FACTS AND MYTHOLOGIES

I have this notion that we need to treat our facts as mythologies, and our mythologies as facts. In particular, science is the most recent addition to our vast collection of stories about the world. I try not to see it as a special category that supercedes all the previous stories. The old creation myths, for example, contain important truths. But we cannot experience those truths if to us they are 'just' stories: they need to be felt as real - in a way that is no different to, say, the Big Bang, which of course no-one was around to see. 

And here's something we're not used to culturally: being able to hold two truths, two stories in our head, without having to eliminate one of them as 'false'. When it comes to death, on the one hand I like to be true to my experience and say 'I don't know, I really don't know'. And yet I can't resist a song like this from the Wintu people of Northern California:

It is above that you and I shall go;
Along the Milky Way you and I shall go;
Along the flower trail you and I shall go;
Picking flowers on our way you and I shall go.

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