Horns of the Ancients.
“Kings Tang and Yu were majestic and reverent.
The House of Zhou found their path by choosing the Way.
Elevating the worthy, employing the able,
They cut along the ink string’s line and never strayed”
Gopal Sukhu tr. Songs of Chu, “Leaving my troubles/Arriving at troubles”, Li Sao, Verse 161-165
I once came across the opinion of a psychiatrist that people in the Panhellenic world lived in a childish fantasy, in an infantile stage of a mythological way of thinking. He held the opinion that they were, in a sense, living out mass psychoses. This testifies not only to his complete ignorance of the theological workings of the Hellenes, but also to a "whiggism" perspective, that is, a reinterpretation of history into a line of understanding that he taught as the best, optimal, and unshakable. It is a typical characteristic of small minds to see everything through their own glasses, without the ability to change them and focus on other parts of the picture before them. It is sheer intellectual arrogance and a favorite curse of specialization to see only one aspect of things through one's own expertise.
Truly intelligent people are not only experts, but also general scientists and critical thinkers. They are analytically and systematically able to draw analogies and comparisons between different fields of science, art, information, structures, and data, and to draw balanced conclusions from them, according to their acumen in process, synthesis, geometry of thought, and synergistic thinking. As in classical rhetoric, it requires invention, composition, arrangement, style, form, and delivery; it is an auto-rhetorical process of ingenuity.
Aspiration to seeing is to let go of such preconceptions and perceive from the mind of another. To see the hellenic mind requires heavy studies in classical reception as well as the ability to understand the corporae of literature embedded in socio-cultural and historical network of ideas, behaviors, cognitive-emotive as well as pneumatic and metaphysical vantage points. It demands pitching one’s own mind and for subtly, psyche to the unveiling and bridging the past with the modern days.
What I posit is that cultural paradigms that are broad in metaphysics are possessing a unique fine-tuned existential decorum. They draw from a rounded world, i.e. their world is spherical and ordered and spherical metaphysics, as in drawing from the outer rims of the unknown through the known towards the societal, group and individual noosphere (what people have in their minds), pneumasphere (what people report about souls, including peak experiences, rites, ceremonies, initiations, festivals, metaphysics etc). To draw from the invisible and to derive order from it, is to set certain philosophical standards, certain desired virtues and masterful techniques to add poetry and beauty derived from a fine world of immortal ideas. In Lucian’s (that grand inspiration of atheists!) words that would cause a quarrel among the philosophers over whose ways of life, whose ideas and whose virtues are the best, but as long as they quarrel in a common world - it provokes food for thought and preserves an element of the sacred and necessary - profane. Inasmuch as an ancient temple or a bionic statue was a reification of the Divine ideas behind them, so the reflection of it within the mind commemorated the signs and symbols of the invisible in the mystic’ eyes.
What the psychiatrist called mass psychoses of the Hellenes was exactly the prerequisite for civilizational health and decorum. What the psychiatrist didn’t see is that modern world in postmodern chaos has no foundations or basis for decorum and public health. Let me tell you a recent story that struck my like an illuminative lightning from the brilliant majestic daylight sky.
Once upon a time I stared in a rain puddle and in its waters I stared at the reflection of the Sun, then I closed my eyes and gazed into the Sun then with my mind I imagined a transcendent realm of Divine fire and with my soul’s eye I’ve seen a fiery, fierce, unconquerable presence of a magnificent Teletarchic world that was neither individual nor a collective, but a unison of wonder, awe, strength, act and will in motion and perfect stillness. It was extremely difficult to express. Then I stared at the puddle again in which the Sun was reflected and I contemplated my own soul in this reflection, here - an image, a mirror, then the deeper I went in introspection, the more I neared this Divinity via my soul, erasing all the barriers that were mere semblances, mere images, tokens, signs and symbols. There I stood full of the world and completely at home, with my soul intelligible to the world and pitched perfectly to its expression and opera omnia.