American Mythologist, Joseph Campbell says:
Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.
By finding your own dream and following it through,
it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live.
But just as in dream, the subject and object,
though they seem to be separate, are really the same.
At a young age, words and images become our mental foundation. Through religious teachings and scriptures, science class, cultural stories told through the memory/lens of our guardians and mentors, and perhaps even Disney’s Fantasia, a collage of concepts about the meaning of creation begins to form, and it continues throughout our lifetimes.
Entertainment has not always come at the touch of a finger, as it does now, so traveling story-tellers would spin yarns for eager audiences in ancient times. Imaginative stories were told to quench the curiosity and sate the longings of the tribes. The naive listeners might retell the tales, bundling wisdom with witticism, and muddling the meanings of mystical metaphors.
Creation myths of old, told orally in most cases, secretly preserved and perpetuated the knowledge of ancestors. Wisdom teachings also conveyed transcendent truths for posterity; however, the information was necessarily disguised so that only the intended recipients would understand. Archetypal principles might become anthropomorpic principals in fantastic fables.
Should old ragged stories of origin simply pass unheeded as mythologies of primitive and superstitious peoples? Of what significance are these tales for us today? Could a timeless value be derived from tattered tales, if their unifying verity were properly understood?
Symbols and numbers held hidden meanings, known only to the elite. In ancient art, architecture and artifacts, we repeatedly find natural patterns craftily disguised — hidden in plain sight. Even if appreciated superficially for beauty, symmetry or proportion, the masses were denied the key to deeper understanding. Still today, we are taught next to nothing about these profound patterns.
Perhaps we ought to consider that tales told, generation after generation for thousands of years, may have a discernible commonality and commodity — a precious and practical truth. What if the myriad communications are scattered pieces of a unitary mosaic?
Despite being run through numerous sieves of censorship, whether innocently or intentionally, there remain unbroken threads of esoteric wisdom which have miraculously survived the scrubbing. Genesis, the first chapter of the Holy Bible, whose English translations were a 16th century achievement, the Tao te Ching from China, written around 500 BCE, and the Rig Veda of India, which preceded the Tao te Ching by at least 1,000 years, are among the sacred texts in which original esoteric wisdom remains shrewdly encrypted, and so overlooked by the overlords. These are the three main scriptures we will use comparatively on this site. When aligned as if a single story told three ways, we can decode each one from the other two.
Myths of Scientists
Today, it is our scientists who elaborate extravagant stories of our origins. Their story-telling spectrum is flanked by a universal origin at one end and particle origins at the other end. Life and consciousness fall somewhere in-between.
Professional scientists are necessarily more focused on engaging grantors of grants than they are seeking to entertain the general population. Nevertheless, stories such as the one about a “Big Bang” — an occurrence without a conceivable cause that somehow causes everything conceivable — has crossed over into contemporary vernacular. As the Big Bang mythology goes, 13.82* billion years ago, before time or space existed, a volume smaller than a pinhead of unknown stuff bizarrely blows up into what is now the ever-expanding fabric of space-time, through which we are whirled and hurled at unimaginable speeds.
*date established by European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, as of March 21, 2013.
And, at the opposite end of the spectrum, scientists are flummoxed by an influx of virtual particles, which emerge in a vacuum that can hardly harbor them.
Author, Charles Seife, on the infinite vacuum:
Particles are constantly winking in and out of existence. The vacuum is never truly empty. Instead, it is seething with these virtual particles; at every point in space, an infinite number are happily popping up and disappearing.
When suddenly a new organization spontaneously emerges within otherwise random-movement fluidity, we call this a phase transition. For instance, a phase transition occurs as water freezes or boils. Snowflakes and Rayleigh-Benard convection cells demonstrate interesting self-organization. Since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the vacuum should possess a static amount of energy. This would severely restrict temperature and pressure fluctuations, which are needed to produce phase transitions. The chaotic emergence of virtual particles everywhere defies our previous understandings — first and foremost, the long-held myth that the vacuum was empty!
In the classical realm of physics, finding fleeting particles popping out of the void means somebody has some ‘splaining to do. To excuse the unlikely scenario, scientists explain that borrowing energy would break no rules as long as the energy is promptly repaid — the more energy borrowed, the sooner it must be given back — so says this myth. We are left to marvel just where might be the boundary between the inventory of energy we account for and the bank of energy from which short-term loans are available.
The Scientific Revolution produced a world view that has had a foothold for the past five hundred years. From a zoomed-out perspective, however, we recognize that world-views, or paradigms, rise and fall, as do the tides and times.
For additional insights about the causes and effects of paradigmatic changes, you are invited to visit the aside: Change and Revolution.
Quadernity of the 21st century posits sweeping and timeless technologies, applicable to microscopic, human and cosmic scales. We are just beginning to explore the process and the products of this amazing tool.
Spiritual Revolution
The nascent uprisings we currently feel welling up in our hearts portend a spiritual revolution: a critical shift away from the mythologies of Renaissance materialism and religiosity. We are less likely to accept by default mythologies of unknown origin, though it is difficult to let go of ideas passed down for generations, if not millennia.
Even exploring alternatives can provoke emotional anxiety. This is a Pavlovian reaction, due to the fact that throughout history dire consequences (torture or capital punishment) have been met by those heretics who fail to adhere to prevailing customs and authoritarian rule.
Churches have long preached that heaven comes as a joyous relief at death, a reward reserved only for the pious. Jesus proclaimed, paradoxically, that we must die to ourselves if we are to live eternally. Spiritual masters from the east teach that enlightenment requires extensive rigorous practices spanning many lifetimes. Conversely, ordinary people claim to have experienced the blissful state of Oneness (non-duality) without notable provocation, as if they just suddenly woke up; entertaining this possibility leads us to deduce that what is ours already need not be attained. Instead of fretting over what to do, how to pray, eat, sit, breathe, vacate the mind, etc., we ought to banish the belief that our enlightenment is elsewhere, when it is always already here and now.
Holy Bible, Original King James Version, Luke 17:20-21
And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God shall come, he answered them and said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, “Lo, here! or lo there!” for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
With all the wildly differing advice, it’s no wonder so many of us find ourselves fluctuating between anxiousness and apathy. Drilling down through the diverse messages, we find but one suggestion is made by all of them: to eliminate whatever obstructs our gracefulness. In other words, an obstruction is simply anything that stands between us and our divine heritage. That is good news, because a critical mass of spiritually awakened beings will help make bearable the oncoming planetary changes and assure the highest good of all concerned.
Although achieving heavenly enlightenment before death is an option few are presently aware of, we can assume that many more will be glad to learn of it. Those who attain their heavenly abode only at death can share nothing on the subject of enlightenment. Those who spontaneously awaken cannot tell us what dispelled their darkness. And those who have awakened through extensive rigorous means are difficult to duplicate. The option holding the greatest hope for large-scale awakening is that people can learn how to identify and sidestep their obstacles. Those who recognize and realize their True Selves make it easier for others to do the same; thus, a population of awakened human beings grows exponentially.
Ancient Mythology for Modern Minds
A new age unfolds before us. We can no longer afford to allow our emotional reflexes to deter us from exploring long-lived mythologies and mining them for meanings that are relevant to our modern-day issues and coherent with current understandings, even if doing this runs counter to the main-stream paradigm.
Quadernity is a myth for our own tribe, a map for our modern minds, and a means to harvest from age-old adages elegant solutions to our contemporary conundrums.
What if, instead of fitting our wanderings and wonderings into a well-worn world-view, we instead employ a model grand enough to engulf what is good from all past paradigms and genius enough to engender a future framework that includes the proliferation of peace and prosperity, as well as wholesome habits and wholistic habitats?
In passages written so long, long ago, we discover shockingly accurate descriptions of what is only recently being explored at the fringes of modern science and well-understood by only dozens of people on the planet. Timeless wisdom teachings are as relevant today as they were in the days of old. If we want to empower ourselves, delight ourselves, or merely entertain ourselves, ancient wisdom is here for the taking: our generous ancestors left us time-capsules everywhere!