temporaryreality

I'm WAY behind on the Cosmic Doctrine reading, and I don't usually read ahead on the monthly CosDoc posts so I might be way off base from that discussion which seems to be on this topic, but I've been thinking about the various planes or realms and what constitutes a balanced existence.

A balanced life, one of wholeness, involves activities or endeavors on all the planes (physical, etheric, astral, mental, spiritual); the converse holds too: living too much in one plane makes for an unhealthy if not diseased life and personal/social imbalance. The basic modern-American(ized) social milieu focuses on the physical and lower astral planes, with forays into and attempts to stimulate the mental. The lower astral (the realm of the passions and of baser imaginings) is activated to serve the physical and to act as a simulacrum for the mental and spiritual. Physical existence (if you've got the means) is provided for by appealing to desires that "deserve" to be fulfilled. You put in your time, earn your coin, pay for your perceived luxuries. If you're just on the edge, the "stuff of life" is luxury enough for you! If you've not got the means, you're reduced to marshalling all your inner and outer resources just to eat and stay warm and dry. Good luck staying sane. At no point do any of these options provide for etheric health - you're on your own with that and if you aren't fortunate enough to have easy access to clean air and a view of the sky and sun, to trees and other growing things, or to landscapes that inspire and paths to roam, then oh well, at least you can see them on your computer's screen saver or the car commercials run every fifteen minutes on the TV.

Ugh, it's just so bleak! And to think that we train our young to think this is right and good and that it is the right and good order of things.

We physically contain our children in boxes for hours a day, in impersonal surroundings (until the lucky kindergarteners make enough art to put up on the walls, at least) and as they grow, we extend the time they must sit and work and decrease the time for replenishment. Creativity is restricted to approved activities, the focus is on mental work without reprieve. Out onto the asphalt play-yard (or maybe a lawn where you're no longer allowed to chase each other (at least where my kids went to school --- because somebody might get hurt!) for your momentary etheric boost. The spiritual is of course verboten since as a people the only thing we can agree upon is STEM. Note that I didn't say that religion is verboten. (Don't get me wrong, I like and appreciate science, I just like and appreciate things that science is the wrong tool for as well).

If we were doing things in a more balanced way - and if school was still necessary at that point, since "a more balanced way" might actually make school obsolete - we'd make sure young people spent ample time learning daily life skills like how to grow and make food, grow and make clothing, grow and build furniture (gee, did you notice my bias toward husbandry (animal and plant)?) and build homes. We'd explore the principles of design and beauty and everyone would engage in handwork, like sketching and crafts, while the utility of functional math would be appreciated and explored. Abstract ideas would be there for those who want to play with them, but they wouldn't be touted as the end-all, be-all of "career" directions.

We'd spend time outdoors among the plants and animals, in dirt and water, under the sun and wind and rain and snow. We'd observe the world and learn ways to incorporate elements of what we saw, tasted, felt, heard, and smelled, into the things we'd make. We'd imagine and play our way to learning to be a human in society. Reading and working with numbers would be skills by which we could approach useful concepts. Whether or not school would have anything to do with it, we'd each know we had a spirit-connection running through all we did and that it was our task to nurture it and that by doing so we would live up to the task of nurturing our community.

Update Sept 17, 2020 (actual readings)

• Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time.
• Hesiod. The Theogony.
• Fortune, Dion. The Cosmic Doctrine.

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Update Aug 25, 2020.
I'd thought I had a copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos on my shelves, but I can't find it and may have gotten rid of it. That might actually be a decent place to get a general understanding of cosmogony from a Western scientific standpoint. Barring that, I may be forced to just read up online. 

The Cosmic Doctrine, which I'm reading anyway as part of JMG's book club, is certainly right at home on this reading list, even if she's conveying metaphors (and, who's to say, actually, that the metaphors don't convey some aspect of how things got started?).

As for the creation stories, I think I'll be looking for something from peoples of each continent or major civilization. I have a book of Native American myths and legends (that's probably the title even) that's got some creation stories. I'll also reread the opening chapter of the Dao de Jing (Tao de Ching) and meditate on that.

Since I'm doing this on a small (or nonexistent) budget, I'll be looking for library books, and classic and out of print, but downloadable, books for readings in this section.

Turns out the Frazer book mentioned below is not available as a scanned or digital version, so that's out. I checked The Golden Bough (I have the abridged version) and there's nothing relevant in there. Ovid's Metamorphosis (which I have) opens with the creation of the universe, so I'll go back and reread that, and I'll be looking for Hesiod's Theogony to see if it fits here as well.

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Original post, August 18, 2020 (though later changes are marked in blue)
This is a draft (and above all, editable) list of where I'm going to start diving into cosmogonies - those theories about the beginning of the universe. 

Given that no humans were present for it, the stories we tell about the universe's beginning are all speculative (not to say they don't describe a truth, just that they're stories). I take them all as such, and accord myth and scientific theory equal weight. I'm interested in the ways we conceive of the start of "it all."

• I'll look for something at the layperson's level for the big bang theory.
• The Norton Anthology of Astronomy and Cosmology - by John North and Roy Porter - not available to me right now, and one review said it's more focused on astronomy than on cosmogony.
• The Cosmic Doctrine - Dion Fortune - currently being read.

Then consider creation myths from various parts of the world, plus an academic study or two, like:

• Ancient Greek Cosmogony - Andrew Gregory
• Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies - James George Frazer

I'm still gathering up titles related to creation stories.

This list will be updated as I figure things out.

Next, I'll be working to fit the plan into a workable timeline. In other words, it can't take forever, so I might as well set a time limit and see where I get.

 Wikipedia's list of timelines is going to be my go-to resource for figuring out what topics I'm going to be reading and learning about.

From there, for instance, I found the timeline of cosmological theories that will help me start dipping my toes into all the ways humans have conceived of the universe's beginnings (if it has one, or perhaps I should say "this universe's beginnings"?) and development. Obviously each of the theories is situated in its founder's place and time and that links it to a human-centered source, but I am interested to find out what all manner of people have thought about the origins and make-up of the universe.

Because I'm taking the historical approach to its logical conclusion by allowing that this isn't a human-centered universe and I ought therefore to not limit my historically-derived re-education to just the human realm, it would seem that I'm actually stepping outside the traditional trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and adding one topic of the quadrivium (cosmology or astronomy). I'm ok with that.

I'll be doing a separate post that will contain my proposed reading list and that will be updated as need be.

From the second portion of the prologue of The Well-Trained Mind, we are given a basic idea of what a (traditional) classical education provides and the way it's organized, as viewed by someone who was educated in this manner and who subsequently became an educator herself. I note here that the book's co-author, Susan Wise Bauer, has written another book that is probably a better fit for what I'm undertaking here: The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.* Regardless, the book I do have is providing some groundwork for ways I can approach (re)investigating several subjects

The trivium is composed of three portions. The first, called grammar, has to do with learning the fundamental "building blocks" of various systems. It includes facts, rules (of math and language), vocabulary, classifications, and descriptions. I'm unsure why poetry is in this category, but perhaps it's because grammar includes information that is frequently memorized. Poetry, particularly for children, can function as a kind of condensed, memorized, conveyor of meaning that only gets sussed out later, so this makes some sense. The second part of the trivium is logic. In this context, logic is typically more abstract than grammar, and is applied to all academic topics. It allows for the organization of information. The third "leg" of the trivium is rhetoric, the skill of using the facts and information one has learned, organized logically, to express conclusions.

Ultimately, this framework is applied to (or used to access) topics systematically, with a focus that is language-based, and that follows the above-mentioned three-part pattern to interrelate all knowledge. It takes "history as its organizing outline, beginning with the ancients and progressing forward to the moderns in history, science, literature, art, and music." (p.15) With such an "organizing outline," each historical era is linked (when it's reasonable to do so) to history (whether human or geological), mythology, religions, literature, fairy tales, philosophy, astronomy, science (biology, astronomy, classification, anatomy/physiology, earth sciences), and math.

Here's how The Well-Trained Mind (TWTM) conceptualizes this system in relation to studying science (p. 16):

The Study of Science in the Framework of History

Name of Period	Years Covered	Scientific Subjects
Ancients	5,000 B.C. - 400 A.D	Biology, Classification, Anatomy/Physio (Human Body)
Medieval - early Renaissance	400 - 1600	Earth Science, Astronomy
Late Renaissance - early modern	1600 - 1850	Chemistry (incl. alchemy?)
Modern	1850 - present	Physics, Computer Science

As I hinted at with my reference to geological ages, I'm intending to expand my timeline. Right now it looks like this:

Cosmologies Cosmogonies (origin/creation stories)
Geological eras (the forming of the earth and its metamorphoses that eventually allowed for life to "occur")
Evolution of life
Prehistory and early Neolithic
Recorded human history:This may be refined or changed as I go along, but that's what I have for now.
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*I don't happen to have that book so for now I'll just continue with The Well-Trained Mind, but I think I'd like to at least take a look at it to see if it can help me in this endeavor. I'll post what I find if my library has a copy.

 The following is from the preface of The Well-Trained Mind (2nd ed), by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise (W. W. Norton, 2004).
With that in mind, I'll be drawing up a loosely-conceived curriculum for myself based on the suggestions found in this book.

* I intend to modify this to include readings on geological, biological, and ecological processes. Considered as topics under the purview of history, this simply means I'll be adding the geological ages and the evolutionary trajectory of life to the scope of my self-study project.