conviction that mankind has not evolved, but "devolved", from "giants who once walked the earth, to a near animal state... vowed to cataclysmic annihilation, while an evolving elite gathers all of human experience for a resurrection in spirituality.
My views on this are similar. We evolve physically while devolving spiritually. We start out with hologram-like subtle bodies, naturally soul conscious, and devolve into body conscious corporeal creatures. It is only at the half way point in the cycle that we take our physical "skins" - these physical bodies will have evolved, much as science indicates, becoming more complex as they become more material and less spiritual. There is always a balance of spirit and matter in everything - it is like Yin/Yang - over time the balance moves to more matter less spirit, until a tipping point (now!) when the balance starts moving back towards spirit.
There will (obviously) be no fossil record of subtle bodies - so science only gets half the picture (as always).
Then, once we have our physical bodies, the process reverses, in the natural way of any cycle, and we evolve spiritually (as we are doing now), while our bodies devolve. At a certain point in our spiritual evolution, we will cast off our skins and become once again soul-conscious angelic beings.
It is like breathing in and out - the endless rhythm of life, of cycles - not the straight-line upward trend hypothesized by the scientists.
This philosophy is in line with all ancient wisdom on the subject - pre-Hindu Vedic, Buddhist, Hermes, Plato, occultists, you name it. Science operates with a blindfold on by denying the spiritual dimension - the life force.
There is lots of evidence that our ancestors had skills that we appear to have lost.
Wilson continues:
Alchemy, according to Shwaller, is derive from "Kemi", the Greek word for Egypt, with the Arabic "Al" appended. In ancient Egypt, the pharaoh, the god-king, was the symbol of this "absolute from which we draw our power". And alchemy, or the transmutation of matter into spirit - of which the transmutation of base metals into gold is a mere by-product - depends upon this "moment of power", of being wholly present in the present moment."
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In The White Goddess, Robert Graves speaks about "lunar" or "solar" knowledge. Our modern type of knowledge - rational knowledge - is "solar": it operates with words and concepts, and it fragments the object of knowledge with dissection and analysis. But ancient civilizations had "lunar" knowledge, an intuitive knowledge that grasped things as a whole.... Worship of the moon goddess was the original universal religion of mankind, which was supplanted at a fairly late stage by worship of the sun god Apollo, ... a symbol of science and rationality - that is, of left brain knowledge, as opposed to the right-brain intuition associated with the goddess.
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The Druid alphabet was a closely guarded secret, but its eighteen letters were the names of trees, whose consonants stood for the months of which the trees were characteristic, and the vowels for the positions of the sun, with its equinoxes and solstices. The "tree calendar" was in use throughout Europe and the Middle East in the Bronze Age, and was associated with the Triple Moon Goddess.This cult, says Graves, was slowly repressed by the "busy rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favor of the commercial Phoenician alphabet - the familiar ABC - and initiated European literature and science."
But these right-brain skills are not really lost to us - we can still access them - as Wilson discusses:
In Swanns Way, Marcel Proust describes how, feeling tired and depressed, he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea, and experienced a sudden sense of overwhelming delight: "I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.". The taste.. brought the sudden sense of ecstasy and freedom.
As a bored and depressed teenager, Graham Greene took a revolver on to the common and played Russian roulette. When there was just a click on an empty chamber, he felt an overwhelming sense of delight and relief, and the recognition that life is infinitely rich and exciting.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the phrase 'peak experience' to describe such moments...
In a book called Seeing the Invisible, a sixteen-year-old girl describes how, approaching a wood on a summer evening, time stood still for a moment. "Everywhere, surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light. like sun on a frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere...". She comments: "I only saw it once, but I know in my heart it is still there."
Maslow noted... when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they began to recall peak experiences that they had had in the past, then forgotten. For example, a youth who was working his way through college by playing drums in a jazz band recalled how, at about two in the morning, he suddenly began to drum so perfectly that he "couldn't do a thing wrong", and went into the peak experience.
Moreover, as students began to talk to one another about their peak experiences, they began having them all the time/ Like the girl approaching the wood, they "knew it was still there", and knowing it was still there places them in the right state of optimistic expectancy that tends to generate the peak experience. These experiences always produced an overwhelming sense of authenticity, of the reality of freedom. In such moments, our usual sense of lack of freedom is seen as an illusion.
....
We can be sure that our ancestors of 4000 years ago found it far easier to induce peak experiences, for they were relaxed and close to nature. Then came the "Fall" into left-brain consciousness, which induces a kind of tunnel vision. Yet, as Maslow's research demonstrated, it is not difficult for healthy human beings to throw off the tunnel vision and regain consciousness of freedom.
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If we wish to live in such a way that we have regular peak experiences, we need to maintain a sense of drive, purpose, optimism. We induce "depression" by allowing ourselves to experience a "sinking feeling". It is like letting air out of a tyre. And when we feel cheerful and optimistic - say, on a spring morning, or setting out on a journey - we create a sense of high inner pressure by filling ourselves with a confident feeling of meaning and purpose. We do it ourselves... we permit ourselves to become negative, or merely "blank".
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I am arguing that it was necessary for human evolution for us to escape from that pleasant collective consciousness that characterized our ancestors. It had enormous advantages, but it was essentially limited. It was too pleasant, too relaxed, and its achievements tended to be communal. The new left-brain consciousness was far harder, far more painful and exhausting.
...as Maslow realised, healthy people are always having experiences of right-brain consciousness. In spite of being trapped in the left brain, healthy and optimistic human beings can easily regain access to right-brain consciousness.
In other words, left brainers have the choice. They can induce right-brain consciousness. But the typical right brainer finds it very distressing to try to induce left-brain consciousness - the kind of purposeful concentration required, for example, to solve a difficult mathematical or philosophical problem. Which means that, at this point in evolution, left brainers have the advantage.
This is why insights into past civilizations.. are so important. We have been inclined to see them as less efficient versions of ourselves - superstitious, technologically inadequate, deficient in reason and logic. Now it has become clear that this was a mistake. In some ways they actually knew more than we do about the hidden powers of the mind. In some ways they were far more efficient than we are.
..evolution has actually given us more than they had. Right-brain awareness tends to be passive. Left-brain awareness is active. Right-brain awareness is like a broad, gently-flowing river. Left-brain awareness has the power to contemplate itself, as if in a mirror... we have not lost what they have - we still have it - but we also have a great deal more. Our chief disadvantage so far has been that we didn't really know that we had it - or, insofar as we did know, failed to understand what could be done with it.
... the next step in human evolution has already happened. It has been happening for the past 3500 years. Now all we have to do is recognise it.
That step is, of course to regain our balance. We moved from right-brain to left-brain, and now we have to find the central balance between the two. We started out naturally and instinctively spiritual and intuitive, with a group consciousness, and we "evolved" into rational individualists, with self-centered egos, and the capacity to analyze ourselves. Now we are regaining our group consciousness, reconnecting with the inherent spirituality which we always had, but without losing our knowledge or our ability to see ourselves.
Now we are on an upswing, becoming giants once again, relaxed, happy and carefree - but unlike our ancestors we will know how lucky we are, and appreciate our fortune
Luckily I look more like my grandpa's side of the family.