Myth, Incompleteness, and the Mystery of Existence
An existential reflection on how we create myths and make meaning within the vastness of the universe.
The Audio Reflection
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Mystery
Photograph by Evan Kaufman
A Strange Loop
Let us start in an unusual place: alien abductions.
Not because I am trying to convince you they are real or unreal. But because they sit at the edge of the human experience. They occupy a strange territory between the psychological, the cultural, and the mysterious. They ask a question that turns out to be much larger than aliens: How do we make meaning out of experiences we do not fully understand?
When researchers collect reports of abduction experiences, patterns appear. People describe falling asleep and then entering a strange half-wakeful state. They feel unable to move. They report flashing lights or intricate geometric patterns. There is a sense of a presence in the room, sometimes shadowy, sometimes vividly formed. Some report floating, lost time, or waking in a different place than they remember lying down.
This is how people report the experience.
But the interpretation afterward varies dramatically.
For some, the conclusion is: I was abducted by grey aliens. For others, the same series of events is explained as sleep paralysis, hypnagogic hallucination, neurological disturbance, or some blend of stress and dream imagery. In another cultural moment or another part of the world, the same experience might be interpreted as a visitation from spirits, ancestors, or demons. Across time and space, the raw patterns resemble one another, but the story woven by each person changes.
The experience and the interpretation are not the same thing. We do not encounter raw reality and then leave it as it is. We always encounter reality through interpretation, through belief, culture, language, and narrative. Which brings us to a word that can be easily misunderstood: myth.
When I use the word myth, I do not mean fake, untrue, or falsehood. I mean something more structural. Myth is the narrative framework through which human beings organize incomplete knowledge into a livable world. It is the story that binds experience together when we cannot possibly hold every variable at once. In essence, myth is a shorthand, a way to hold staggering complexity in a simple and deeply human form.
What is Myth
When I think about myth as shorthand for our encounter with raw reality and the complexity it contains, I see it as having three interwoven components.
Belief
The first is belief. This includes what we inherit from culture, what we are taught, and the assumptions that shape how we see the world. Belief functions as shorthand. It stabilizes reality so that we can exist meaningfully within it. Another way to see this is that it helps us form a picture of who we are within the absurdity of existence.
Meaning
The second is meaning. Meaning is what we build from belief to make sense of a given experience. It is the personal narrative we construct to answer questions like: What happened? What does it say about me? What does it imply about the future? Another way to think about meaning is that it is a layer stacked on top of raw experience. It is deeply interpretive and helps stabilize the psyche while providing an approximation of the truth of experience.
Objective Inquiry
The third component, relatively new in human history, is objective inquiry. Scientific investigation, technological measurement, shared verification. This mode of knowing refines our myths. It narrows error. It provides powerful tools for testing claims. But it does not eliminate myth.
Objective inquiry refines the stories we create, but it does not remove the fact that we must tell stories to make sense of reality. Our access to truth, however disciplined and precise, is always partial. This tension becomes especially clear if we examine highly logical systems. To my mind, there is no better example than mathematics.
Incompleteness within Mathematics
For a long time, mathematics was seen as the gold standard of certainty. It offered a language of formal systems, strict rules, and proofs that seemed immune to interpretation or the snare of myth. But in the early twentieth century, the mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated something astonishing. In any sufficiently complex formal system, there are true statements that cannot be proven within that system itself. No formal system can demonstrate its own completeness from within.
Gödel showed that limits are built into systems and that completeness cannot be achieved from inside the structure that seeks to guarantee it.
The echo is striking when we think about myth as a human meaning-making system. These systems also contain limits. They can orient us. They can illuminate. But they cannot exhaust reality or render it fully complete.
Emptiness
Buddhist philosophy articulates something similar through the idea of emptiness. Emptiness is shorthand, a symbolic term meaning that all things, people, objects, and abstract ideas do not possess an independent, fixed essence. Everything exists in relation to everything else. Emptiness is a way of saying that context defines everything, and as context shifts, so does meaning and understanding.
Take a simple object like a sheet of paper. It seems obvious what it is. But to understand it fully, you would need to trace the pulp back to trees, the trees back to ecosystems, the ecosystems back to climate and geology, the ink back to chemistry, the language printed on it back to culture and history. Even your ability to read it depends on years of enculturation. The paper is not a self-contained object. It is a web of interdependent conditions. It is empty of isolated essence, yet undeniably real.
The Ouroboros of Experience
When I consider Gödel’s incompleteness and the Buddhist idea of emptiness, an image appears: the Ouroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail. A self-referential loop. A system of understanding that turns back upon itself.
Our search for certainty often resembles the ouroboros. We attempt to construct a framework that fully accounts for experience. We press harder, gather more data, refine our models. Yet at some point, we encounter the limits of the system itself. The search loops in on itself and begins to chip away at the very thing it was trying to secure.
Return now to the alien abduction scenario. If we say, “It was aliens,” that explanation leaves many questions unanswered. If we say, “It was purely neurobiological,” we gain empirical clarity, but we leave out the subjective texture, the meaning, the lived impact of the event as it was experienced. Even if we placed someone in an fMRI scanner, measured their heart rate, tracked their blood chemistry, and mapped every neural firing pattern, we would still interpret the data through models and an infinite layer of assumptions. The rational scientific frame is powerful, but it too operates within a framework that is fundamentally context bound.
The Coexistence of Myth and Objectivity
When we begin to see that our experience is always a combination of myth and objectivity, a new perspective emerges. We can begin to notice that an incomplete picture is not a failure of our minds but a condition of being human. A condition that becomes especially powerful and relevant in therapy.
People often enter therapy because of a problem, anxiety, depression, relationship conflict, confusion about identity. At first, the work involves understanding the problem and imagining who one might become. We examine beliefs. We revise meanings. We experiment with new narratives.
But in deeper, longer-term work, something else tends to emerge. Clients begin to see that their lives have been organized around narratives, stories about who they are, what happened to them, and what is possible. These stories begin to be understood through the lens of myth that this reflection has been circling. They are seen as context-bound truths, open to revision as the context of the self changes over time.
The realization that one’s identity is not a fixed essence but a constructed narrative can feel destabilizing at first. More often, however, it becomes liberating as people work with and integrate this insight. If one’s story was constructed, it can be revised. If the system contains limits, there is space within it for possibility. If completeness is impossible, perfection is no longer required.
In this sense, incompleteness does not diminish the value of existence. In a paradoxical way, it intensifies it. If the universe is not a closed, fully knowable system, then our participation matters. Our choices, our care, our relationships are not meaningless. They are the very fabric through which meaning is enacted.
Said in the most direct way possible, we do not transcend myth. We become conscious participants in it.
Science refines our narratives. Philosophy interrogates them. Therapy helps us loosen our grip on them. None of these remove the mystery at the heart of being alive. They allow us to inhabit our own universe with greater humility and freedom.
In the end, perhaps the most stabilizing realization is this: you do not have to solve yourself completely. You do not have to achieve perfect coherence. You live within a universe that is necessarily incomplete.
