by Mark Booth
So the big WHY questions — WHY life? WHY the universe? — as a matter of quite elementary philosophical distinction, cannot be answered by scientists, or more accurately not by scientists acting in their capacity as scientists. If we ask ‘WHY are we here?’ we may be fobbed off with answers which — like the girl’s early answers- are perfectly valid, in the sense of being grammatically correct answers to the question, but which leave a twist of disappointment in the pit of the stomach, because they don’t answer the question in the way that deep down we want it answered. The fact is that we all have a deep-seated, perhaps ineradicable longing for such questions to be answered at the level of INTENTION. The scientists who don’t grasp this distinction, however brilliant they are as scientists, are philosophical morons.
Obviously we can choose to give parts of our lives purpose and meaning. If I choose to play soccer, then kicking the ball into the back of the net means a goal. But our lives as a whole, from birth to death, cannot have meaning without a mind that existed beforehand to give it meaning.
The same is true of the universe.
So when we hear scientists talk about the universe as ‘meaningful’, ‘wonderful’ or ‘mysterious’, we should bear in mind that they may be using these words with a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty. An atheistic universe can only be meaningful, wonderful or mysterious in a secondary and rather disappointing sense — in the same sense that a stage conjuror is said to be ‘magic’. And, really, when it comes to considering the great questions of life and death, all the equations of science are little more than difficult and long-winded ways of saying ‘We don’t know’.
TODAY WE ARE ENCOURAGED TO PUT aside the big questions of life and death. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Such questions are strictly meaningless, we are told. Just get on with it. And so we lose some of the sense of how strange it is to be alive.
This book has been written in the belief that something valuable is in danger of being snuffed out altogether, and that as a result we are less alive than we used to be.
I am suggesting that if we look at the basics of the human condition from a different angle, we may appreciate that science doesn’t really know as much as it claims to know, that it fails to address what is deepest and highest in human experience.
In the next chapter we will begin to imagine ourselves into the minds of the initiates of the ancient world and to see the world from their perspective. We will consider ancient wisdom we have forgotten and see that from its perspective even those things which modern science encourages us to think of as most solidly, reliably true, are really just a matter of interpretation, little more than a trick of the light.
A ‘perspected’ picture, which may be seen either as a witch or a young woman in a feathered hat, depending on your predisposition.
2. A SHORT WALK IN THE ANCIENT WOODS
Imagining Ourselves into the Minds of the Ancients
CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE A TABLE, a good table, the table you’d ideally like to work on. What size would it be? What wood would it be made of? How would the wood be joined? Would it be oiled or polished or planed bare? What other features would it have? Imagine it as vividly as you can.
Now look at a real table.
Which table can you be sure of knowing the truth about?
What can you be more sure of — the contents of our mind or the objects you perceive with your senses? Which is more real, mind or matter?
The debate springing from these simple questions has been at the heart of all philosophy.
Today most of us choose matter and objects over mind and ideas. We tend to take physical objects as the yardstick of reality. Contrariwise Plato called ideas ‘the things that really are’. In the ancient world the objects of the mind’s eye were taken as the eternal realities we can really be sure of, as opposed to the transitory, external surfaces out there. What I want to suggest now is that people did not formerly believe in a mind-before-matter universe because they had carefully weighed up the philosophical arguments on either side and come to a reasoned decision, but because they experienced the world in a mind-before-matter way.
While our thoughts are pale and shadowy in comparison with our sense impressions, in the case of ancient man it was the other way round. People then had less of a sense of physical objects. Objects were not as sharply defined and differentiated to them as they are to us.
If you look at depiction of a tree on the walls of an ancient temple, you will see that the artist has not really looked to see how branches are joined to the trunk.
In ancient times no one really looked at a tree in the way we do.
An irritating thing that tour guides on ancient sites like to say goes something like this: ‘Look at this carving of women washing clothes in the river, or men sowing crops — you can still see exactly the same scene very near here.’ There are two types of history, one being the modern, commonsensical approach that assumes that human nature has not substantially changed. This history belongs to the other type. In this history consciousness changes from age to age, even from generation to generation. Note the anatomically inaccurate and somewhat perfunctory depiction of a tree from an 8th Dynasty tomb. The artists who painted these walls were less interested in these physical objects than in the gods depicted only a few paces away in the inner sanctum of the temple. What they looked at in detail and with their greatest powers of concentration were the objects of the mind’s eye. These they portrayed in golden, bejewelled and highly detailed images. The contention of this history, therefore, is that, contrary to what our tour guide might say, any similarity between women washing today and women washing four or five thousand years ago is little more than a matter of appearances.
THESE DAYS WE TEND TO THINK VERY reductively about our thoughts. We tend to go along with the prevailing intellectual fashion that sees thoughts as nothing more than words — perhaps with a penumbra of other stuff, such as feelings, images and so on — but with only the words themselves having any real significance.
However, if we dwell on this fashionable view, even only briefly, we will find that it flies in the face of everyday experience. Take an apparently mundane and insignificant thought such as ‘I mustn’t forget to phone my mother this evening’. If we now try to examine a thought like this as it weaves through our field of consciousness, if we try to hold it back in order to throw a little light on it, we can perhaps see that it carries a loose cluster of word associations, such as might come to light in a psychoanalyst’s word association test. If we then concentrate harder, it may well become apparent that these associations are rooted in memories that bring with them feelings — and may even carry with them their own impulses of will. The guilt I feel at not having phoned my mother earlier, as we now know from psychoanalysis, has roots in a complex knot of feelings that go back to infancy — desire, anger, feelings of loss and betrayal, dependency and the desire for freedom. As I contemplate my feelings of failure, other impulses arise — nostalgia for when things were better perhaps, when my mother and I were one — and an old pattern of behaviour is reanimated.
Signet ring from Mycenae with poppy-bearing priestess. Experience of a thought in all its constantly mutating, multi-dimensional glory may well be familiar to people who experiment with drugs such as marijuana or hallucinogens such as LSD. William Emboden, Professor of Biology at California State University, has published convincing evidence to show that in ancient Egypt the blue lily was used, along with opium and the mandrake root, to induce a trance state.
As we continue to try to pin this thought down, it will twist this way and that. The very act of looking at it changes it, causes reactions, perhaps sometimes even contradictory reactions. A thought is never still. It is a living thing that can never be identified definitively with the dead letter of language. This is why Schopenhauer, another proponent of the mystical philosophy at the heart of this book, said that ‘as soon as you try to put a thought into words it ceases to be true’. Words can ne
ver convey or capture the complexity of an image or of the feelings.
Whole dimensions lie glistening on the dark side of even the most dull and commonplace thought.
The wise men and women of the ancient world knew how to work with these dimensions, and over many millennia they created and refined images which would perform just this function. As taught in the Mystery schools, the very early history of the world unfolds in a series of images of this type.
Before considering these powerful and evocative images I now want to ask the reader to begin to take part in an imaginative exercise: to try to imagine how someone in ancient times, a candidate who hoped for initiation into a Mystery school, would have experienced the world.
Of course it is a way of experiencing the world that is completely delusional from the point of view of modern science, but as this history progresses we will see more and more evidence that many of the great men and women of history have deliberately cultivated this ancient state of consciousness. We will see that they have believed that it gives them a view of the way the world really is, the way it works, that is in some ways superior to the modern way. They have brought back into ‘the real world’ insights that have changed the course of history, not only by inspiring works of art and literature of the greatest genius, but by prompting some of history’s greatest scientific discoveries.
THEREFORE LET US NOW TO TRY IMAGINE ourselves into the mind of someone about two and a half thousand years ago, walking through woodland to a sacred grove or a temple such as Newgrange in Ireland, or Eleusis in Greece…
To such a person the wood and everything in it was alive. Everything was watching him. Unseen spirits whispered in the movements of the trees. A breeze brushing against his cheek was the gesture of a god. If the buffeting of blocks of air in the sky created lightning, this was an outbreak of cosmic will — and maybe he walked a little faster. Perhaps he sheltered in a cave?
When ancient man ventured into a cave he had a strange sense of being inside his own skull, cut off in his own private mental space. If he climbed to the top of a hill, he felt his consciousness race to the horizon in every direction, out towards the edges of the cosmos — and he felt at one with it. At night he experienced the sky as the mind of the cosmos.
Modern drawing, after Rudolf Steiner, illustrating the disposition of human organs as taught in Rosicrucian philosophy.
When he walked along a woodland pathway he would have had a strong sense of following his destiny. Today any of us may wonder, How did I end up in this life that seems to have little or nothing to do with me? Such a thought would have been inconceivable to someone in the ancient world, where everyone was conscious of his or her place in the cosmos.
Everything that happened to him — even the sight of a mote in a sunbeam, the sound of the flight of a bee or the sight of a falling sparrow — was meant to happen. Everything spoke to him. Everything was a punishment, a reward, a warning or a premonition. If he saw an owl, for example, this wasn’t just a symbol of the goddess, this was Athena. Part of her, a warning finger perhaps, was protruding into the physical world and into his own consciousness.
It’s important to understand the particular way in which human beings have affinities with the physical world according to the ancients. They believed in a quite literal way that nothing inside us is without a correspondence in nature. Worms, for example, are the shape of intestines and worms process matter as intestines do. The lungs that enable us to move freely through space with a bird-like freedom are the same shape as birds. The visible world is humanity turned inside out. Lung and bird are both expressions of the same cosmic spirit, but in different modes.
To the teachers of the Mystery schools it was significant that if you looked down on to the internal organs of the human body from the skies, their disposition reflected the solar system.
In the view of the ancients, then, all biology is astrobiology. Today we know full well how the sun gives life and power to living things, drawing the plant out of the seed, coaxing it to unravel upwards, but the ancients also believed that the forces of the moon, by contrast, tend to flatten and widen plants. Bulbous plants such as tubers were thought to be particularly affected by the moon.
More strikingly, perhaps, the complex, symmetric shapes of plants were believed to be caused by the patterns that the stars and planets make as they move across the sky. As a heavenly body takes a path that sees it curving back on itself like a shoelace, so that same shape is traced in the curling motion of a leaf as it grows, or a flower. For example, they saw Saturn, which traces a sharp pattern in the sky, forming the pine needles of conifers. Is it a coincidence that modern science shows that pine trees contain unusually large traces of lead, the metal believed by the ancients to be inwardly animated by the planet Saturn?
In the ancient view the shape of the human body was similarly affected by the patterns made in the sky by stars and planets. The movements of the planets, for example, were inscribed in the human body in the loop of the ribs and the lemniscate — bootlace shape — of the centripetal nerves.
Science has coined the word ‘biorhythms’ to describe the way the relationship of the earth with the moon and the sun, marked by the sequence of the seasons and day following night, is built biochemically deep into the function of every living being, for example in sleep patterns. But beyond these more obvious rhythms, the ancients recognized how other, more mathematically complex rhythms that involve the outer reaches of the cosmos work their way into human life. Humans breathe on average 25,920 times per day, which is the number of years in a great Platonic year (i.e. the number of years it takes the sun to complete a full cycle of the zodiac). The average or ‘ideal’ human life — seventy-two — also has the same number of days in it.
This sense of interconnectedness was not just a matter of bodily interconnectedness. It extended to consciousness too. When our man on a walk saw a flock of birds turn as one in the sky, it seemed to him as if the flock were one moved all together by one thought — and indeed he believed that this was the case. If the animals in the wood moved altogether in a sudden, violent way, if they panicked, they had been moved by Pan. Our man knew that this was exactly what was happening, because he commonly experienced great spirits thinking through himself and through other people at the same time. He knew that when he reached the Mystery school and his spiritual master introduced astonishing new thoughts to him and his fellow pupils, they would all be experiencing the very same thoughts, just as if the Master were holding up physical objects for them all to see. In fact he felt closer to people when sharing their thoughts than he ever did through mere physical proximity.
Today we tend to be very proprietorial about our thoughts. We want to take credit for originating them, and we like to think that our private mental space is inviolate, that no other consciousness can intrude on it.
However, we don’t need to dwell on these assumptions long to see they don’t always fit experience. If we are honest we must admit we do not invariably construct our thoughts. It’s not just that geniuses like Newton, Kepler, Leonardo, Edison and Tesla talk of inspiration coming to them, as if in a dream and sometimes literally in a dream. For all of us it is the case that everyday thoughts naturally just come to us too. In common parlance we say ‘It strikes me that…’ and ‘It occurs to me that…’ If you’re lucky it may happen now and then that a perfectly phrased quip comes to you that sets the table aroar. Then of course you’re happy to bask in the glory — but the unvarnished truth is that the quip probably just jumped up and out of your mouth before you had any time consciously to phrase it.
The reality of everyday experience is that thoughts are quite routinely introduced into what we like to think of as our private mental space from somewhere else. The ancients understood this ‘somewhere else’ as being some-one else, the someone being a god, an angel or a spirit.
And an individual is not always prompted by the same god, angel or spirit. While today we like to think of ourselves as each
having one individual centre of consciousness located inside the head, in the ancient world each person experienced him or herself as having several different centres of consciousness originating outside the head.
We saw earlier that gods, angels and spirits were believed to be emanations from the great cosmic mind — Thought-Beings in other words. What I am asking you to consider now is that these great Thought-Beings expressed themselves through people. If today we naturally think of people thinking, in ancient times they thought of Thoughts peopling.
As we shall see later on, gods, angels and spirits can bring about great changes in a nation’s fortunes. The focus of these changes will often be an individual. For example, Alexander the Great or Napoleon were vehicles for a great spirit, and for a while carried all before them in a remarkable way. No one could oppose them and they succeeded in everything they did — until the spirit left them. Then quite suddenly everything began to go wrong.
We see the same process in the case of artists who become vehicles for the expression of a god or spirit for a certain period of their lives. Then they seem to ‘find their voice’ and create masterpiece after masterpiece with a sure hand, sometimes transforming the consciousness of a whole generation, even changing the whole direction of a culture in history. But when the spirit leaves, an artist never again creates with the same genius.
Similarly if a spirit weaves through an individual to create a work of art, the same great spirit may once again be present whenever that work of art is contemplated by others. One of his contemporaries said: ‘When Bach plays the organ, even God comes to Mass.’
Today many Christians believe that God is present in the blood and wine at the climax of the Mass, albeit in a rather elusive way which centuries of theological debate have never quite managed to pin down. On the other hand if you read liturgies that have survived from ancient Egypt, notably The Book of the Opening of the Mouth, or consider chronicles kept in the temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome that record the regular ‘epiphanies’, or appearances of the gods, it is quite clear that in those days the gods’ presence was expected at the climax of religious ceremonies — and in a far more imposing way than in Christian services today. The people of the ancient world experienced the gods’ presence as awe-inspiring.