Our world seems to be at a crossroads always, and this cultural cross is the point of where countervailing forces meet - sometimes leaning one way or another but never revealing a definitive direction in time.
I know some would argue either way, and by taking the middle path I may be copping out. But this is where I am now, and yet it was not always the case. As a former “evolutionary,” I had sensed we were progressing in time with greater impressions of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. This zeal was misguided by a limited sense of the world, the lens from where I viewed culture, and the way I believed transcendental virtues should manifest.
I was marveling more at the progress in the material sense, and the premise that improved life conditions allowed for a civilized world that was becoming more self-aware of itself. Now, I am not so sure (even beyond the banality on social media).
So reading Jeremy Naydler’s book, The Future of the Ancient World: Essays on the History of Consciousness, was truly a pleasure. He brought me back to a time when man inhabited transcendence in a way that definitely seems rare today.
One interesting point is while modern man leads with vision, which creates greater division, ancient man operated more through sound. “Whereas the eye shows us the surfaces of things—their extension in space, their form and color—the ear reveals to us that which is hidden from the eye... The sound an animal makes gives us an experience of what is happening in its soul, which no amount of looking would communicate to us.” This definitely seems valid. I’m sure we’ve all sensed how great music can touch our soul on a much deeper level than a great painting (see Schopenhauer on this).Ancient man also lived in an enchanted world, where the visible and invisible worlds were connected. So how does modern man recapture that? Naydler suggests, “In these three practices of, first, stilling our thoughts so that awareness is intensified at the inner threshold where thoughts arise; second, attending to our dreams and “living the symbolic life”; and, third, practicing an “imaginative seeing” of the natural world, it is possible to become aware once more of the reality of what is not “there”—a reality that can become present to us in the three spheres of spirit, psyche, and nature.”
Despite that lack of physical change that happened historically, ancient man did not necessarily live in a static disposition to life. “To the ancient Egyptian nothing ‘is as it is’: it is always potentially another thing.” Differently so for us, as we may be overwhelmed with the dynamism on earth, our depth in consciousness may be in a place of constant inertia.
“From the religious viewpoint of antiquity, however, the historical process would more accurately be interpreted as having involved, not the withdrawal of our psychic projections from the world, but a process of introjection, by which the gods dwelling in the interiority of nature have been appropriated by the modern psyche: a subtle but important difference of perspective.” So as we moderns like to do, we just put in all in heads.
Still, time has not done a complete disservice to man. Naydler notes that “This is the future of the ancient world—a future that differs from the past in one fundamental respect: that the renewed relationship to the world of spirit will be based on the autonomy of the individual whose center of consciousness is the free reflective act.”
Yes, we own it now! But what is it that we own?
And here is the unfortunate thing: “Spirit has unraveled itself so completely into materiality, into that which is divided from itself, that this division must itself form the basis of reunion.”
So while we now have many gods today, as our ancestors once did, they are so much less sacred: the Kardashian-gods are just one such example.
And the way out may be “just as the old polytheism was in fact monocentric, so does the emerging polytheism need to recognize a new principle of unity at its center. A principle of unity that cannot be reduced to any god, for it is the specifically human energy of transcendence, which links us with the One that embraces all multiplicity.”
So it doesn’t have to be is as it is, but oh so much more.