What is the Logos? It is the creative word which expresses itself in the world as sense, reason and power. The Logos is the power of emerging in nature and in the spiritual core of man. The Logos expresses the existence of the One as an origin of all things. It is the highest source of inspiration; experiencing it – be it just for a moment – means that the deepest and highest aspects of the self-flare up.
Everything can be deducted from the original One, everything stays enveloped by it. In LOGON it should become clear that the two remain in the One, the discord in the unity, the unity in the One. The One possesses perfect freedom and transmits as much of it to creation as it can bear. Nobody can grasp the One. It is transcendent, unnameable, unspeakable and unfathomable. And yet, we have to speak about it, since everything arises from it and everything strives to return back to it. Being one is the goal in which all the goals of life come together.
The Logos enables us to do so. It has given us our thinking capacity. And our thinking can open to its origin; it can be inspired by it.
The myths tell us how the One shows itself as masculine and feminine. A philosopher of ancient times (Philo from Alexandria) said: The Logos was given divine and pure parents: “God Himself as the father, who is also the father of the All and Sophia as the mother, through whom the All came into being”.Quote from Wilhelm Kelber, Die Logoslehre, Frankfurt am Mail 1986, p. 90.
In the midst of the holy first polarity, the first consciousness awakened: The Logos. It uses the creative movement of the two original poles to give impulses in their name, which can clothe the one life into ever higher forms.
The Logos generates reality in manifold circles down to man. Man can disturb the original harmony of the poles and ignite them as contrasts.
Being and non-being, construction and deconstruction, life and death, male and female, stillness and movement. They are no longer the harmonious poles of unity and the creative Logos: we turn them into antagonistic opposites. The path of man is long, confused, dark, -even though it is always within the One.
Goethe says that the animals lived in a “holy circle of living formation” (in: Metamorphose der Tiere). They do not touch unity. It is different for man. His existence is under the sign of departure. He breaks up and is thereby broken up himself. Lukrez, a Roman poet of the 1st century BC sang a song of praise saying that, “first a Greek had the courage to focus his mortal eye against the sky which was full of gods and he was the first one who dared to break the locked gate of Mother Nature in a mighty storm…. And so it happened. His courageous spirit was the winner and he set his foot far beyond the flaming walls of the universe.”Quote from Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1st part, volume 2, Schaffhausen 1986, p. 350
What did the Greeks do?
They grasped the mind. Thoughts are a part of our creative consciousness. Man began to focus his thoughts on details. He tried to understand the appearances of nature to be able to control them. And so he separated them from each other, differentiated them and in this way he broke up the unity. “Mother Nature” no longer appeared to him as a whole.
For a long time the myths gave man the basis for his existence. He recognized his origin and his destination in them and found his place in the world through them. But then came the time when the myths lost their power. The diversity of the world became more extreme, the game of forces, which man experienced as the gods, became more confusing. A psychological chaos developed in his inner being which he could no longer tame through the myths.see Gebser, p. 373
Thus, man took the sword of the mind. By means of this sword he began to ban the forces of nature that frightened him, by identifying them. This was a kind of liberation.
At first man’s mind was “vertically” focused on the origin of things. The first Greek philosophers explained the phenomena from that which was above the original phenomena. They reached into the soul and from there to the Logos. From today’s perspective their mind was mysterious and obscure. Many words of the Greek philosopher Heraklit remain full of riddles. They are based on impressions of worlds of the soul, where the creative spirit can be experienced.
Then came a time in which the mind was horizontally focused. This, too, was a struggle for liberation. It took place when the One withdrew further from people’s consciousness. Religious authorities tried to work against this and subordinate the desire for knowledge under the scriptures of religion. To do so, they formulated dogmas. However, in the course of time they were less and less understood. So, they became straightjackets, from which people also broke free.
Curious and scientifically thinking people penetrated more deeply into the appearances of nature and established the horizontal mind. The so-called “Galilean renunciation” developed. By means of this, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei saved his head from the inquisition at the beginning of the 17th century. He was, besides Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon and René Descartes, one of the founders of modern science. Galilei confessed to being Catholic towards the church judges and explained that he would limit his research to the question of “how” and leave the question about “why” to the religious authorities. The horizontal way became the domain of the mind and the vertical way the domain of faith.
The triumph of science began
Researchers got ready to conquer nature. What was before “mother nature”, beloved and feared, became now something to take apart and take advantage of. “The nature of things is manifested when we look at them with human art”, Francis Bacon wrote in 1620.Quote according to Roland van Vliet 4in: Mensch und Erde, Wege zu einem inneren Klimawandel, Band 2, Stiftung Rosenkreuz 2010, p. 51
The strong desire for knowledge which was focused only on the outside, led to the development of the ego within man, as we know it today. Descartes saw the proof for his existence in his mind. Is the ego which developed in this way, not a dazzling reflection of the One and the search of man for the One, who really is and who always remains unfulfilled? Is it not a reflection of the search for the One?
The consequences of our research are far-reaching. Scientists focus on the infinity of the universe – and thereby reduce us to midgets. They limit their efforts on the natural phenomena – and reduce us to a natural phenomenon. The scientific mind is tied to time – and so we see ourselves as a mayfly in a world process that began with a big bang and created us as a consequence of accidental mutations.
The horizontal mind can rise and elevate itself as well. It leads to abstraction and mathematics. In formulas and terms, we recognize correlations. There as well does the One shine through, although with this approach our soul cannot come closer to the One. Only few people are capable of experiencing the dimensions of the soul and the creative spirit in the harmony of mathematical formulas.
Scientists claim sovereignty over the interpretation of the existence of man. Thereby they lead their science into a crisis, perhaps similar to the crisis of the myths and dogmas in their time, because man wants to proceed further. A purely scientific mind cannot explain the meaning of life. Thus we are again at the point of breaking out of a circle.
(To be continued in part 2)