experience; a layer of the soul that deals with the interconnections between places
and events, and even anticipates future places and events and mythologises them
through a process of symbolic abstraction.
The information one gains through this aspect of soul, which manifests for
some as SC or MLC, is never clear and distinct the way information from either
sensory data or abstract thought can be. Rather, it is wild and vague, heavy and
primitive; in a word, mythopoeic. As wild as this mode of perception may be, it lies
at the root of all human experience. I t exists prior to egoic perception,
complements it throughout the life of the individual and supplies the base
knowledge from which humans form abstractions in order to grasp the coherence of
their lives as enacted in place. I n a balanced tension with egoic consciousness, SC
and MLC produce an awareness of a de-centred self, a personal existence across
time and beyond place; one gains a sense of personhood because at the deep root
level of the collective, an individual perceives continuity across the events and
places of their life, both actual and imagined.
11.2 Emergent Themes of the Research
(a) Meaning Beyond the Triviality of the Mundane.
One of the things I set out to establish was the existence of an imaginal-
mythopoeic tradition that reflects a dimension of the psyche that transcends the
meta-historical tradition of Western civilization. The historiography of that
dimension, where the individual becomes an active co-creator in an existential
narrative of a different dimension of awareness, was described in Chapter 2. What
it established was that the act of reading and writing a fictional narrative, or more
particularly of creating (co-creating, in the case of the readers) mythopoeic text, is
frequently undervalued and what we often fail to consider is that it is really myth-
making, accessing another dimension, an elsewhere-place; it is an act of the
greatest existential importance. This has been substantiated in the responses of the
cohort mythopoeic writers, the works of other mythopoeic writers, and confirmed by
the cohort readers. Parallel with this are the responses and textual material relating
to shamans, a template of sorts, that allowed comparison.