“Some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.”
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
This is my favorite passage from Moby Dick. Here our narrator, Ishmael, is stating (questioning?) his belief that everything has meaning or significance — whether or not it speaks to us, whether or not we can comprehend it. He believes that without meaning the earth is nothing, and by extension life has no meaning. But Ishmael is no nihilist. He ponders the meaning of everything.
Curiosity and Interest is one of my top five Character Strengths (test your’s here or here). I’m attracted to shiny objects (and by that I mean, yes, physical objects, but also bits and bobs of information) and like Ishmael, I too am frequently looking for significance and meaning.
And, apparently, I don’t mind really long sentences. Nor do I mind starting a sentence with ‘and’ (sorry, Mr. Webb).
Since I mentioned it I should let you, dear reader know that this can be a vice of excess. That is, I am distractible —
– SQUIRREL! –
— and prone to question people — their motives or reasoning — which doesn’t always play out well in interpersonal relationships.
As you may have gathered by now, I don’t mind the occasional flight of fancy — metaphorical thinking, symbolism, and well done allegory (even when the author says they don’t like allegory, Mr. Tolkien).
What follows are some of the more common motifs that seem to pop out at me when I’m reading. The treasures (to me) that I tend to look for among the flotsam and jetsam of life’s coastline.
Hero’s Journey: aka “Monomyth”
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from the mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Joseph Campbell
Borrowing a term from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Joseph Campbell called this template “the monomyth,” indicating it was the ultimate narrative archetype.
The Monomyth refers to a cyclical journey undertaken by a mythical hero in three acts:
- Act I – Departure
- Act II – Initiation (tests & trials)
- Act III – Return
On the surface the framework is useful as a roadmap to stories and movies. I’ve used it with great success in developing presentations. Even Ray Dalio used the format in his work of non-fiction, Principles. For more information on this method, see Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers, and Nancy Duarte’s Resonate.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Joseph Campbell
A deeper mining of Campbell’s books (see list here), influenced as he was by Jungian psychology, reveals two things:
- Myths also point us to our place in the cosmos, our role in the great movement of the universe. They are more than the origin stories of the universe and the cosmogonic cycle,
- Myths are a society’s outward manifestation of inner conflicts and desires, and represent a transformation of the individual through a spiritual quest, battling our own dragons.
“We may therefore think of any myth or rite either as a clue to what may be permanent and universal in human nature (in which case our emphasis will be psychological, or perhaps even metaphysical), or, on the other hand, as a function of the local scene, the landscape, the history, and the sociology of the folk concerned (in which case our approach will be ethnological or historical).”
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Book I, Primitive Mythology
If you want to explore that cavern deeper, I can think of no better lamp light than Jordan Peterson’s book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.
“Myth is not primitive proto-science. … Myth can be more accurately regarded as ‘description of the world as it signifies (for action).’ The mythic universe is a place to act, not a place to perceive. Myth describes things in terms of their unique or shared affective valence, their value, their motivational significance.”
Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning
OODA Loop
“For the human mind in its polarity of male and female modes of experience, in its passages form infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone — the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master of all the gods.”
Joseph Campbell, Masks of God, Book I, Primitive Mythology
As far as I can tell, Colonel John R Boyd never met Joseph Campbell and none of Campbell’s writing appears as citations in Boyd’s presentations or papers. That said, in my answer to the question “if you could have a dinner party and invite any five people living or dead, who would you invite?” they would be on the top of my list.
In 1976, then retired but working as a consultant for the Pentagon, Boyd wrote a paper titled “Destruction and Creation.” This philosophical treatise lays a foundation for his strategic theories, integrating Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, Heisenber’s Uncertainty principle, the second Law of Thermodynamics, and according to the bibliography, ideas from Polanyi, Popper, Kuhn, Fromm, Piaget, Skinner, and Alan Watts(!).
To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning. The purpose of this paper is to sketch out how we destroy and create these patterns to permit us to both shape and be shaped by a changing environment. … generating both disorder and order that emerges as a changing and expanding universe of mental concepts matched to a changing and expanding universe of observed reality.”
John R Boyd, Destruction and Creation
Here is where Boyd first starts putting together the pieces for his “cybernetic engine” of Orientation that drives the decision cycle, aka the “OODA Loop,” (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). Its not until 1996 that Boyd presents the above sketch, in a four slide presentation called “The Essence of Winning and Loosing.” On the sketch Boyd gives us the key insights: “Note how orientation shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window. Also note how the entire ‘loop’ (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.”
In my previous career as a law enforcement officer and a “Park Medic,” the ability to Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act faster or more efficiently than the persons I was contacting, was the overarching philosophy(?) strategy(?) to survival during proactive engagement in VUCA environments.
Map & Compass
It stands to reason that if we are on a journey, and we are ever orienting our direction, a map and compass would be helpful tools. I love teaching land navigation because of the unavoidable associations with metaphor, symbolism, ‘sacred geometry,’ and, dare I say, philosophy.
“Our most fundamental maps of meaning–maps which have a narrative structure–portray the motivational value of our own current state, conceived of in contrast to a hypothetical ideal, accompanied by plans of action, which are our pragmatic notions about how to get what (or where) we want.”
Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning
Most prominently in ‘self help’ or psychology for the masses literature, maps represent your plan, your understanding, your sketch of reality. In your mind’s eye some homunculus cartographer is blending schemas, scripts, stories, previous experience, and training into a planographic reference of the way the world should be–pouring over the meaning of so many contour lines and other symbols, as if they were QueeQueg’s tattoos, which were the meaning of life.
But, be warned, the map is not reality, only a best estimation thereof.
“…time makes liars out of maps. By the time they are printed they are already partially out of date.”
W.S. Kals, Land Navigation Handbook, The Sierra Club Guide to Map and Compass
The magnetic compass–invented more than a millennium ago for divination by Chinese prophesiers–contains a peice of electrically charged metal that aligns itself with the Earth’s magnetic field, thereby indicating the north and south pole directions. The compass symbolically evokes the the idea of navigating one’s psychic course by conscious alignment with invisible nodes.
These nodes could be “true north principles” (Stephen Covey), or our “ultimate mission” (Jim Joehr and Tony Schwartz). If your compass was a Joseph Campbellian model its needle would likely point to your ‘bliss,’ just as Jack Sparrow’s compass points to the thing he desires most.
Cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice) have likewise been associated with the “cardinal points” of north, south, east, and west. A properly defined European compass has 32 points. To these one might assign their character strengths, values, or deep held beliefs. Regardless, these are the ideas we rely on to guide us, especially when the map doesn’t seem to properly depict the terrain. Without these we may be climbing the wrong mountain, as David Brooks says–the ‘false summit.’
Like what you’re reading? Has this information been helpful or entertaining? It’s all free, of course, but if you feel moved to the point of spending money, I won’t stop you from clicking this PayPal donation button…
