The myth of Arachne tells of a mortal woman who boasted that her skill at weaving was greater than that of Athena. Inevitably, things go badly for Arachne and she ends up as a spider weaving webs instead of tapestries. I always felt sorry for the girl and a little disappointed in Athena; the goddess of wisdom should be above petty jealousies, shouldn’t she?

I understand now that there is a valuable lesson even in my reaction. The great myths are not to be interpreted as literal stories and the gods are not to be judged as if they were powerful humans. It is the insistence that myth should be held up as fact and that we should “believe” in Scriptures in the same sense that we “believe” in what we learn from empirical considerations that has been eroding the spiritual core of the three major western religions since the time of Paul of Tarsus, even while they have expanded across the globe.

Where then is the real message in the story of Arachne? Perhaps the key is that she was a weaver. Weaving, a skill and an art form in which individual threads are woven to create a thing both beautiful and useful.

It is a wonderful metaphor for the skill required to live our lives as we combine the threads of our natural endowments, our accidental circumstances and our fundamental needs to create a personality and character that, like a tapestry is tough yet flexible and, if our skill is sufficient, adorned with beauty. (Although I was not thinking about poor Arachne at the time, I titled the essay in which I described my own path to a more spiritual life, “Threads” and my initial impetus for change as an “unraveling.”)

I have discussed, in “The Theory of the Sentient Mind,” how the gods themselves are metaphors for the evolved archetypes by which we recognize and seek the fulfillment of our fundamental human needs. They are the root of all we desire and all that we seek to avoid. They are the wellsprings of those experiences which bring force and emotional meaning to our moral values, without which they are empty intellectual shells.

The underlying psychological mechanisms which we know as the gods (or when we abstract what is common to all, as God), dwell in the Sentient not the Sapient mind; a part of us that lies outside the boundaries of what we experience as the Ego. This is the mystery, proclaimed by spiritual teachers, explained: God is outside of the self but is none-the-less to be found within.

The ego encompasses the Sapient Mind, the intellect, and it products. We say my thoughts, my work, and my perceptions of the objective world. It is identical with consciousness which also perceives the subjective world as we also say, my feelings, my pain, and my happiness. But there is more, there is the region we call the subconscious, the place of dreams, the place of myth; an elder realm the ego does not control and does not claim. It is a place we ignore at our peril for the gods also dwell there and as Jung said, “Bidden or unbidden God is near.”

The human intellect is indeed mighty, and we have learned to use it, through the discovery of the rules of empirical thought, to uncover the mechanisms of nature, empowering our kind to rule the earth. But herein also is danger, for when our knowledge, a product of the Ego, is super-imposed upon our direct perceptions, we see things only as we understand them to be, what we believe we see, and the deeper regions of the Sentient Mind, the very well springs of “deep meaning,” of “soulfulness” are cut off from the light of day. The wisdom of the mind supersedes the wisdom of the heart. The Ego has set itself against the gods. This is Hubris.

Poor Arachne, how could she have known that the practice of her good arts could lead her astray in this way? The work of the ego, of the intellect is not only empowering, it is essentially human. A healthy ego is a prerequisite for the healthy life, though not a sufficient one. Nor does is it make sense, in the pursuit of deeper meaning and more spiritual lives, to compromise empirical thought with dogmas and superstitions that insist on literal belief in things that at their very core are essentially metaphorical. This practice too is the work of Ego for the gods accept all paths that lead to them. The modern day skeptics are right on about this.

But if the religions are being strangled by their own dogma while the New Age spiritualists invent arcane metaphysical systems in their attempts to make spiritual experience palatable to the intellect, the skeptics are in danger of committing Hubris. The gods are as much a part of human nature as our bodies: both must be fed or the organism will not flourish.

The theory of the sentient mind is empirical and like any scientific theory it will stand or fall by its ability to explain the observations and make compelling predictions. The phenomenon it explains is that pervasive endeavor that has characterized every human culture: to find meaning in life and derive from that meaning moral and esthetic principles that are the hearts and souls of civilizations.

A geologist may apply theory to field data and predict that if one digs in a certain place he will strike gold. The chemist predicts an amazing reaction if certain substances are combined. My prediction is this, that if you conduct the experiment and open your mind to the possibility of spiritual experience, understood not as a connection to the supernatural, but to the richness of your own subconscious mind, and you may indeed strike gold. But be careful explosive reactions are also common.