Popular traditional religion tends to be associated with "Creation" myths, or archetypal and allegorical stories that, in their proposed details, try to account for the existence of the world and mankind as the effects of acts on the part of either one or many Deities. The origin of such stories is in the "primitive" awe of existence experienced by pre "civilized" human individuals and groups. That awe was experienced in relation to the mysteriously and unaccountably existing natural and human world, and the "Creation" stories were themselves human psychic creations, or projections of the human psyche onto the natural forms of existence. Indeed, "primitive" myth-making expresses a fundamental and profound Realization, that the "natural" world is not merely physical, but it is entirely psycho-physical, or an interplay of the psychic and the physical, and that both the "visible" and the "invisible" are Rooted In What Transcends both psychic and physical phenomena. Likewise, that same Realization affirms that human existence is not merely a matter of knowing and suffering physical events, but it is a kind of Quest, or Great Ordeal, wherein the human individual must ever strive to achieve psychic unity with the natural world, psychic association with the Power that Pervades the natural world, and Ultimate Realization of the Inherently Perfect Condition beyond even the total world. And this Great Ordeal is presumed to involve the constant transcending of merely physical reality by the constant invocation of the psyche, the Great Power that can Help it, and the Great Self-Condition That Is its Ultimate Source-Condition. Therefore, the "Creation" stories were intended not merely to account for natural existence, but to project human beings into a participatory psychic relationship to the natural world. "Creation" stories generally communicate via images associated with the physically based psyche. And although one "God", and many "Gods", and many "Goddesses" are described in "Creation" myths as the Causative Powers of the world and mankind, the original motive and source of these descriptions was not any otherwise independent experience of either the local or the universal Deity, but the primal experience of awe in the context of gross bodily existence in the "natural" world. In other words, the "creative" source of "Creation" myths was not "God", "Gods", or "Goddesses", but the psychically mysterious and terrible experience of physical existence and the physical world. On the basis of that experience, the human psyche anciently began its "natural" work of generating psychically effective means for transcending fear and for Realizing true participation in the apparent world. And once human beings began to participate psychically even in the gross phenomenal world, they began to develop complex mythological representations of the Mana that magically, or miraculously, or omnipotently causes all effects. The fully developed ancient "Creation" myths originally appeared in animistic societies. As collective myths developed over time, a hierarchy of powers was conceived. Thus, animistic myths of local powers were progressively enlarged toward a cosmic description of senior and great Powers. And these descriptions were themselves often developed to the degree of hierarchical grandness, with the "One" at the top and all multiplicity expanding below (Therefore, the "One", even as "Creative God", was not the exclusive and original discovery or, as some would have it, the exclusive and original invention of any particular society or culture, although some proponents like to argue or claim that the Jews were the originals in this regard. However, the Jews in particular in reaction to their early historical disintegration as an independent political collective, and in anticipation of the dispersal of Jewish people among the peoples of all nations did raise their own tribal, or local, "God" to the status of a universal and Absolute "God" King of all nations. And this universalizing and rather political, or "civilizing" tendency of progressive Jewish, and, later, Christian and Muslim, monotheism eventually provided a basic justification for all Western political, social, and cultural efforts toward the unification, and even the universal "Westernization", of mankind.) In any case, the truly original and really "creative" source of all ancient and traditional "Creation" myths was the native "interior", or the archetypal and hierarchical design of the human psyche itself. And, as it was perceived by shamans and psychic visionaries and seers of all kinds, the "Great Within" is grounded in the body and it extends upwards, even bodily, to the subtler reaches of the body-mind and the subtler reaches of the mind itself. Ultimately, both high and low are to be Most Perfectly transcended in the Beyond That Is the Heart Itself, or the One Divine Reality of Being Clearly, the ancient "Creation" myths were, by virtue of traditional techniques of psychic inversion, psychically inspired and, therefore, all types of mythic ''thinking'' express the many and various possible levels of traditional human psychic participation in the apparent world. Therefore, no such traditional myths are Absolute, and none of them are based on any kind of scientific conception or perception of the physical world. Rather, all of them are based on a purely psychic urge toward the total world. And, in all such myths, it is not the physical world but the innate design of the human psyche that is the principal subject displayed by means of myth. Ancient myth-making was fundamentally an expression of "primitive" magic, mysticism, and Spirituality, rather than an early form of science. The myth-makers were not merely trying to describe how physical forms are produced, but the myth-makers were trying to raise human existence to a greater level of participation in the total context of natural existence. Therefore, myths were, originally, psychic tools for the achievement of magical, mystical, and Spiritual "intoxication" and ecstasy, or the Realization of a psychic state of non-separateness, non-fear, and Ultimate Unity. And myths were, therefore, not merely pre-scientific and, thus, according to the scientific view, wrong but myths and myth makers represent the specifically religious form of human culture and individual endeavor, which form of culture and endeavor is, even now, in its greatest moment of struggle. In the process of the pursuit of hierarchically greater and greater levels of ecstasy, visionaries developed the ancient concepts of the "chain" or "ladder" of the cosmos. And the ecstatic experiences of Ultimate Unity achieved by certain uniquely great individuals eventually led some cultures to postulate an Ultimate Singleness. The ancient and traditional myths have been culturally transmitted down to the present day via traditional religious cultures and sects. And each culture or sect tends to value its own myths as exclusive and final "Truths". However, now that mankind is gathered as an intercommunicative whole, the provincialism of exclusive myth and exclusive religion has become both obvious and untenable. Therefore, more and more, mankind must receive all traditions, together, as a basically single Great Tradition and that Great Tradition must be rightly interpreted and fully understood. Relative to "Creation" myths themselves, they should not merely be criticized and dismissed as pseudo-science, but they should be understood as exoteric artifacts of "primitive" magic, mysticism, and Spirituality And it is no longer either necessary or appropriate for religion itself to base itself on "natural" or cosmic arguments for the existence of "God". As all the Great Seers have proclaimed, Real God is not "out there". Rather, Real God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, or Happiness Itself Is "within". Indeed, Real God Is Existence Itself. Real God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, Happiness Itself, or Existence Itself Is Self-Evident. And Real God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, Happiness Itself, or Existence Itself is, therefore, not to be "proven" by conceptual argument but Real God, Truth, Ultimate Reality, Happiness Itself, or Existence Itself is to be directly Realized. The Message of all "Creation" myths is a Call to magical, mystical, and Spiritual ecstasy, progressively transcending the hierarchies of "Creation". Myths themselves are not a call to mere belief, but a Call to ecstatic Real-God-Realization. And, once myths themselves are Out Grown, the final Call is to Realization of That Which Is Beyond all conditional and cosmic categories. As long as the propagation of "Creation" myths is limited to the domain of popular exoteric religion, all myths are used more or less exclusively to support the popular social, political, and institutional purposes of public "civilization" but, if religious myths are visited in the context of the real process of self-understanding and participation in the esoteric Spiritual culture of ecstasy, then they serve as psychic reminders of the Great Ordeal that leads, Most Ultimately, not to a "Place" above the stars, but to the Transcendental, Inherently Spiritual, and Self-Evidently Divine Self-Condition and Source-Condition the Beyond That Is the Heart Itself. And just as that Great Ordeal does not stop either in the world of the gross body or in inner visions of the cosmic Man, it is not necessary that religion itself begin in belief in a "Creator-God". Indeed, such "Creator and creature" beliefs are primarily about the world and, therefore, they tend to affirm and idealize gross human and social existence, rather than to effectively guide human attention to ego transcendence in Real God, or Truth, or Inherently Perfect Reality, or the Most Ultimate Realization of Happiness Itself. Therefore, may not religion begin as it must end with self-understanding and a Spiritual Awareness of That Which Merely Contains, Pervades, and Transcends the world ? And is it not by religion itself that Real God, or Truth, or Inherently Perfect Reality becomes "Creative", whereas, otherwise, the world and Man are "Created" and changed by much and all that is not Divine? Indeed, if Real God, or Truth, or Inherently Perfect Reality were the Direct, Simple, and Only "Creator", religion would not be necessary to convert, and raise up, and "Perfect" any one at all, but Perfection Itself would "Picture" here in the Perfection of all "Creation". Until the One and Perfect Is Realized, all the countless imperfections gather in twos and threes to pester and break the heart. And this begins at the "beginning" itself, or in every present instant of perceived separation between "light" and "dark", "this" and "That", "Heaven" and "Earth", and the "other" and "I". Therefore, the true Message of myth is ego-transcendence. If by myth the natural world and the human self are conceived and perceived to arise within the Context of the Spiritual and Transcendental Divine, then the total world and the human self are not merely to be desired and clung to for their own sake, but the total world and the human self are to be progressively transcended In the Spiritual and Transcendental Divine.

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