The deeply weird platypus is even weirder than you thought.
Gregorian chanting can reduce blood pressure and stress.
And finally, I recommend to you, my dear reader, this essay: C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem: Recovering the medieval imagination.
Try to get over the fact that Mr Lewis was a Christian, and this essay by Mr Michael Ward appears in Christianity Today. This essay is Important.
[T]he medieval universe was "tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine".Somewhere along the line, our western view of the universe changed from Mythopoeic to Mechanical. Fair enough; I like my electric toaster just as much as the next fellow.
But our mode of imagining the universe largely changed in the same way, and something vital and wondrous in our civilization died.
Or perhaps it only slumbers, and raises again its hoary head from time to time and shakes the rime from its beard. Or perhaps the whole idea of the universe as a metaphor for itself in anything but mathematics is irrational.
Frankly, I've sometimes found myth more rational than math, but perhaps that's just the way my imagination works.
Anyhow, read the essay. Then come back here and tell me what you think.
And, if possible, relate it to the platypus. And Gregorian chant.
Edited to add: Mr David Brooks writes an essay about the essay that pegs it.
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thomryng- the Cherry Blossom King
- Vombatus Sapiens
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Well you are kind of strange yourself that must be the connection;)
The essay...I suspect such shifts in view are cyclical. Cultures go through periods dominated by anthropomorphosis and mysticism and shift to the empirical and back and forth. I think neither view, on its own, really explains things. I think we need both. And I don't think either impulse is ever absent in any person, no matter how superstitious or scientific they may appear.
Ultimately, I think the best approach is to embrace both, fully. Because a mind full of wonder is conducive to finding creative avenues for investigating the provable. Or if you're Italo Calvino, vice-versa (as in T-Zero and Cosmicomics).
Right now, I think we're deep in an empirical phase, but that doesn't mean the wonder is gone...it just takes people like you and me and many of our friends to put the imaginative beauty in its rightful place beside the scientific and mathematical beauty.
If we approach science with pure intellect then there is no wonder. It becomes rigid and unmoving. I think the platypus is a great example. When I first heard of it, I laughed, and got excited that there existed something that science could not put into a neat little box!
Don’t take me wrong, I love scientist, most are humble and imaginative enough to accept that they don’t know it all and are willing to toss out pre-established theories when new evidence comes to light. It’s just the ones that refuse to that bother me!
To look at the universe with the knowledge I do have (I’m getting an A in astronomy), and to realize that we really don’t know quite why it all works makes me happy. I love a good mystery, it should drive us to try to understand in a limited why but not to be disappointed if we never get there.
Because of my faith I realize that we all are limited human beings, we will never be perfect nor will we understand it all until the Lord’s return. I believe that is what God is constantly trying to tell us through our experience here in the reality. That even if he could sit us down, give us all of his knowledge, we still would not get it!
“8For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways”, saith the LORD.- Isaiah 55:8 (King James Version)
I don’t have to “get it” but it does not preclude me from trying to learn all I can, from trying to live all I can. It should let me know that there won’t be a test at the end of it all that I can enjoy the wonder of the world/universe around me and praise my God for it’s creation.
I’m done… oh yeah you can have your soap box back…
:)
Swedenborg wrote of the planets as having spiritual significance as well. He wrote of life on other planets having different spiritual characteristics, based on how close to the sun each was. When I first encountered this, I felt disappointed, because he wrote about it as if he believed it was the literal truth. Now that I've moved back into a more mythic frame of mind, I'm thinking of going back and having another look.
My recent reading in Qabalah also has made me more aware of the spiritual nature of natural phenomena. It's a good feeling to make those connections and feel those overtones.
I grew up in a family of scientists, who tended to sort-of believe in God and not at all in Magic.
A large part of what formed my own spiritual views was reading Diane Duane's Young Wizard books, which very specifically read science into a mythopoeic framework. I was about twelve (there were only three out then) and it was like a bolt of lightning to the brain. And I think sometimes that the leap from data to meaning is one of those deep goals I'm writing towards in every story, more or less.
Thank you. This puts some new pieces into an old frame.
Think about you and Familias Ryng surprisingly often for total strangers.
Be good,
Dave.