Flexing Mythopoetic: The Ultimate Integration

“I have gained this by philosophy; I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.” ~Aristotle

Audacity. Daring. Insouciance. The courage to be dynamite when everyone else is choosing to be rocks. The impudence to pull Heaven into Hell or raise Hell into Heaven. The fearlessness to slap false gods in the face while everyone obsequiously obfuscates their existential angst.

If philosophy is good for anything, it is good for rubbing the stuck-up nose of Power in the dirt of Humor. It is good for lighting a match and tossing it into the fragile kindling of dogmatic structure. It is good for slitting the conceited throat of holier-than-thou wishful thinking. It is excellent for crushing written laws with the universal hammer of unwritten laws.

And so, with the power invested in my by the sharpened mettle of my pen, I must flip the script on your brainwashing. I must turn the tables on your indoctrination and cultural conditioning. I must send the marble of your “faith” reeling inside the labyrinth of an Earthquake Test. Behold: the ultimate integration…

Follow me into the Desert of the Real:

“If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.” ~The Gospel of Thomas

It took forty days and forty nights for you to realize the most profound truth of all: that Christ consciousness only became truly conscious when “Satan” was integrated into the whole. It took forty days and forty nights for you to pressurize your inner demon into a diamond. And now, finally, diamond is free to sharpen diamond.

Yes. You have been fooled your entire life. Jesus (you) did not become Christ (also you, just individuated and self-actualized) until “He” integrated his shadow (Satan: your dark side) in the desert.

Your inner Christ is your inner insouciance. Your inner Satan is your inner courage. The former gives you audacity. The latter gives you tenacity. Together, they form the integrated human, the Over-human, the enlightened human. Together, they are Interconnected Cosmos first, disconnected individual second. Together, they are One with all things, Nonattached, balanced and individuated. Separated, they are at odds with all things, attached, imbalanced, and individual. Together they are Peace; Separated they are War.

It took a desert to awaken you to the level of your thirst. It took a desert to recondition your cultural conditioning. It took a desert to teach you the importance of water. It took a desert to sharpen your mettle, to test your resilience, to shock your chakras, to awaken sleeping dragons, and to finally stop pretending you’ve been asleep.

As that African proverb states, “The desert teaches you more about water than the ocean ever could.”

You want to bring forth your inner “genius”? Integrate your shadow. Sublimate your culture’s “Devil.” Flip the script on your spoon-fed scriptures and antiquated indignity. Face the fire of your fear. Burn until everything you’ve taken for granted is reduced to ashes. Then rise like a Phoenix to the level of your antifragility.

As James Hollis said, “The shadow is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.”

And so, you come out of the desert more alive than you’ve ever been.

The Power of Poiesis:

“The goal is to develop the strength and grounding required to hold the tension of two opposing ideas until a new idea is born.” ~Brene Brown

Holding the tension between opposites is no small achievement. It’s counting coup on the gods. It’s finally becoming the personification of checks and balances. It’s discovering your very own Truth Quest despite whatever “truth” came before you. It’s rewriting your way through hand-me-down scripts by flipping them on their heads and using the unwritten laws of the universe to guide you.

Poiesis is that flip. Poiesis is an Ancient Greek term meaning "making," "producing," or "creation". In philosophy and art theory, it refers to the process of bringing something into being that did not exist before, distinct from praxis ("doing" or "acting"). It can be seen as the creative power behind artwork or other natural and artificial processes.

Poiesis emerges when the tension between opposites is held in sacred alignment. When awe and fascination are discovered between reciprocal dynamics, then you know that you are holding the tension. Balance is key. Poise is paramount. Nonattachment is the secret.

Through Nonattachment, you’re able to elevate yourself above the battlefield of the human condition. You see the big picture (the infinite interconnectedness of all things) despite your small picture ego (your dogmatic need for things to be a certain way). From this strategic advantage, you’re able to utilize cognitive shifts in perspective. You’re able to move with grace, laugh readily, and create elegantly.

Here, your ever shifting Mandala-like self is free to maneuver, to existentially pivot, to mythopoetically inflict the static world with flexible seeds of paradox.

The Power of Paradox:

“Only the paradox comes anywhere near comprehending the fullness of life.” ~Carl Jung

It took the desert to teach you paradox. So be it. Only the individual who has embraced paradox can embrace his individuation and thus get his interdependence in front of his independence.

As Carl Jung said, “There is a mystical fool in me that proved to be stronger than all my science.”

The “mystical fool,” the Alchemist archetype, central to Jung’s work, seeks to transmute the base into the divine, embracing paradox as the path to wholeness. The fool within Jung—the irrational, intuitive spark—thrives in the ambiguous interplay of conscious and unconscious.

In mythology, the Alchemist appears in figures like Merlin, who wields magic born of liminal wisdom, or Dionysus, God of ecstasy and dissolution, or the devil in Christian mythology. These figures teach us that transformation requires embracing paradox: order and chaos, self and no-self, mind and no-mind, discernment and doubt. The mystical fool laughs in the tension held between opposites, finding truth in the paradoxical interplay.

To live this art is to hold ambiguity lightly, and to see uncertainty as a sacred dance. The Alchemist, or mystical fool, or trickster sage, having gained a certain transcendent perspective in his mastery of ambiguity, uses the archetypes to level-up. He strategically tricks himself to get out of his own way. Shooting himself in the foot, the alchemist keeps “leveling-up,” by kicking himself out of his own comfort zone (back into a state of liminality). Back into the Desert. Again, and again if need be. He gains the heightened awareness that we are God playing peek a boo with itself.

Assuming the Divinity of Integration:

“The task of genius is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously.” ~James Hillman

In assuming divinity, we don’t merely survive godlessness (Nietzsche’s “God is dead”); we thrive in it, transmuting the death-knell into a chorus for a new dawn. The human must become divine not to fill the gap, but to BECOME the gap—vast, vertiginous, vital. Who among us will answer? The bridge awaits the builders.

You begin building this bridge in the desert. You plant the seed of your divinity in Hell. You water it with integration, audacity and courage. You strengthen it with tenacity and grit. You climb it with humility, humor, and grace.

You get ahead of the status quo junkies, the dogma bums, the indoctrinated idiots. You use their antiquated monoliths as steppingstones out of blind faith and toward the faithful doubt of the Philosopher’s Stone. You stay ahead of the curve with the desert-forged Question Mark Sword. You stay ahead of the game by playing the Infinite Game of individuated life rather than the finite game of individual strife.

You dangle your inner-Satan from the noose of your insouciance, taunting the goody-two-shoes and placatory pantomimes of false promises. You are all at once Christ on a cross and the laughter in the whirlwind. You are God flexing on God. And the universe itself bends to your mighty perception.

You are “miraculously” in the middle. Dancing with ambiguity. Weaving meaning out of chaos. Stretched between light and shadow, making music in the tension. Squaring the circle. Keeping things in perspective by trumping ego-driven attachment with soul-driven nonattachment.

As Jung said, “Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.” And so, you magnify the middle. You augment the center. You amplify the paradox.

In a world that often demands perfection or polarizes good versus bad, the Middle Way is a radical act of self-acceptance. It challenges you to embrace complexity, to see yourself as neither villain nor hero but as a beautifully imperfect human.

As Joseph Campbell said, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you.”

In the middle, seeing yourself from two sides, you subsume the gods, the heavens, the hells. You subsume the perfect imperfection of being a flawed human. In the middle, you subsume Jesus and the Devil to awaken your very own Christ Consciousness. What are you waiting for? Quench your thirst. Seek the desert to slake your soul.

Image source:

Red-horned Jesus (AI prompt)

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (Flexing Mythopoetic: The Ultimate Integration) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.