Heliocentrism

To return to our main point, we may say that ordinary human thought, no matter how brilliant, is thought in the service of the ego. Sacred ideas, however, are a force against the ego. In the presence of a serious idea I become quiet; for a moment something appears in myself that is bigger and more real than the ego. In that moment I see that I do not know what I am.

The history of the "warfare" between sacred teachings and human nature is in part the history of the struggle between ideas and thoughts. Great teachings, in recognition of this tendency of thought to serve what is peripheral and superficial in man, speak of many levels simultaneously. It is not that man is asked to deny the surface of sacred communications; it is that he must not remain frozen to it. And it is the literal mind, supported by logical systems or "poetic" interpretations, that keeps him fastened to the surface of both scripture and the world around him

We take the universe literally when our thoughts about it draw us completely outside ourselves, alienating us from our own depths. When, therefore, the sacred idea of heliocentrism is met by thought that is insulated from real emotion it serves to drive men crazy: to a despair at the meaninglessness of things to grotesque assumptions about unperfected man's uniqueness, to the presumption of a cosmic mandate which seems his by default. Is there any doubt that the modern scientific view of man's place in the universe is just such a expression of madness? We have converted a sacred idea into a thought which affirms the ego, completely ignoring what is most essential in the nongeocentrism of Buddhism, Hinduism and the cosmological systems of ancient Egypt and the Pythagoreans, namely, the idea of levels of power and intelligence in the cosmos, the objective symbolism of the Sun as a source not only of perceptible light and force, but of illumination and life corresponding to a central fire within man himself which, were he to come in touch with it, would gradually transform him.

Heliocentrism is thus the sacred or inner meaning of geocentrism. Which is to say that the real sense of heliocentrism cannot be grasped through the isolated intellect, but must be experienced in the play of inner and outer forces that influence one's own life. It is therefore only as one ignores the idea of microcosmic man and its existential import that geocentrism and heliocentrism appear to contradict each other.

This, apparently, was what happened to both parties in the famous dispute between the Catholic Church and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Rightfully considered by many to be the father of the scientific revolution, the great Italian scientist was formally condemned as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition in the year 1633 for teaching the "Pythagorean" doctrine of heliocentrism. In modern times this trial and condemnation of Galileo has been regarded, along with the trial of Socrates in ancient Athens, as a classic example of the search for truth being crushed by dogmatism.

History does indeed show that on the whole the appointed representatives of the Church were ignorant, blindly dogmatic, frightened, and some of them even nefarious in their struggle against the heliocentric system of Galileo. But the main point here is that the Church seemed to have lost every clear sense of the relationship between the outer and inner cosmos. Lacking this understanding, it made the dispute into one concerning two opposing views of the external universe. It thus contributed heavily to the strange conviction so prevalent in the modern world that scientific observation and theory can actually threaten the sort of knowledge gained through spiritual discipline.

But when the dispute is seen from this point of view, Galileo himself loses some of his heroic stature. Courageous though he was in his effort to stand by his way of investigating the cosmos, it may now be asked whether he was only substituting one literal minded approach for another.

It is true that the Copernican-Galilean-Newtonian era gave men a renewed sense of law in the universe. Surely every serious student of modern science knows those moments when the intellectual grasp of a lawful pattern in nature frees him from his own subjective perceptions of what is before him, embroiled as these perceptions are in the tormented machinations of the ego. This brief release from ordinary thought, which I believe is a foretaste of inner freedom, occurs when the mind is actually touched by a relatively objective idea.

Why then did modern man forget that so much of the value of apprehending scientific law lies just in this quality of direct self-knowledge which such apprehending brings? How did he not see that if a general law of nature is objective it is also a law of man's own nature? And that the deepened quality of his own experience in that moment is also an attribute of the universe? From this understanding a man may surely sense that he lives his life in ignorance of the levels of conscious order that exist in the cosmos and which are hidden in himself.

Whatever the reasons may be for this forgetting, the fact is that after Galileo scientists began to pride themselves on not asking why things are the way they are, but only how. Because the Church had lost sight of the connection between cosmic and psychological purpose in the universe, the whole idea of purposes in nature fell into disrepute. The Church had become unable to do what it is an essential task of all religions to do: to communicate the purposes of existence in such a way that a man can hope to experience them both in himself and in the cosmos. The Christian view of the universe was reduced instead to dogma, in the sense of beliefs held without any method of verifying them for oneself. Modern science therefore rejected the wrong thing: It separated itself from the idea of purpose in the universe, when it should have rejected only the Church's wrong relationship to that idea. The Church had come to read the book of nature through hard and dead categories. Science, while beginning as a search for a new way of experiencing the meaning of that book, soon ended by counting commas.

Gradually, but inexorably, the desire to manipulate nature moved to center stage. Pragmatism was born, and the purpose of knowledge came to be the satisfaction of desire rather than the growth of consciousness. Theories were judged by predictive power or aesthetic appeal; appearances were judged by further appearances. The heliocentric theory was true because it gratified the isolated intellect, the ego and the desires. A sacred idea, which in ancient Egypt was given to men only after they had experienced the sense of their place and task in a hierarchically structured conscious universe, an objective idea for which men required the preparation of recognizing the limitations of their unperfected inner state--was grabbed by the ego, rendered external and became a dementing influence upon civilization.