We've seen y'all mention mythic selves a few times and still don't quite understand what it means, would you mind explaining? Sounds interesting and possibly similar to some of our own experiences
I sat here for like five minutes trying to think of how to put this, because some kinds of knowledge really don’t like trying to be described with words (especially English ones, I guess. you really gotta work for it in English)
also because the crows outside are straight up having a rap battle or something and they only shut up when I yelled “do y’all want to help me explain what a mythic self is???”
anyway. so the way I understand my existence is that there’s layers to it, and the most “restricted” or law-bound layer is my human life, right here on this planet. then you’ve got the dreamself, which has a few less rules -- you know how dreams work, you can do all kinds of weird shit in dreams and your dreamself is like “yeah, this is absolutely how reality works” and you wake up like “well that made no sense” but Dreamself does not have that dissonance because it does make sense to them
my Inworld self is another self, and is like Dreamself except with way more control and, of course, connection to/communication with the outworld self. if you think of these like layers stacked on top of each other, as you go up the scale the level of connection with the, idk, the ~primal fabric of reality~ or whatever gets greater. the truer the self gets (ironically, the self is at its truest when it’s completely unbound and at its most difficult to define)
so the highest level is the mythic self, and that’s basically like... the enduring self, the self outside of time* and entropy, the... Oversoul? and I think there are mythic selves that are inextricably bound to a neverending cycle of storied existence (this is where Dark Tower knowledge would help, because I’m really talking about Roland Deschain here) but there are also tricksters, who are... well, bound in a different way, bound to always be changing, bound to mess with and sometimes unravel bits of the fabric of the universe... “mythic” works as a term here basically because the kind of self I’m talking about is the kind that is most often depicted in humanity’s most essential and enduring stories (usually as gods, or heroic figures that never seem to die). we try to play out these parts in our everyday human lives, because we’re echoing our mythic nature, which plays out over various worlds/timelines/whatever. my mythic self has certain features -- certain experiences and traits that are integral to its fabric -- and I can see those features in this lifetime, a prosaic echo of them, but there nonetheless
when I see a character in a story and I feel that pull, that’s me recognising my mythic self in another reality. it’s like if you are a time traveller and you run into your younger self.
... that’s the best I got. also I haven’t eaten breakfast yet so I might be even more inscrutable than usual
*I say “outside of time” in the human sense of time. mythic time is absolutely a thing but it’s not the same kind of thing
