Quantum Culture

Even today, we have little comprehension of what the ancients did, much less what they knew in order to do it.

Part of it is our complete failure to grasp how they understood their world. We speculate with very little proof that they treated math and science as magic. That’s because our Western approach to knowledge is so pitiful, confined to mere sensory observation and the intellectual reasoning we hold as sacred truth. We tend to read their scant writings as literal statements, when ours is apparently the only civilization in human history that used language in that fashion.

When I use the word “sunrise,” does anyone imagine I actually believe the sun moves across our sky, revolving around the earth? It’s a figure of speech. If even our Western culture recognizes figures of speech, why do we reject the notion that ancients might have used them even more? Jesus pointedly said His national heritage included a vast lore of imagery that no one with an education took literally. He taught in parables, and insisted that those who lacked a spiritual level of awareness must be excluded from the truth. Yet we have an entire world of Christianity that insists most of the Old Testament must be read with a baldly literal approach. They insist Hebrew scholars actually believed the mythology they used to flavor their narratives.

We are no less obstreperous in reading other cultural and intellectual traditions from the ancient world outside the Bible. It seems only a precious few genuine scholars understand that parabolic expression is the norm in antiquities. They aren’t keeping it a secret, but trying to explain it only gets them needless hostility from those who refuse to understand. The arrogance of Western epistemology guarantees we will never understand what the ancients were thinking.

Not only do we not comprehend the designs and purpose of some of their monuments, but we can’t imagine how they concentrated the resources. We have no idea what technology may have been involved, nor how they got so very many people to willingly dedicate themselves to these massive projects. Yet the forensic examination shows inexplicably how vast armies of workers apparently loved what they were doing, because the means to force their participation are conspicuous by their absence. Our pitiful Western politics and our behavioral science is not capable of grasping how the ancients could leverage so much power without force. We have no clue about our own behavior.

The future achievements, the grand potential of human exploration of the universe, will not arise from more of the same kind of pedantic science. We know the ancients understood math and science, and apparently better in some ways than we today, but our civilization rejects the notion that those ancients also understood things on a higher level than mere intellect. They learned to tap a level of awareness we insist cannot possibly exist. Yet that is the very key to human achievement, as evidenced by what has come before, and how pitiful our own Western accomplishments. We can’t even understand why those ancient projects seemed important to them, as our speculations are too shallow on the subject. Until we rise above mere reason and intellect, we cannot hope to accomplish much.

When mere science becomes the primitive mythology of superstitious peasants, men will look back on our civilization and wonder how we could stand to wallow in the mud.