It is interesting that the ‘science’ we over use today to the point of scientism is actually what brought us out of a very dark, dim, misty landscape into the rational thinking of people like Plato and Aristotle.
To be sure, the roots of this new way of knowing could be traced back to earlier times. Its origins can be seen in Greek philosophy, in Plato and Aristotle. But they go back even further, and can be found in much earlier thinkers, such as Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and the other pre-Socratic philosophers who appeared around the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries around 500 bc. This was the period that the German existential philosopher Karl Jaspers christened the ‘Axial Age’. Jaspers assigned a unique importance to this age because he argued that it was during it that ‘the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid’, a development that took place across the globe.
During Jaspers’ Axial Age, Confucius and Lao-Tse appeared in China; India saw the creation of the Upanishads and the appearance of the Buddha; Zoroaster emerged in Persia and laid the groundwork of Zoroastrianism, which saw the world as a battleground between the cosmic forces of good and evil; and in the Holy Lands, the Hebrew prophets arose, preaching a new relationship between God and his creation. It was during this time that in Greece a new kind of individual, moved by new interests and sensibilities, appeared. While in other parts of the globe the Axial Age saw the appearance of powerful religious and ethical feelings and insights that would inform whole civilizations, in Greece and Asia Minor – that part of modern Turkey bordering the Mediterranean Sea – something different occurred. Here what we can call a movement from a ‘mythical’ to a ‘mental’ outlook took place.
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 53-65). Floris Books. Kindle Edition.
What was lost when this revolution in thinking grew, was our capacity to apply imagination and creative use of our perception – our intuitive and divine aspect of our selves to our daily lives. So much so that today when we try and ‘handle’ the appearance of phenomena in our lives, we are terrified. This was enhanced by the church with the outlawing of anything spiritual coming through your own soul to you. The religions of ‘revelation’ all said that there was one and only one way to recognize God, and it was definitely not from your own heart – but from the revealed manuscripts that contained the one true message – and that the only people who could answer questions about that – should you get it wrong, were the high priests of the day.
Through a strange, brief, but effective collaboration, the Church and a rising science, soon to be sworn enemies, temporarily worked together to empty the world of its qualitative character, of what the philosopher of language Owen Barfield calls its ‘insides’. What remained was its ‘outside’, its physical form, its surface, which, it was increasingly understood, was subject to what were beginning to be called ‘the laws of nature’. These laws were of a purely physical character, the push and pull of mechanical cause and effect.
From a world of qualities what was emerging was one of quantity. And so vigorous was the pursuit of this new approach to number that what quickly came into effect was what the Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon called the ‘Reign of Quantity’.
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 124-126). Floris Books. Kindle Edition.
This created a schism in the human psyche and soul. So much so, that we now call it the unconscious – and we have a bicameral brain – left and right hemisphere that also don’t talk to each other very well. The left brain is dominant in our society and the right brain is only used by artists and musicians and mothers…
Put briefly , our right brain , which McGilchrist contends is older and primary – it is the ‘ master ’ of his title – sees the world as a whole , as a given totality , a living presence , much as we see another person . In Pascal’s terms , it sees things intuitively , ‘ at a glance ’ . It is interested in implicit meanings .
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 239-241). Floris Books. Kindle Edition.
Somewhere in there we forgot that they were supposed to work together to form a whole greater than the parts. We have lost our soul somewhere in the fray. We have lost that deep knowing about perceiving the outer with the eyes of the inner. An intuitive grasp of anything, including first person testimony is still so suspect, that if persisted in can only be cured by medicating it.
Whereas, with a real brain or a whole psyche and soul, the qualities operate together. One part looks at its pieces and the other part looks at its ‘IS’ness. The ability to perceive its isness comes from the imaginative joining to the observed – a merging where in an intuitive grasp of its isness is accessed from the inside of you – meaning that you get in touch with the underlying unity of everything in this world – one perceived thing at a time.
Yes that is real and it is do-able, much easier than you ‘think’. In this other side of reality lives creativity, imagination, an old knowing about the world, the spiritual connection to creation. IMO, if you wanted to keep the development of a species down, you would you would train them for more generations than they could remember (thousands of years) that they don’t have this part to them – you would make it a very unsuccessful way to survive in a world that you set up, that would punish this aspect and reward their way of thinking, creating a deep schizophrenic split in them.. This would be an effort to head off at the pass the coming spiritual development of that species that would ultimately end your control of them.
What this meant was that science was quickly becoming , or giving birth to , ‘ Scientism ’ . This , according to the eminent historian Jacques Barzun , is ‘ the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used on all forms of experience and , given time , will settle every issue ’.
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 160-163). Floris Books. Kindle Edition.
We are at that juncture – right up against it. We have channelers, spiritualists, psychics, empaths, healers – we have science and tech that are now beginning to measure energy frequencies they cannot see. We are beginning to pine for that something deep within our inner mystical land that we barely remember and yet calls to us. Even the sleepy people are yearning for this hidden aspect deep inside them, or the super heroes would not out sell all else at the box office. We have: X Men, Marvel Comics Super Heroes, Dr. Strange the list is legion and it is a siren call to all ages in 2018. The first comic book made its debut about the time 1930s – just about the time that science became a religion in that period between the world wars when the planet was still reeling and healing from the first war. Those wars led us straight down the garden path to looking at full blown loss of our very souls in things like transhumanism, and the total loss of our connection to our wildness, our inner space, our connection with our souls and the divine.
– they are not the only unforeseen side effects of the ‘ knowledge revolution ’ four centuries ago . Our own ‘ inside ’ has been dramatically affected by it too . The freedom of mind that was achieved by jettisoning dogma and faith had a dual effect . It liberated the human mind , but it also seemed to set it adrift . One of the results of the new way of knowing is that it has left many of us feeling , as the novelist Walker Percy put it , ‘ lost in the cosmos ’ .
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (Kindle Locations 143-146). Floris Books. Kindle Edition.
In the deep dark recesses of our souls we remember a time when life was different, had a different power to it, when our connection to the spirit and our connected natures to our planet were much different. When you could call up and out of your inner world a power that could alter your external world. Where prayers like these would work and elemental energy would respond.
At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the wind with its swiftness along its path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness
All these I place
By God’s almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness
From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Swiftly_Tilting_Planet>
There was a fifth mode of prayer, the “lost mode,” a prayer that’s based solely in feeling. In unity with our inner landscape and our imagination it would reveal itself in the outer world when we felt the soul of the elements from within and called to them, they listened. It was a communion – a wholeness, a unity.
We need not relearn this, we need only to remember that we are not either-ors, ones and zeros, we are a trinary wholeness. One aspect plus the other aspect makes a wholeness and thereby a new perceptual doorway to step through when viewing things like the ET-ED question, the Nuts and bolts/plasma dimensional question. The reason we don’t understand the spooky-phenomenal side to the UFO conundrum is because we are afraid to step past the huge menacing looking guardian of the threshold called scientism.
Once we can and do, we will realize that the science we need and the doorway to the stars are found in the marriage of spirit and real science.
In the Mind's Eye 