Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

Connecting with our inner universe and the outer universe brings light to our mind

To speak of a universe within each one of us and of another universe outside of each one of us is undoubtedly improper, since in reality there is no "inside" or "outside", much less two separate universes, although the idea of a microcosm connected to a macrocosm seems to bring us closer to the thought that we would like to share.

I recently came to this thought when rereading De Rerum Natura (On the nature of the universe), the well-known work of Lucretius (1st century BC) where the universe is analyzed from the point of view of the philosophy and science of the Epicureans of that time.

But you don't need to be a follower of Epicurus to understand this thought that Lucretius shares in Book 3 of his work:

"The terror and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by sunbeams, the shining shafts of day, but only by the understanding of the outward forms and the inner workings of nature."

As Lucretius emphasizes, children, when they are in the dark, are afraid of everything and that fear sometimes persists even when those children are in broad daylight. In other words, the imaginary horror felt in the darkness accompanies them when they are in the light because the darkness has now moved to their minds.

The teaching is clear: we live (regardless of our age) with darkened minds, dragging every day real or imaginary horrors and fears that we accumulated in the past when our minds were, due to our young age ignorance, even more darkened.

We live as adults following the way of thinking and seeing the world that we had as children. And, according to Lucretius, the way to overcome that perpetual childhood, that Peter Pan syndrome, is to study the world and ourselves until we discover not only how things work, but that we are one and the same with whatever we have reified to be studied. 

We remain children as long as we do not understand the meaning of "I and the Father are one."

Obviously, we are not talking here about a chronological childhood, but an existential one, something that could also be described as "living asleep", as Heraclitus said when expressing that "we should not act or speak as if we were asleep", comparing that way of behaving with "behaving like the children of our parents” (fragments 73 and 74).

For his part, commenting on those sayings of Heraclitus in his Meditations (IV 46), Marcus Aurelius (Stoic) correctly affirms that this means that we should not behave as adults in the same way that our parents raised us as children. Wisdom, maturity, then consists in knowing when to stop being children, something that many people never learn.

That "stop being children" is what Father Richard Rohr describes as reaching the "second half of life", which is not a chronological event, but an existential and spiritual one. What a paradox! Now that we face overwhelming global challenges, we are more immature children than ever.  

Go Back