Postscript to Apocalypse and Emotion

There are several topics from my previous essay "The Apocalypse and Emotion" I would like to expand on, thus the present essay. To begin with we shall do some review, and in reviewing we shall also expand on the topics we covered int the previous essay. We begin with the old (mythological) gods. As I have said the old gods were an emotional-informational nexus. In simpler terms the old gods were a collection of scenarios that were personalized, and divinized. By personalized is meant that scenarios that were meant to achieve a certain goal became through the use of projection: a person or a god. My example in the previous essay was a god of the hunt. Where the scenarios involving hunting were projected into a god of the hunt. The human hunters try to embody, or be possessed by the god of the hunt. They tried to embody or be possessed by the god through the use of ritual. It was the ritual where the information was both carried and bonded to the emotions. The ritual in primal society would probably be a dance and some sort of imitative drama. The ritual would cause the participants to remember the techniques and scenarios involved in hunting. The hunters would become the god of the hunt. It should be easy for the reader to connect this with my example in the previous essay of recreating one's activity to find a lost article. This is the thrall the old gods had over conscientiousness that was proposed by C. G. Jung. Our early ancestors did not possess an individual "I" as modern people do. Instead they were ever shifting emotions with very little holding the shifting emotions into a unity. We know that they even has trouble separating sleeping (dreams) from waking experience. It is probably in dreams where modifications in scenarios occurred. In the previous essay I said it was by doing something differently by accident, and then judging the difference, if it pleased or displeased the god, but this was most likely a latter innovation. It was in dreams that innovations were first tried out; dreams have always been the realm of the gods. Dreams are where scenarios are torn apart and the elements switched around, without obeying the rules of waking life. So it would be in a dream that a scenario or ritual would be modified, and then tried out in waking life. Remember incubation was the first way humans tried to reach the gods. If the new scenario was successful the dream was a divine revelation, if not it was forgotten. It is interesting to note that novelists like Mary Shelly, and H.P. Lovecraft came up with their stories in dreams. Not only fiction writers have found answers in dreams, there are plenty of stories of scientists finding the answer to a problem in dreams. Even the father of modern philosophy Rene Descartes had a series of dreams before he wrote his first philosophy. Unfortunately the effect of dreams on waking life has not been even scratched by psychology and science. Dreams are creative because they do not obey the the rules of waking life,or the our presuppositions, thus dreams can examine problems with a freedom that is not available in waking consciousness. So it should be obvious why the Egyptian King in Plato's myth says to Thoth that writings shall destroy memory. The literate person does not have preform the ritual to get the information, thus misses much of the scenario. The god does not have to be invoked. So instead of of possessing the wisdom of the god, the literate person only has the appearance of wisdom. This is of course, an echo of the modern complaint against rote learning. Where a student can repeat the information, but does not understand how the use the information. The content of an experience is given up for clarity. It is in the writings of the Gnostics and Greek drama that we see the anxiety this new way of thinking affected the people of the time; alienation was born. The old gods were forgotten, if one needed information, they only needed to consult written material. Thus the scenarios that a person used became separate from the person; they became an object. Humans were no longer part of nature, nature became an object. This also had a corrosive effect on society, people became individual, instead of manifestations of the tribal gods. Societies were a unified scenario built around the gods of the society. This change gave birth to the modern rational consciousness with all the familiar anxiety and alienation. Let us now reexamine Plato's conception of time and the cosmos. As we observed in the last essay Plato divided reality into two realms, the eternal immutable (the intelligible) realm of the Forms, and the world of appearance, or our everyday world. The eternal realm was more real than the everyday world; our everyday world was a flawed copy of the eternal realm. Aristotle then changed Plato's divisions, but still kept an eternal realm. Aristotle divided the the region above and below the Moon, remember Aristotle held a geocentric planetary system. The region above the Moon was eternal it was made of a finer matter than that on Earth. The further the sphere was from Earth the closer to the eternal it was, the fixed stars were the closest to Aristotle's god, and imparted motion to all all the spheres below. For Plato and Aristotle, and long after both of them reason was the eternal, it was called the intelligible as opposed to the sensual. The reasoning behind this distinction is that entities of the eternal realm are not physical, and can only be perceived through the use of reason. This idea of reason being the eternal and immutable reality would persist for centuries. A quote from a medieval alchemist should be illustrative. Basilius Valentinius's treatise "Concerning the Great of the Ancient Sages" (taken from "The Golden Tripod" edited by Micheal Maier) should help us. "Hence the rational soul of man makes him an abiding creature, and though his body may seem to die, yet we know that he will live forever. For to him death is only a process of purification, by which he is freed from his sins, and translated to another better place, But there is no resurrection for the brute beasts, because they have no rational soul, for which alone our Lord and Savior shed his blood." For Plato the cosmos (the planetary system and the fixed stars) was the material representation of the eternal realm. This was because to the ancients the cosmos seemed eternal and inexorable going through its motions. The motions of the heavens affected entities on Earth. They controlled the weather, the generation of living of living entities, and in astrology the destiny of individuals. The cosmos was both a program and operating system for what happens on Earth. The cosmos was also the embodiment of eternal reason. This astral piety is a connecting link between ancient mythological consciousness and the modern rational consciousness. The hallmark of reason is objectivity; that is that it is the same for everyone. That an individual is lifted out their perspective to a God's eye view; what is real for everyone. An example of how this worked for the ancients is to imagine a man in a high tower. The man in a high tower has a larger perspective than a man at ground level. It may even appear to the man at ground level that the man in the high tower can see through time. This is because the man in the high tower can predict what the man on the ground shall encounter as he moves around, because of his heightened vantage point of view. To help illustrate this in the ancient world we shall again go to a quote from Franz Cumont about the philosopher Posidonius. Posidonius was instrumental in bringing astral piety to the Roman world. "Posidonius describes the ecstasy which seized him who left the Earth, who felt himself transported to the midst of the sacred chorus of the stars and who followed their rhythmic evolution's. In these transports, the soul did not only win to infinite power, but also received from heaven the revelation of the nature and cause of the celestial revelations. Thus even in this life it had a foretaste of the beatitude which belongs to it after death when reason, rid of the weak organs of senses, would directly perceive all the splendors of the divine world and would know its mysteries completely." In the astral religions of paganism the soul of the blessed would rise to the Moon or above, to the spheres of the planets, which were the visible gods, and the most blessed to the creator God. Thus we see that the one God is seen as the embodiment of reason. What has happened is the law of non-contradiction represented by the One has become deified as the one God. Soon the old gods were forgotten. the old gods would first lose there personalities, and become universals. In other words the scenarios that were the old gods became information (universals) subject to the one God, who became the creator of universals. This is of course the truth, in that the law of non-contradiction is how universals are created. So by becoming an embodiment of reason, a person could come to embody the One (God). This is of course the metaphysic of Christianity. The early Church Fathers pasted the message of Jesus on Nazareth on top of classical Greek metaphysics. The Medieval philosopher-theologian Thomas Aquinas gives the game away when he teaches that the law of non-contradiction cannot be separated from the nature for God. Reason has become deified. This is of course, what we observe in Plotinus, and the latter neoplatonists. This is not to say that mythology disappeared, both Prophyry and Iamblichus asserted the efficacy of ritual. The philosophy of Plotinus is a religion for the sage, not the common man. The latter neoplatonists tried to broaden Plotinus's Platonism. The top-down system held sway until the new astronomy of the Renaissance destroyed the physical basis of the geocentric theory the metaphysics was based upon. Thus starting the crisis of modern Western Civilization. We now move to the issue from the previous essay of the end. For people living in the period of intertestemental Judaism, it must have seemed the world had ended, the old gods were gone, they were alone in the cosmos. The alienation of the age can be observed in the writings of the Gnostics and classical Greed drama. Humans had to embody the new rational consciousness by invoking the One (the law on Non-contradiction), or be alone in the cosmos. They had to accept that the usual limited perspective of the individual is flawed, that the individual must invoke the eternal universal perspective of reason, where the individual becomes lost. Humans are no longer part of nature. There should be now surprise that this new view caused massive alienation. The meaning of the Apocalypse is the the old image-triggers no longer worked. Humans construct their world through the use of image-triggers, change the image-triggers, change the world. A world had ended and new one had begun. END