In a time in which we have been cut loose from the moorings that provide stability, and much is in chaos, we can turn to nature to find tranquility and stability.
Joe, sorry to be so wordy... but these are some of my thoughts from the past decade.
There is general consensus that history began in ancient Sumer where the first kings issued — and had transcribed into written code — the first civil laws over four thousand years ago. With this development, literacy quickly replaced oral tradition, and the written word became imbued with magical powers formerly attributed to the living, lived-in world. But, as the written word began speaking, says David Abram . . . “the stones fell silent, the trees became mute, and other animals, dumb” (1996, 131).
Coincident with this transition to literacy, there emerged entirely novel ways of thinking, acting, and interacting within the world. Overwhelming evidence from the history of religions, anthropology, archeology, paleontology, and ethnography strongly reinforces the view that a qualitatively different set of perceptions arose with this transition. Human community itself was transformed from an egalitarian kinship-based, predominantly nomadic hunting-gathering mode of subsistence characterizing the Paleolithic and the autonomous villages of the early Neolithic, to more sedentary, hierarchically organized life-ways based primarily on intensive plant and animal domestication. And, as Richard Leaky noted,
Every biologist knows that when a basic change occurs in a species’ pattern of subsistence, other changes usually follow. (The Origin of Humankind, 55)
Collectively, these developments –- agriculture, urbanization and literacy –- had an incalculable impact on human perception and consciousness over ensuing millennia, producing entirely novel ways of constituting and manipulating the world. Consciousness, now reflectively detaching itself from the living environment, constituted reality differently after the birth of civilization than we had done previously, when we dwelt there profoundly participating the world. This cognitive change produced resounding reverberations for all generations to follow, entrenched, as humanity would become in new organizational hierarchies that appeared — the formal institutions of civil society. It was literacy, giving special prominence to the written logistic, that would provide the living structure and momentum to political institutions, world religions, and the burgeoning sciences.
This view of the world established and entrenched itself, memorializing our changed relationship with a reality in which we originally dwelt. The world-as-given was emptied of any intrinsic significance or value aside from that which these new humans and the logic of their written word attributed to it. It was first a linguistic and then an early scientific objectification of nature –- destroying the power (pouvoir) and thickness of a pre-objective present –- that led ineluctably to the de-animation of nature and the subsequent theoretical construction of transcendent religious powers, gods, goddesses, and other supernatural entities. All the major world religions have this transcendent construction at their core, whether we call it Allah, Brahman, God, or Yahweh. Even those polytheists, the ancient Romans and Greeks, fell victim to the same illusion, the only difference being that they had numerous deities, as did the Hindus before them. The philosophers for their part also sought out a true reality beyond the phenomenon in some “noumenal” realm, again reinforcing this fundamental assumption about some immutable “Being” which gives life or meaning to the world of “becoming.” It was this diremption — the forceful and artificial bifurcation of being and becoming, of sacred and profane — that is its legacy.
Like its first cousin, natural science (and its bastard brother, the human sciences), historical religions have lived off this fundamental dualism haunting human conception since the birth of history. Preliterate humanity on the other hand seemingly made no such distinctions, experiencing the world as living, having a power and motility shared with all sentient beings and even with what we would call inanimate nature. It is for this reason that pre-historic consciousness may be called participatory consciousness; tribal members actually could fuse with their totem animal, for example –- intertwining with their environment –- because from their perspective there was no substantive difference between them and the totem: they were essentially of one substance or consubstantial. We must not be confused here. It is not as if they thought like us, only with incorrect judgments; they did not think the way we do at all. It was qualitatively a different mode of perceiving and experiencing all together. They did not see things from a detached objective perspective; indeed, we cannot say that they saw any ‘things’ at all in the sense that we speak of things today in space. Rather they participated things. The way they experienced their world was different naturally from the way we configure the world.
I too have had mystical experiences
Reading proof of Gods existence
In Thomas Aquinas as a teenager
I loved the idea that God is Being
and the intelligent designer of the universe
When Einstein talks about the how impressed he is by the laws of nature
I can respond to this Newton’s laws
Quantum Mechanics The Periodic Table
of Elements,etc.Is this Natural Mysticism?
I remember at that time feeling one with
God or Nature! Fantastic! Being envelops
everything,everywhere.
Joe, sorry to be so wordy... but these are some of my thoughts from the past decade.
There is general consensus that history began in ancient Sumer where the first kings issued — and had transcribed into written code — the first civil laws over four thousand years ago. With this development, literacy quickly replaced oral tradition, and the written word became imbued with magical powers formerly attributed to the living, lived-in world. But, as the written word began speaking, says David Abram . . . “the stones fell silent, the trees became mute, and other animals, dumb” (1996, 131).
Coincident with this transition to literacy, there emerged entirely novel ways of thinking, acting, and interacting within the world. Overwhelming evidence from the history of religions, anthropology, archeology, paleontology, and ethnography strongly reinforces the view that a qualitatively different set of perceptions arose with this transition. Human community itself was transformed from an egalitarian kinship-based, predominantly nomadic hunting-gathering mode of subsistence characterizing the Paleolithic and the autonomous villages of the early Neolithic, to more sedentary, hierarchically organized life-ways based primarily on intensive plant and animal domestication. And, as Richard Leaky noted,
Every biologist knows that when a basic change occurs in a species’ pattern of subsistence, other changes usually follow. (The Origin of Humankind, 55)
Collectively, these developments –- agriculture, urbanization and literacy –- had an incalculable impact on human perception and consciousness over ensuing millennia, producing entirely novel ways of constituting and manipulating the world. Consciousness, now reflectively detaching itself from the living environment, constituted reality differently after the birth of civilization than we had done previously, when we dwelt there profoundly participating the world. This cognitive change produced resounding reverberations for all generations to follow, entrenched, as humanity would become in new organizational hierarchies that appeared — the formal institutions of civil society. It was literacy, giving special prominence to the written logistic, that would provide the living structure and momentum to political institutions, world religions, and the burgeoning sciences.
This view of the world established and entrenched itself, memorializing our changed relationship with a reality in which we originally dwelt. The world-as-given was emptied of any intrinsic significance or value aside from that which these new humans and the logic of their written word attributed to it. It was first a linguistic and then an early scientific objectification of nature –- destroying the power (pouvoir) and thickness of a pre-objective present –- that led ineluctably to the de-animation of nature and the subsequent theoretical construction of transcendent religious powers, gods, goddesses, and other supernatural entities. All the major world religions have this transcendent construction at their core, whether we call it Allah, Brahman, God, or Yahweh. Even those polytheists, the ancient Romans and Greeks, fell victim to the same illusion, the only difference being that they had numerous deities, as did the Hindus before them. The philosophers for their part also sought out a true reality beyond the phenomenon in some “noumenal” realm, again reinforcing this fundamental assumption about some immutable “Being” which gives life or meaning to the world of “becoming.” It was this diremption — the forceful and artificial bifurcation of being and becoming, of sacred and profane — that is its legacy.
Like its first cousin, natural science (and its bastard brother, the human sciences), historical religions have lived off this fundamental dualism haunting human conception since the birth of history. Preliterate humanity on the other hand seemingly made no such distinctions, experiencing the world as living, having a power and motility shared with all sentient beings and even with what we would call inanimate nature. It is for this reason that pre-historic consciousness may be called participatory consciousness; tribal members actually could fuse with their totem animal, for example –- intertwining with their environment –- because from their perspective there was no substantive difference between them and the totem: they were essentially of one substance or consubstantial. We must not be confused here. It is not as if they thought like us, only with incorrect judgments; they did not think the way we do at all. It was qualitatively a different mode of perceiving and experiencing all together. They did not see things from a detached objective perspective; indeed, we cannot say that they saw any ‘things’ at all in the sense that we speak of things today in space. Rather they participated things. The way they experienced their world was different naturally from the way we configure the world.