Civilizations and their world-views

Monday, September 23, 2019

4:30 a.m. Guys, you may have your own agenda for today. If not, I’d be open to your explanation of how the various kingdoms maintain the 3D world.

Bear in mind, explanations are models, they are schematics.

Yes. The map is not the territory. Still, it helps orient us.

Yes. That is the intent, to orient you. Anything experienced first-hand is going to be different than expected, but a little preparatory explanation can help point you in a helpful direction.

Felt like I botched that, pretty much.

It’ll get through. It’s just a matter of persistence and repetition, as usual. So, let’s paint a few broad strokes, and see where it leaves us. Your reactions, as usual, will help us to refine the presentation; that’s just the nature of teaching.

Taking the old conceptual scheme of things, we will look at the 3D world in terms of kingdoms, and will not concern ourselves to adhere strictly to the scheme when we have reason to diverge from it. After all, a scheme hundreds of years old must in some senses be obsolete or, let’s say, incomplete, in terms of the revolutionary discoveries and theories that followed. Animal, vegetable, mineral didn’t really have room for electrons and plasma and quantum states. However, in practice this is less of an obstacle than you might imagine.

All right, let’s begin with mineral, vegetable, animal, human, celestial. A progression from inert to energetic, from static to active, from unconscious to conscious, from dead to fully alive.

Bear in mind, this scheme was not prepared by “modern” minds. The mental world of those who devised it contained very different premises than yours does, and contained premises that will be in some ways more and in some ways less similar to the civilization that is shaping itself around you. Life, we remind you, is not linear, and the mental life of a culture is not a progression from ignorance to knowledge, from error to truth, or from puzzlement toward comprehension. It is more like a fade-in / fade-out process, in which a new field of perception gradually clarifies a different world, as older ways of seeing close and newer ways open.

Although I understand what you are saying, if only from our decades of pondering this, I’m not sure this is going to be clear to our readers.

Feel free to translate.

A civilization has limits to its perceptions and understandings, within which are contained all its possibilities. The ancient Greeks, Jews, Romans, Parthians, etc. were not different from us merely because they didn’t have our science and technology, but really almost the inverse. They didn’t build our civilization in their time because they lived in a world with different mental limits.

Yes, and of course that is true in far more detail, to a far greater extent, when you consider not only the civilizations to which you are directly affiliated but also those like the world’s indigenous communities that entirely reject or cannot comprehend the underpinnings of your worldview that resulted in your technology, and your way of being. African tribes, North and South American tribes, Aborigines in Australasia, subcultures everywhere including in Europe – they are not necessarily failed attempts to produce the Model T Ford. And they are not necessarily unsuccessful adaptations to the world. One small example, the mostly unsuspected world of shamans in many cultures, intimately in contact with vegetable mineral and celestial intelligences to which your particular civilization has been mostly blind and deaf.

I imagine that some people will find it hard to think of primitive people around the world, particularly in the tropics, as successful but different. To us they appear to be more like degenerated remnants of an earlier level of development. I am not calling them moral degenerates; I am saying they appear to have been ground down by the difficulties of life in their environment, and appear to have lost the thread that their ancestors had. Today’s Maya, for instance, descendants of what seems to have been a fabulously accomplished civilization, who appear to be total incapable of understanding it, let alone recreating it. Of course, this could be because the invading Spanish burned their books, but I don’t think it is entirely that simple.

You could look to medieval Europe for a more accessible example. Then people believed in alchemy and astrology, in geomancy, in communing with spirits, with many forces you cannot take seriously in your current civilization’s model: elementals, demons, familiars, etc. Another civilization’s assumptions and working models are going to appear superstitious when a different civilization has arisen using different models.

We’re slow off the mark this morning, though. We’ve burned 45 minutes and we haven’t even begun on the kingdoms as explanation.

Oh, but we have, only we didn’t begin where you might have expected us to. These preliminary brush-clearings will shed light on the subject, if absorbed.

We will begin by reminding you of a very basic fact that no other civilization but the ancient Greek and ancient Roman world have overlooked or repudiated, which is that the 3D and non-3D worlds not only interact, not only interconnect, but are two aspects of the same undivided reality. The West, and its cultural children, tends to proceed as if this were not so. No one else has done so since the days of Atlantis. It is that particular blindness to inconvenient facts that doomed them and is dooming yours to irrelevance or let’s say obsolescence.

Seems to me the Greeks and Romans took their gods seriously. What is the underlying assumption of the Iliad and the Odyssey, after all, if not the continuing interaction of the gods and humans? The Roman Army cast augurs to see if this was a day they should fight. You know what I mean: These were not seen as superstitions nor as poetic license. So in what sense may they be said to have lived without a sense of 3D / non-3D interaction?

That isn’t quite what we meant to convey. Those civilizations – or that civilization, if you wish to consider Greco-Roman as one – did begin as religious; they ended as skeptical, materialistic and “hard-headedly practical” in a way your own civilization finds comfortingly familiar. After all, your civilization, which in a sense may be said to date from somewhere in the Middle Ages when the Renaissance attempted to recreate Greek life in its attitudes and perceptions, began one way and moved to another. Do you think John Adams would recognize your times as his logical mental and spiritual descendant? Jefferson might. Adams would not.

I gather that the distinction you are drawing is religious.

Not religious in the sense of following any particular creed, let alone belonging to any sect, but religious in the sense of at least an instinctive recognition of non-3D ties as active and in fact vital. Washington would have agreed with Adams in that; he believed in divine providence, because he had repeatedly experienced it.

All right. But we are out of time.

Hold in mind the distinction between different civilizations and their beliefs (which is another way of saying, their codifications of the results of what they experienced). We will be looking at a medieval scheme of classification not as they would have seen it, and certainly not as your civilization sees it, but as the next, emerging, civilization might tend to explain it.

Looking forward to that. See you then.