Have we always had the mind we have today, or is the mind a constantly changing concept? If we read ancient mystical texts, or study concepts such as the Akashic Records, it appears we do not have a mind today that the ancients would recognize.
Rather, the Akashic Records suggest a mind that is all-encompassing, holistic, and complete with all knowledge of the universe. They are a concept the mind can wander through, as if a great library of all knowledge, and all meaning.
A DIFFERENT WAY OF THINKING
Could our ancients have understood such a concept? In ‘The White Goddess’ the writer Robert Graves put forward his idea that ancient civilizations had a different form of consciousness.
Speaking of ‘lunar’ and ‘solar’ knowledge, solar is modern knowledge based on the rational, whereas lunar knowledge is intuitive and grasps things as a whole, compared to solar, which is compartmentalized, breaking knowledge up into manageable bits.
Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz would agree. He argued that the ancient Egyptians had a totally different knowledge system to us, again seeing the world as a whole. To him, the modern mind acts as a spectator in the world, looking at things from the outside. Ancient knowledge involved taking part in the world; being connected to its totality.
He even went as far as arguing that man has not evolved, but devolved to a near animal state in modern times. But more than this, he also believed that the ancient Egyptians had inherited this previous way of thinking from a previous civilization.
DATA-PROCESSING MIND
What kind of mind could they be talking about? Perhaps more importantly, could man have actually had a different kind of mind?
Of late, a new mood has entered psychology which argues that the form of consciousness we presently have may not necessarily be the form of consciousness mankind has had since he evolved.
Take, for instance, the modern computer game. We all know the stereotype of the computer nerd. Alien to many of us, he seems a different creation, existing in a reality of cyberspace and techno-babble.
The stereotype is most likely a fiction, but a hint of reality can always be found behind such stereotyping. To see whether such people ARE different to most of us, during the mid-1990s a series of studies were made on computer game playing kids, including a study at the University of Washington.
Although the findings do not constitute proof, evidence was found that over-use of computer games can cause a form of evolution of consciousness.
For most of us, concentration is a straight forward process of clearing the mind in order to concentrate on one thing at a time. It seems this is not so with addictive computer gamesters.
They seem to have evolved the ability to concentrate on several different elements in parallel. Finely tuning their minds to scan a mass of information, their consciousness is changing to form a data-processing mind in order to access the mass of information available through information technology.
CLASSICAL MIND
This new mind for a techno world suggests a constant stream of evolutionary change going on in consciousness. But if this is so, can hints of similar evolutionary changes be identified from the literature and culture of the past?
When you begin to look for such changes, it appears they can, indeed, be identified.
The earliest known European texts are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Thought to have been written in Greece in the 6th century BC, they contain many descriptions of the world that would be alien to us today. For instance, the sea is described as the colour of wine.
During the 1970s, Princeton scholar Dr Julian Jaynes became interested in such perceptions from Homer’s writings, as well as the O1d Testament and Epic of Gilgemesh.
His conclusion was that perception was different to the point that the people of our early civilisations did not have self-consciousness as we identify it today: Iliadic man did not have subjectivity as we do; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mindspace to introspect upon.
Such words were based upon the fact that any decision, any action, taken by such early peoples were decisions made, not by them, but by their gods, or God. Their world was totally regulated by the supernatural, and any choice they made seemed to come from them via the supernatural rather than their own inner minds.
It was almost as if their inner minds were the vessels through which they perceived their gods to be operating, as if Graves and Schwaller were right in saying they were part of a whole, rather than observing the world from outside.
ALLEGORICAL MIND
Because of their reliance on their gods for all decisions and actions, such early people did not have a need to theorise and conceptualise as we do today. Due to this, their language dealt in myth and allegory. Through such early literature, ideals and standards were expressed poetically, with laws and customs being identified and related to the antics of past gods.
To see how this differs to modern consciousness, the proverbial Trekkie may recall an episdode of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ in which Captain Picard is transported to a planet in order to learn how to communicate with a puzzling alien species who’s language is gibberish to all other species.
In order to begin to understand the language, Picard first had to realise that he needed to identify certain past customs and actions of the species’ ancestors to relate the words and place meaning upon them.
EVOLVING MIND
By the time of Aristotle it appears that consciousness had evolved to the modern form, in that introspection is carried out and thought of as personal to the thinker. But there are hints that this is not so. Consider, for instance, perception of the world.
Today we perceive ourselves as living in a three dimensional world. But it seems that this is a recent innovation of consciousness which didn’t materialise in our minds until the 16th century.
Evidence of this can come from looking at pre-Renaissance art. Such art is clearly two-dimensional with no indication of depth to the picture. Then, suddenly, perspective geometry was understood and an artist realised that if he put his thumb to his eye, it would appear bigger than a building.
Almost at once, paintings changed to reflect a three dimensional world. And according to academic Harold Bloom, a similar change occurred a bit later.
Bloom has argued that, prior to Shakespeare, man had no conception of personality. It is perhaps incorrect to say that prior to this time man was an automaton, but with the possible exception of Chaucer, there is little evidence in literature prior to Shakespeare that a modern personality, with feelings, existed.
Of course, this is all controvercial, but evidence suggests that early man could well have had a different form of consciousness to us.
© Anthony North, September 2007
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