The sun of the mind at dawn rises from the grip of not knowing.
The sun of the mind at dusk drops into exhausted non-attachment.
This “metaphor” was all too real in the India that gave birth to Yoga, since the light of the sun illuminates the objects conceptualized by the mind. Through the illumination of objects, the mind attaches the desire to participate, own, use and identify with objects and scenarios concerning them and other persons.
The Light and Dark, as Value and Fact, could be viewed as reconciled by an evolved mind, within the biosphere. They could indeed be the cause of the arising of proto-minds, since existential situations in the Biosphere are of value for its beings whilst being factual. As Bennett points out, sex and death are innovations of the biospheric world, and we can now date their arrival during the Cambrian “explosion” (around 542 million years ago) when plants and animals (multicellular life forms) innovated sex to reproduce their organisms as a whole as well as regenerating their cells through cell division. Animals, unlike single-celled algae, are able to express action but must die to benefit from generational improvement by natural selection. Only by such means could the three brains of humans, motive, emotive and cognitive, be selected through their effectiveness in adaptation to living conditions within a variety of different biomes.
But there have been problems for humans in their maintaining a shared cultural harmony towards nature and the biosphere, due to the success of their cognitive brain capacity to solve environmental problems based upon facts. Technologies can arise whose consequences may conflict with social values that are somewhat weakly held to. Arguments can break out over values and the impact of technologies and those that wield them, but the factual benefits generally dominate other human views. The environmental argument is being lost whilst technology becomes an ever stronger threat to the biosphere as we know it. The modern world is simply the latest and greatest in which actions often clearly go against valuing the environment over the wealth it can create, and better-off populations have become used, inured and psychically hardened to human and biospheric tragedy.
When understanding the origins of human knowledge, we tend not to look into the everyday aspects of life such as the calendar, our numbering systems and how these could have developed. However, these components of everyday life hold surprising clues to the past.
An example is the seven day week which we all slavishly follow today. It has been said that seven makes a good number of days for a week and this convenience argument often given for the existence of weeks.
Having a week allows one to know what day of the week it is for the purposes of markets and religious observances. It is an informal method of counting based on names rather than numbers. Beyond this however, a useful week length should fit well with the organisation of the year (i.e. the Sun), or the month (i.e. the Moon) or other significant celestial or seasonal cycle. But the seven day week does not fit in with the Sun and the Moon.
How can an immortal god die? Especially Zeus who was not just a god but head of the Olympians, a new breed of gods that had replaced the Titans and their “despotic” ruler, Chronos. A Rome holding to Zeus/Jupiter perhaps rejected the Cretan tradition of the god’s death with the well-broadcast adage “All Cretans are liars”.
But we all should
know that mythology uses contradictory, or at least inconsistent, versions
of the same story, to express alternative perspectives and to transmit more
knowledge in the process, rather than “a lie”.
The importance
of the death of Zeus is that the story emerges exactly from that point in time
and cultural transformation in which Zeus is also born and at that time it was
familiar for a vegetative god, representing nature blooming in spring and dying
in autumn, to die and be re-born within the immortality of the eternal round of
the year or yearly daemon.
There were other
norms too, including the birth of men and their world of form, out of the Earth
and from within The Cave, as a natural sacred space created by the Mother or
earth goddess. Directly symbolic of her womb, form emerges as shapes in
formation like dreams, travelling towards the definite order found on the
surface.
Figure 1 The Dictyan Cave, one of two in Crete claimed claimed to be Zeus’ Nursery
The numerical foundations of the “earth mysteries” were nominally present in the medieval doctrine of the four numerical arts, the Quadrivium of sacred numbers, geometry, musical harmony and astronomy. However, these foundations need to be applied to something real which is: the numerical nature of the world seen from being alive upon it. This application gives a completely different set of results to modern science where, instead, numbers are being employed for measurements and calculations (using the physical laws discovered after the medieval period came to an end.)
The ancient mysteries treated numbers as having characteristics seen to be active within the world.
In applying these numerical arts, one comes into contact with mysteries in the form of ancient monuments, art and literary works, these containing the clues required for developing, in oneself, a kind of skill. This skill can mature into being able to recover information in the most unlikely circumstances because something apparently other to oneself is active within you: a developed sense. This I call the autonomous nature of the mysteries, which is essential when going beyond what is simply data in books, monuments, etc. I believe it is mistaken to call such mystery work historical since it is actually happening in the present moment to create something new, whilst appearing to reference data from the past. Historical data provides the necessary starting points for a new work of reconstructing the mysteries within oneself.
written October 2014 and published in DuVersity Magazine
In order to think about the cosmic world one has to recognize that it is more than the world of life found on the earth and the living world, or biosphere, is most probably a result of how the cosmic world organised evolution on the earth.
Threefold Manifestation: The light triangle of the Trinity represents God, who remains ‘beyond all things’, entering the black hole of matter (hyle). As a result, three worlds arise: the angelic (empyrean), stellar (ethereal), and elemental. From Robert Fludd by Joscelyn Godwin, Thames & Hudson (Shambhala: Boulder, 1979, page 52)Continue reading “Cosmic Origins of Religion and Death”
