Man & the Advent of Ego (Part 1)

In most of the ancient philosophy, religion and school of thoughts, man is seen as an objective creature. It is very recent that we have started to define man as an subjective entity. Man was seen as THERIOMORPHIC. Which simply means that man was seen in the form of the beast. Man was not special. He was not superior to the rest of the planet. He was a part of that beast family. Just look at the imagery of the Egyptian gods, the head of the man is shown as an animal. As a beast. It is same with the Vedas, the most revered and auspicious among the god is an elephant 'Lord Ganesha'. It was not a question of possibility but the acceptance of the planet as a whole. The nature can take any form. A monkey, a rat, a bird or emptiness. Man was not presumed to be the center of gravity.  

The Dancing Ganesha (Nritya Ganesha)

Today man has made himself regardless of the nature. He finds himself as the observer and not the observed. His spirit is not the spirit of the nature. Hence he struggles with his identity. Because he cannot find his home. The stories of trees, the sounds of bird and the smell of the forest is not a part of him, but a part of his adventure. Our whole ideology focuses on finding adventures, the ego is made to look as a separate entity and that is the problem. Though in our scientific and artistic exploration, we generally imitate nature. We deny the fact that our capacities and understanding are not limited to the senses. The true progress in both science and art is not just to observe and imitate nature, but to realize the one'ness with it. 

Pendulum Clock conceived
by Galileo in 1637. 

Gothe once said, 'Were not the eye of the nature of the sun, how could it behold the sun'. Around 1602, Galileo Galilee observed the relationship between the pendulum and time keeping. He discovered the principle of isochronism. The idea that struck him about pendulum in 1602, became the founding idea for the pendulum clock in 1637. Though Galileo couldn't build a functioning pendulum clock. He knew with certainty that it was possible. It was only in 1656, that the world got its first functioning pendulum clock build by Christiaan Huygens. Galileo could see something beyond the normal eyes, something deeper, hidden in a sense. The force of nature itself, he was a man of true science, hence he was a man of nature. And that is what Gothe is telling us. The true genius of a man is not to look at himself as something from the outside but to look at it from within, as an inside. As one with the entire universe. 

Huygens first Pendulum
Clock design 1656. 

The ego is a powerful composition. It consists of the entire universe. Because it is so huge and so vast, it is very hard to understand what 'ego' is. It is not a tool, per say. That makes a man function. As an example take language. It is so vast, so profound, yet so weak. Language is not the tool of communication, but the essence of what communicates. The mind's eye has certain experiences, and that experience can be shared with certain limitation, and that limitation gives birth to language, but the essence of language precedes experiences. The essence of being precedes the ego. The spirit of the language is not the sound and words, but the imagery, 'the image'. It is only in certain experience of an image that language can be born. The essence of language goes beyond the sense of conceptual thinking. The seeing and the seen, are beyond the conceptual thinking. But because language is looked upon as a method, we can never go beyond that. And as ego, we take language very subjectively. 

This is hence a challenge of communication. Because we are limited to language as a tool. We cannot properly express the deepest of our feelings. Our relationships, our culture, our philosophies, hence remains in the outside. It barely travels the distance of the essence. But that doesn't mean it is not there. For instance, we watch a movie and because of the 'unspeakable factor' of the movie, we travel to our inner language. It reaches somewhere deep within. We feel a sense of familiarity. The language is easily expressed as image, not as words. The battle with language is to be able to portray that image. This image is not in sense the image that we define or visualize it as. The 'Image Spirit of the Language' is our capacity to understand it in terms of our own ego. If someone has only seen green apple, he can only visualize apple in green color, when someone says apple. This is the subjective image. But when someone says 'Love', the image or the sense he has within himself is the objective image of the language.  The 'Speech Spirit of the Language' has its own functional reality, which might not coincide with the 'Image'. Love has no image, no speech. Yet it belongs to the 'Speech Spirit' in a clearer sense. 

Rudolph Steiner in the book How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation (Classics in Anthroposophy) explains that It is, however, not so much our concern here to point out whatever may be needed in this direction, as to indicate things that have a practical bearing on life. Anyone who considers such facts as the above and looks at them all round, must come to recognize that deeply hidden in language there is something that leads out and beyond it to something higher, something that is over language — to the Spirit itself. And this Spirit is not such that in the manifold languages it too can be manifold. It lives within them all as a single unity. This spiritual unity amongst the languages is lost when they shed their first native, elemental vitality and are seized by the spirit of abstraction. Then comes the time when a man in speaking no longer has within him the Spirit, but only the verbal clothing of the Spirit. It is quite a different matter for a man's soul whether, in using such expressions as the above, he feels within him the picture of what actually takes place between two people when one, let us say, ‘falls in’ with the other — or whether he only attaches to the phrase a conventional, abstract notion of the relation between them.

The Voynich Manuscript (the example of objective language)

(........... to be continued)