I greatly admire the psychologist Abraham Maslow. As I was reading one of his books, however, I found a sort of value schedule, values that his psychological experiments had shown that people live for. He gave a list of five values: survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, and self- development. I looked at that list and I wondered why it should seem so strange to me. I finally realized that it struck me as strange because these are exactly the values that mythology transcends.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development– in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness.

Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote, Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.”)

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the won- derful student of African cultures, called Ergriffenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out.

Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery-the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.