Pandora's Box

I've been thinking about this ancient Greek myth lately. I remember it from my childhood in the same way I remember many of the fairy tales I heard or read. Here's the way I remember it:

Somehow Pandora (seems important she's female, like Eve in the Garden of Eden mythology. We'll talk about that at another time.). She has acquired this box from the Gods, and she isn't supposed to open it, but can't seem to help herself because of her intense curiosity. Of course, as soon as she opens it even just a crack, out comes flying all these horrific things, things that supposedly had never existed for humans before: disease, pestilence, famine, war, etc. She tries desperately to close the box before anymore horrors emerge, and just as she is about to get it closed...out flies Hope.

Now, as I remember it, the moral of the story is this: even though we now have all these terrible things to contend with and suffer through in our lives, at least we have hope. This is a good a thing, it seemed. How could we possibly bear all the terrible things there are in life without hope?

Now let's change the perspective a little.... Most, maybe all the 'horrors' released into the world from the Gods on that eventful day by curious Pandora, are really no more than what one experiences by being a living being on this planet: disease, discomfort, tragedy, death, violence (and, we assume, joy, peace, love, connection, fulfillment). What makes this myth significant in my mind is that it persists as a representation of something endemic in our shared cultural dream, going back to the ancient Greeks. At some point, the human cultural group from which evolved the dominant human culture on this planet now, conceived of themselves as not being animals any longer, saw themselves as being something other than, something superior to animals. At some point this human group no longer considered themselves to be a part of the whole community of life (Daniel Quinn term), rather they felt themselves to be apart from the community of life. As a result of this voluntary(?) expulsion from the Eden of being a part of life, there was no longer a context in which birth, life events, and death made sense. Life itself, as experienced and felt by these humans, was an experience of displacement, not-belonging. Life events no longer had meaning in and of themselves.

So, now we have a group of thinking and feeling animals who experience life as angst-ridden and lacking in intrinsic meaning. We now have a group of people who feel an overwhelming need to be saved from their lives; and since the everyday of their lives was always and ever vulnerable to unpleasantness, and since the everyday of their lives is inevitably the now of their existence, then any chance of salvation from all this anxiety would have to dwell in the future, a concept which probably did not even exist in the way we conceive it now before the advent of hope.

Hope automatically redirects the trajectory of peoples' lives away from the now and toward a conceived time that does not, cannot, and never will exist. The future never happens. It is only a mental construct. When the future arrives, it is always now.

The other change that occurred when hope emerged was the loss of place. Now and Here are synonymous. If Now is lost, then there can be no Here. If I do not know when I am, how can I know where I am. I do not know when I am because I reject the present in preference for some hoped for better future. If I am not now, then I also cannot be here.

We rejected being animals, we rejected our interdependence with all other living things with which we share this life. The very biosphere upon which our existence depended was felt as being frightening, threatening, unfriendly...not our home.

...So, get here now, for a moment. Look around you and note how many humans you see who are plugged into one or another kind of electronic device: ears plugged, eyes glued to screens, voices speaking to disembodied presences. All this can only produce one result: these people cannot know where they are. There is no connection via their senses of the here and now. They are distracted by some otherwhere, some othertime. The 'virtual' has become more real.

How could we have done anything other than what we have done to this planet over the last 15,000 years? We don't feel that we belong to this planet. We don't fell that we need it. Our gaze is elsewhere. We're looking ahead. We're hoping. 'It's gotta be better just over the horizon.'

Of all the things Pandora unleashed on that fateful day, only one was a curse. Hope.