III - A Symbol for the 21st Century.
I went on a deep dive, reading wisdom from the past. It took me through Greek philosophy, ancient Jewish mysticism, and the myth of Hermes Trismegistus. I had come across wisdom from over 2000 years ago that is still unbelievably profound today.
I wanted to go further. To try and understand how they got to the ideas they did. One book mentioned that back in ancient Egypt, they were a different consciousness to the one we are today. That they were right brain focused whereas we are left brain focused.
They saw the universe as a complex system of symbols, and that our purpose was to try and uncover what the author was trying to tell us through them. Their language, the hieroglyphs, were inspired by this, hence their symbolic nature.
In the Corpus Hermeticum, one of the texts mentions the simple concept of ‘movement’. For something to move, it must be first moved by something else. This led to the idea that if I wanted to move a stick, it wasn’t my body that moved the stick, but my mind which moved my body which moved the stick. If it was the mind which moved the stick, was there a mind which moved the stars? These avenues of thinking led them to profound new discoveries. They questioned everything. From the stars to our souls.
The ancient Greek philosophers carried this tradition on. They began questioning things like ‘what does it mean to be good?’, ‘what really is a happy life?’ etc. They embodied their ideas, trying to live by their philosophies. In doing so, they have given the likes of myself a rich insight into life. For instance, ’On The Shortness Of Life’ by Seneca, is just one of those texts that has made me ‘wake up’ a bit.
Which leads me to today. An era where three worlds exist. The natural, the arbitrary, and the digital. A world where everyone has become obsessed with technology. Our identities online have more power than our identities offline. We are choosing fake artificially made creations over the ones made by our actual hands. We are getting lost in a digital version of Narcissus’ pond. The myth tells us how this story ends.
I decided to create a symbol that represents our modern 21st Century. In doing so it reveals the path which is diverted us off course. I hope it might act as a symbol to help bring us back to the right way we should be heading.
There is much more that could be said but for now I think the best thing we can start trying to do is make it a habit of going offline and to sit and question the world we live in again. It’s through this act of questioning our world and ourselves that we reveal profound areas of insight. History has proved this to be true. A part of our history that is worth repeating.
