“As the child’s first feeling is for its
mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in
primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet
were outside, and independent of him. Devotion arose out of that feeling, and
became the first and foremost motor in his nature — for it is the only one
which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us, and which we find alike
in human babe and the young of the animal.” ............Madame Blavatsky
“The great antique heart, how like a
child’s in its simplicity, like a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth!
heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making all the
earth a mystic temple to him, the earth’s business all a kind of worship.
Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the
common sunlight; angels yet hover, doing God’s messages among men. Wonder,
miracle, encompass the man — he lives in an element of miracle. The essence of
it lives through all times and all eternity!” ............Thomas Carlyle
It was Jean Gebser who categorized the
evolution of consciousness and its transition into five distinct levels. In the
primitive level, which he called Archaic, is the one that both Madame Blavatsky
as well as Thomas Carlyle bring out in their writings.
The term "archaic" as used here
is derived from the Greek "arce", meaning inception, or origin. This
state of consciousness is also termed as "Zero dimensional" as humans
were totally immersed in the world unable to extricate himself or herself from
that world. They were identical with that world.
This is the feeling of the infant who has
just emerged from the womb. Humanity at large had just emerged from the womb of
nature through a process of evolution. His six layer neocortical network was
still in its nascent state with all its innate capacities untapped. The first
step in the awakening of self awareness was the sensing of the objective nature
of elements which were outside his existential framework but which was very much
felt to be the essential elements of his or her sustenance.
The mystical nature of the objective
world emerged from the understanding in the human mind about the concept of
space and time. As a biped and hunter-gatherer space was integral to man's
existence.
There were no delineated spaces in his
life as there were no demarcations in his existential functions with respect to
space and time. He was in a consciousness of ever present origin both in space
and time. Rightly Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin (first
published in Germany in 1949 but not translated into English until 1984) had
the most appropriate name to his insights into human consciousness.
The very first sustaining external agency
was the mother and the first seeds of worship or devotion was directed in that
dimension. This is the reason that we find the "Mother Goddess"
worship was the most ancient. The source from which man comes and the source
which sustains him, mother earth, was the first seed of worship sown in the
heart of man.
Archaeological investigations have
revealed that the Upper Palaeolithic, Venus von Willendorf, (Image attached to
this post) is estimated to have been carved 24,000–22,000 BCE and was one of
the oldest images of worship.
The next level of evolution of human
consciousness was the Magical structure wherein humanity was still integral in
its relation to nature.
As Gary Lachman writes in his book "A Secret
History of Consciousness":
"This
doesn’t differ greatly from the archaic, but the separation from origin has
increased. Where in the archaic structure there is identity between
consciousness and the world, in the magical structure there is unity between
them. At this stage, our ancestors lived in a kind of group or tribal
consciousness, which was still strongly linked to nature. Gebser speaks of a
“vegetative intertwining of all living things” during this stage, and he links
Jung’s notion of “synchronicity”—“meaningful coincidence”—and the effects,
aptly, of “magic” to this structure.
Thomas Carlyle captures this ethereal
feeling in his poetic excellence wherein the magic of heaven overhead and angels
hovering as God's messengers, man lives in an age of miracles or as Gebser
named it in an age of magic.
This is a short article to highlight the
emergence of self conscious awareness in mankind and his alienation from his
integral nature with the true source. The seeds of worship was sown to nurture
the connectivity to the source but the many branches of the full grown tree
seem to relish and wallow in self glory in the false notion of an independent
ego driven existence.
New seeds are being spawned as humanity is
nudged to ascend to an integral consciousness level and establish a holistic approach through spiritual insights
which underlie the great ancient traditions and marvellous discoveries of
science.
Love to all.
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