We have substituted the symbolic life with an intellectual life.

It’s a kind of amputation that we’ve dressed up as progress.

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.
—Richard Rohr

The symbolic and mythic layers of life weren’t just decorative or primitive. They were the meaning-making infrastructure of human experience. When you moved through a rite of passage, or participated in a ritual, or understood your suffering through a mythic frame — you weren’t escaping reality, you were deepening into it. The experience became something that could be held, metabolised, integrated into who you were becoming.

What we replaced it with — the intellectual and mental modes — are brilliant tools for manipulating reality, but they’re terrible at receiving it. You can analyze grief, explain it neurochemically, develop coping strategies for it. But you cannot think your way through grief. The symbolic and emotional layers are precisely what allow experience to move — to transform you rather than just accumulate in you.

And what I’ve been noticing is this deeper consequence: without those layers, feelings become threats rather than messengers. Because if you have no mythic container for suffering, no symbolic language to give it shape and meaning, then suffering is just... malfunction. Something we need to fix, suppress, or medicate. So we build elaborate intellectual and behavioural systems — productivity frameworks, optimisation routines, therapeutic protocols — essentially to manage what we refuse to inhabit.

The uninitiated man is often not someone who lacks intelligence or even self-awareness — he can explain his patterns endlessly. What he lacks is the capacity to let experience land. To move through rather than around. That’s exactly what initiation once provided — a structured descent into the symbolic and emotional depths, held by community, framed by myth, so that something real could change inside the person.

Somatic work, community circles, and good therapeutic practice — are partly attempts to rebuild access to those layers from within, in the absence of the cultural structures that once provided them automatically. And I believe that we need to create more consistent structures within our communities to bring back this lost but essential part of being human. Communal spaces, workplaces, all levels of education, sportclubs, after-school activities, etc. should invest more in building and integrating awareness around the themes of meaning-making and intentional story-telling, and learning what it means to hold space for all our feelings and emotions, both for others and ourselves. These spaces are actively shaping our identity and belonging and those of our kids, but are largely doing so unconsciously, and without intention.

We have substituted the symbolic, mythic life, with an intellectual and mental life. We have lost the connection to our emotions and the meaning of our feelings to the point where we even fear them, so we use logic and science to keep us in a sense of control and safety.