute significance be revealed. We are not necessarily talking about ‘meaning’ but ‘connectedness’. All acts, all objects, are understood as expressions of coincidence. The world meshes. For the open imagination, the mirror and the agent are coincident, the mind and the phenomenal world are coincident. The names spontaneously arise as the coincident voice.