(This is the first part in a series of essays exploring the connection between cosmology and psyche. Much of the bones of this essay was written as a graduate-level essay for a masters in Archetypal Psychology. Pardon the wordiness, I’m getting the academia out of the old mind-hose so that more pithy thoughts can hopefully come down the pipe…).
If you’ve been suckered into observing to the headlines of corporate media over the last few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen the ghosts of ancient cosmology knocking at the gates of our cultural psyche. However you wouldn’t trust the treasure of this Trojan horse by the way such thinking is portrayed as “backwards” and “science-denying” or one of my favorites: “counter-factual”.
The rusty gates of reductionism, constructed with brittle post-Enlightenment brass, have a fatal weakness: they cannot handle the gravitas of naked phenomenology: the sobering fact that no matter how many probes we send into space to measure the infinite motions from infinite vantage points, the sun will still rise and set above our heads. For the pious, it’s how God created it for us to experience. For the skeptic, it’s an illusion of our senses.
“In so far as we make use of our healthy senses the human being is the most powerful exact scientific instrument possible the greatest misfortune of modern physics is that it's experiments have as it were been set apart from the human being physics refuses to recognize in nature anything not shown by artificial instruments and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.” - Goethe
I’ve noticed that the intelligentsia of our time, seem awkwardly confused by the rising numbers of flat-earthers. They are unable to admit that these “backwards” thinkers are actually living in a reality that rests solidly beneath the modern pageantry of abstract reasoning. This rise in this ancient worldview actively challenges our epistemological complacency. During the past few years, the radical, yet ancient idea of the Earth as a stationary, flat plane has made a small, yet startling return into the collective consciousness. Videos and articles claiming and demonstrating the Earth to be a level plane have been uploaded en masse to YouTube and other video sites. Popular news sources voraciously criticize the dangers of allowing such “baseless” information to be propagated. Yet they apparently aren’t doing enough. In a 2018 Forbes study, one-third of Americans between the age of 18 and 24 were skeptical that the Earth was a globe. To most humans, the notion of a flat Earth brings about a sneer or an uncomfortable laugh; a common response to a concept that, on the surface, seems entirely out of sync with the progress of modernity.
This essay is not a claim to absolute material truth between the globe model or the flat model; neither am I on a conspiratorial witch-hunt. I am here to explore the primacy of our first-person awareness and how this perspective, a symbolic perspective, is undeniably central to any meaning we may find in our world.
The rise of skepticism towards modern science and the re-emergence of the embrace of ancient cosmology is a worthy moment to pause for examination of why we believe what we believe. For the establishment of technocratic scientism, the notion that we don’t live on a spinning ball presents a frustratingly backwards argument against the utopian vision of progress. This geocentric idea appears to be a wake up call from our collective psyche to balance a hypertrophied rationalism, to reunite the fractured hemispheres of our brain and return to an embodied symbolic, even religious, worldview. It might be returning us to a world where the words “up” and “down” have universal value, where the human being is a vessel of meaning rather than a sack of flesh and bones.
“…
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
When we lose the common ground of objectivity and trust that gives coherent meaning to the world around us we begin to find ourselves in a society bearing the fruits of such relativism. In this ‘flat earth’ moment, we find ourselves in a period of strangeness, where, without the axis mundi connecting the phenomenal and the noumena, the image and the archetype, unconscious forces emerge to trigger us and shake our foundations. “God is dead, and thus everything is permitted”. As information becomes more decentralized, control of the accepted cosmology moves away from established arbiters of perception while the fools on the fringes begin to flip things over, uncovering the prevalent ancient beliefs that have evaded the sterilized scalpel.
These sudden shifts in human paradigms are none other than shifts in the mythical perception of the world around us. From the dawn of civilization, humans have woven frameworks to explain the seasons and the motions of the heavenly bodies. But since the Copernican Revolution and Enlightenment Period, we have experienced a split between the mythic conception of the universe and sensory experience of it.
Loss of myth means loss of orientation in a bewildering time. The rise in technology has turned us away from our surroundings and into our devices which have become our surroundings. While our search bars give us access to every documented myth, we are at a loss of how to incorporate this numinous wisdom into our scattered, contemporary lifestyle. This siren call of digital connectivity has many adrift in a sea of distractions as we seek to fill the void of physical connection with scrolling and status updates. The biological instincts that helped us thrive in nature have been hijacked by sleek interface design and colorful notification bubbles. The upheaval of our world and the upheaval of our consciousness are one and the same. Everything that becomes relative becomes doubtful.
For better or worse, the energy of myth still lives and surrounds us. It can be found in movies, TV shows, and news stories. This is allowed because it have the same orienting effect on our life as it did for our ancestors. “You’ve just got that from the movies”, most will say with a laugh and a wink. However, Science, as a replacement for our superstitions, has pushed humanity towards the edges of the known in equally mythological fashion. Our space missions are named after the Greek pantheon, but these incredible experiments are still only available to a select few. The everyman is not the hero of the scientific stories; rather these roles are filled by astronauts and men behind closed lab doors. In the light of the growing skepticism of our modern scientific cathedrals, we can find a new frame when we replace the word 'theory' with ‘myth’ and view the scientific viewpoint as an archetypal premise alongside all other mythologies. Included in these myths would be The Myth of Evolution, The Myth of the Big Bang and the Myth of Gravity. These are all models, generally accepted as truth, explaining who we are, how we got here, and why we’re being pulled towards the ground.
The difficulty with the Copernican renovation of the medieval cosmic topography is that it fails to recognize its own projected mythology. The grand narrative of a progressive, scientific world where human happiness is supposedly arrived at by objectivity and mechanical progress but it still relies on our experience of this desired outcome. Scientism fails to consider the inevitable side effects of this modern cosmological perspective on the human psyche and how it plays a part in the alienated senses of modern man. When this cultural shift is viewed through the lens of psychology and phenomenology, we see how the deconstruction and division of man from his environment has led to the inevitable blowback from our divided psyche and the eruption of ancient perspectives.
In our situation today, not only does there appear to be a breakdown in the trust of authoritative institutions, but the role of the holy fool is fast arising in the online culture of epistemology, bringing into question everything we ‘know’ to be true. The resurgent energy of provocation, seen in meme culture, is also seen in the rise of those who are questioning, (in jest or not), the shape of the Earth. It is this skepticism, this doubt in authority, that once fueled the Scientific Revolution’s attack on the Church. Now we are seeing the ouroboros of empiricism eat itself and return to devour “Science” itself. We are coming to realize that many of the things we believe about the world are inherited and taken on the same faith that science once aimed to eliminate.
The status quo image of the world as a globe, however scientifically accurate, is not something that we experience on a daily basis. It’s safe to say that in fact, most of the time, excluding earthquakes and drunken stupor, the Earth feels flat and motionless. It is only when we begin to abstract ourselves from our environment, taking our view further away from the immanence of our immediate surroundings, that we find ourselves viewing the world in our mind as we have been taught and shown in pictures: as an object floating in space, and our minds follow suit. When scientists speak of the ‘global environment,’ they have in mind a world that humans have surrounded. Expelled to its outer surface, we have become ex-habitants, rather than in-habitants.
We are remembering that the meanings of things are not contained within the mechanical descriptions of them; instead, the meanings are contained within the experience of them, from the inside. Through a symbolic attitude, we can witness how the emergence of ancient tropes in the collective psyche acts as a counter pole to the hyper-certainty of rationalism.
Science, with its reductive mechanisms and bias towards objectivity, has largely ignored these deeper, more rooted dimensions of human experience. In order to return to the garden of meaning, we must be willing to return to the organic sense of seeing and experiencing the Earth as symbolic translators of immediate experience. We must be willing to allow our senses to be correct, with a healthy sense of discernment and observation.
For the early astronomers, the cosmos was conceived as a series of spheres which man did not live on, but inside, residing at the center of the universal experience. Through a series of human epochs, we have gradually removed ourselves from that center. Telescopes and microscopes have projected our consciousness further away from this sacred center, creating a reality that only seems to hold up in equations. With each successive zeitgeist, the enchanted view of reality succumbed to a more rationalistic and calculated view of our place in the universe. Phenomenology and the symbolic attitude, give us the tools to examine the cosmos both within and without as a unified field and brings us into connection with our most profound principles of observation that shape our experience.
Of the mythological and deep psychic implications raised by the modern-day revival of geocentrism in the crowd of “flat earthers”, the most impactful might be the idea of returning humanity to an inner sense of belonging in the cosmos: a re-enchantment of place. If you pretend, for just a moment, that the Earth actually is flat; then the scriptural accounts of creation, the traditional maps, and the human experience becoming vastly more meaningful as descriptions of both symbolic and felt experience. Sweat lodges, Maypole dances, and Churches become physical crystallizations of a lived cosmology, rather than quaint representations of superstition. Whether our ancestors knew they lived on the outside of a spinning ball or not, they experienced themselves as indwellers inside nested spheres of an environment, sharing the sacred center of a cosmic mystery.
Despite the prevalent hold of modern science, it is fascinating to witness how the original world view, especially the ancient and primary cosmology, is still here, hovering so close to us that is has practically trapped itself between our lived human experience and our scientific theories about the world. From our view, the sun, the moon, and planets still rise in the east, the Earth stands perfectly still, and the sky is stretched like a vault above our heads. Of course, we are told that this experience is a trick, a misconception of the superstitious mind. However, the dissonance is real, especially for those who seek to return to the mythological and symbolic reality. The contemporary emphasis of looking at nature from the outside has blurred the valuable discernment between the literal explanation of phenomena and our inner experience of symbolic meaning.
Just as we have learned to interpret alchemy as representing something quite different from a chapter of historical science, a geocentric cosmology may also be revealed to us in its truest gestalt, having no defined place in the linear path of human development, rather as anchor of perspective for a psyche inflated by the archetype of scientific authority. To regain the healthy currents of life and sensory awareness, we need to remember the spark of humanity that gives rise to the perception of things from within the individual, a shared inheritance of perspective. Rather than casting our attention into the abstracted and alienating vision from outside, the Gordian knot of the age asks us to cut through the illusions of Scientific certainty and re-inhabit the soul’s perspective.
“What this word (Earth) means here is far removed from the idea of a mass of matter and from the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back – as, indeed, the very thing that it is- and sheltered. In the things that arise the earth presences as the protecting one.” - Martin Heidegger. Origin of the Work of Art
All mythical journeys end with the return to the home, to the center, the heart that we left in order to venture out face our illusions and remember our true nature. Is it possible that the return of the flat earth perspective is symbolic of this return home to a cosmology centered on human experience? The myths of modern science have cast our imaginations out of the garden. No longer residing at the still heart of a conscious universe we are now hurtling through an infinite and numbing void at incomprehensible speeds. This rupture with the ancestral vision is akin to the rupture with our own unconscious. The repression of this ancient cosmology is like an alienation of the fountainhead, a reversal of instinctual knowing of our place in the cosmos that still submits its sensual experience to the doctrines of scientific institutions.For the collective psyche, starved of its sensual, Earth-bound awareness, the return to a more intimate cosmology may as well be celebrated.
Under the spell of modernity, we fail to realize that a participatory mode of perception will inevitably produce a nuanced approach to the world. As we march off to cities and sift through current events on screens, we are bypassing the opportunity of direct experience with nature’s ways and the opportunity to create symbols based on lived experience and allowing others to create our world for us. In order to embody this symbolism and inhabit the world fully, we must first strip away the outer, artificial garments and stand naked. We must be able to take off the VR goggles of modern science and technology for a moment and try to see the world with the immediacy that depth psychology prescribes.
“For it is the body, the feeling, the instincts which connect us with the soil. If you give up the past you naturally detach from the past; you lose the roots in the soil, your connection with the totem ancestors that dwell in your soil. You turn outward and drift away and try to conquer other lands because you are exiled from your own soil” - Carl Jung
Every attempt at greater consciousness is generally followed by an enantiodromia, a reversal, a switch into the opposite, into unconsciousness. This is the process of contention between opposites by which world-views and cultures tend to evolve. This tension exists both on the individual and cultural level and the friction between these opposing views provides the fuel for consciousness to express itself in new patterns.
In a symbolic world, our reality is understood and translated in a fashion that connects experience and knowledge. We describe occurrences in the way that we experience them, and this allows for universality of stories and myths that can inform our shared subjective reality. The resistance to the heliocentric model appears to be the collective psyche’s attempt to salvage this phenomenological mysticism and return humanity to a center of embedded meaning. It is the natural urge to express the map of the world as we experience it because this expression seeks to inform how human beings live their lives and interact with the image of the cosmos. By projecting ourselves out through our machines and devices into an artificially augmented world, we fall into materiality and remove ourselves from the anthropic center bestowed upon us by God.
If we are tricked into thinking that technology provides a perception which is truer and more valid than our lived experience, then we are in danger of being possessed by a principality that can sweep us out of the embodied perspective of our reality and we will loosen from our capacity to fully inhabit the world. Our imagining is all too readily crushed by the high-powered impact of a global science more intent on establishing the authority of its own particular view of the environment, and of what human beings are doing to it, than enhancing our own awareness and powers of observation.
The gap that separates ancient cosmology from modern science is a chasm of meaning begging to crossed by an ontological return to primary experience. On one extreme, we process reality exclusively with a mechanical and materialistic explanation, where everything is devoid of meaning and a higher purpose. On the other extreme, we interpret reality solely through a symbolic language, where facts and events are the vessels of spiritual significance. Neither of these methodologies is complete without its balancing opposite. A purely material perspective learns how reality functions, but perceives no higher reason for its existence, while a purely spiritual perspective understands the mythos of the universe without understanding the groundwork. Ideally, we can adopt both attitudes without sacrificing one to the other. Meaning depends on how we look at things. The least of things with a meaning are always worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
If I have given the reader the impression that I am denying the technical achievements of modern science, then I may not have been able to pull them away far away from their objective frame of reference to see my point. Our current technological cosmology is undoubtedly useful for exploring the possibilities of the edge and providing a rational backdrop to how things work. Without the advances in technology we would not experience the connectivity and freedom of expression that we enjoy today. However, technology is reaching a point where it has begun to yank human consciousness away from its traditional moorings inside the wisdom of the world and the language that created it. We are in danger of losing our grounded, symbolic relationship to the world, and falling over the edge into abstraction and disembodiment. Each person holds the sacred job of embodying the center of an mandalic awareness. Of being a witness to their inner and outer experience. When we sacrifice that role to others with secular motives, we sacrifice our personhood, our priesthood, and give up our capacity to be a vehicle of deep meaning.
Might we consider that what is “flat” is actually the reductionistic thinking that has quantified every perception into a chart of data points. It is this screen of thinking that we are now called to see beyond.
Thought provoking topic, thanks!
The diminishing returns of Science and Tech. coupled with the limited ability of either to provide psycho-spiritual guidance, meaning and purpose, emerging as awareness in our collective unconscious of pragmatic epistemics. In our quest for meaning we realize that grounding is an antidote to fragmented materialist Scientism, symbolized by the reality that most of the time, for most of us, a flat earth is a practical, apriori orientation. What framework ( heliocentric or geocentric) comports most accurately with reality becomes secondary to its utility for organizing our experience and activity.
It seems similar psychic processes are at work throughout the social fabric wherever the claims of Science have taken on the stridency of dogma. The field of medicine, especially in its increasingly government sanctioned, corporatist variation, is rife with examples and is undoubtedly a catalyst for many seeking new theoretical frameworks.
More of us are confronted daily with the reality that we inhabit an epistemic warzone and that the wellbeing of our bodies, spirits and souls is the most objective and rational arbiter of our truth. We are each the center of our universe for all practical purposes, our realization of this symbolized by opening up a taboo cosmology.
My sense is a great integration is possible now, a healing of millenia old wounds to our collective unconscious. Gaian rebirth? Salvation of Promethius? a balancing of energies in our culture? Please flush some of that out for us! thanks for writing this.
Ryan
This awesome daring dive to explain the reality that many of us are living in has so many pull quotes that are pregnant with meaning, it is impossible to pick just one. Fantastic read William, and such a timely piece (for me) as footholds are eroding and we need to create new ones.
Marlene