I’ve been reading Gary Lachman’s “Secret Teachers of the Western World” for non-RQ purposes but it is filled with RQ-relevant gems like this:
“Considering the difficulties involved in trying to express the insights of mystical experience, Ouspensky saw that invariable
a man who has had mystical experiences uses, for expressing and transmitting them, those forms of images, words and speech which are the most typical and characteristic for him. In this way it can easily happen that different people describe and convey an entirely identical experience quite differently. A religious man will make use of the usual cliches of his religion. He will speak of the Crucified Jesus, of the Virgin Mary, of the Holy Trinity, and so on. A philosopher will try to render his experience in the language of the metaphysics to which he is accustomed… A theosophist will speak of the “astral” world, of “thought forms” and of “Teachers.” A spiritualists will speak of the spirits of the dead.
… If I go to my local supermarket, my experience of it will not be exactly the same as someone else’s, but neither will it differ radically or in any fundamental sense. Because we are different people, our perspectives on it will naturally differ, but not enough to suggest that we really visited two very different places.”
Food for Gloranthan thought.
So in Glorantha there is the “God Time” – and when we interact with it we have what Lachman and Ouspensky would call “mystical experiences.” Gloranthans express that experience with the images, words, and speech they already have at hand – the Runes and myths of their cults. Now these mystical experiences are different for each person, but they do not differ radically or in any fundamental sense. That’s why the Monomyth works. There is a core architecture to the God Time and it is filled with events that are experienced differently, even though they are fundamentally identical.