Resemblances and Correspondences X 6

I was talking about perception and in perception we get some sensory input from our five senses, and then we have to organize that input, and there’s a facility of organizing that uses resemblance as one of the main means of organizing, which then must be interpreted into something meaningful and, again, this is where analogy starts to come into play.

The people who were watching the television set, who only saw the electrons, were not able to organize. In other words, there was no way in their consciousness that it was possible for a little man and a little woman to be sitting inside of this box. This is really what I believe is the reason why they could only see the electrons, because they just couldn’t imagine the possibility of a little man and a little woman sitting inside of this box that you had to plug into the wall current that, if there wasn’t a power cut, you could see. So this is all a process of organizing. Ultimately, what my point is, is that I was mind blown, finding out, understanding, that there have been other cultures besides modern culture, that have had enormous levels of mathematical sophistication, astronomical sophistication, and so forth, and yet they were able to obtain this sophistication through means other than the means that we use today and we expect to be used today to determine these things.

And now we have leftovers from all these people and especially in the last 50 years, half century or so, there’s been a great popular interest in the brand of exotic India and these texts and these, this thinking and this articulation is, is has to be interpreted, and we are using interpretation systems, systems of what they call hermeneutics that are not really applicable to the hermeneutics that were that were described by these people themselves thousands of years ago.

This the general point of this evening of what I want to understand so that when we start getting more specific with the elements of Speech and the syllables and so forth, you are not tempted to try and go in this sort of modern fashion in determining meaning but that you start expanding your minds, your consciousness, with concepts that have been used for thousands of years in many different cultures, concepts of analogy, and resemblance, convenience, emulation, sympathy, these kinds of things which are not just cute literary devices.

Maybe this is the main point, because you have heard of all these things or some sort of references to metaphors and analogies and so forth, but what I am saying to you is that these are not just cute literary devices—that these are actual devices that people were able to make very sophisticated mathematical and astronomical systems … And so when we are into the cultures of the East, the cultures of India, we have to understand that there’s really a lot there and to be tempted or influenced in any way to make these over-generalized, reductions of culture, I mean, you take the Rishi Garg, do you think that he didn’t associate the Heavenly bodies with Gods and Goddesses and Rishis and sort of individuals. Of course, he did. He saw Jupiter as a God. For sure he did. But did he have a comic book, Disney understanding of that planet? No, he knew how far from earth Jupiter was. He calculated it.

Now, to put those two things together, a sort a deification of the universe, together with such sophisticated mathematical calculations that until they couldn’t be equaled until the 1930s. Then we have a situation there. And the whole idea of the personalities of nature, gods and goddesses and so forth goes way beyond the Disney comic book version.