We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

TS Eliot, Little Gidding

In the beginning, after the big bang and the formation of the earth and living beings, human beings emerged embedded in the dream of nature. There was no differentiation.

Gradually there emerged language and groupings of people.

There were some societies where the connection with nature remained strong, where language worked in consort with the one, where men and women each brought their own strengths to that cooperation with others and with the one. They developed wonderful creativity in their cave paintings, and a wonderful science that enabled them to comprehend and relate to the cosmos through great stone constructions. They told stories that passed through the generations, passing on archetypal knowledge, lessons of experience to each new generation.

With the coming of written language, some feared that the knowledge of connection would be lost. They wrote it down, hidden away for when ignorant barbarians came, which surely they did.

The Egyptians went through periods of knowing, when great works were laid, and ignorance.

The Greeks, based on mystical connection raised the prospect of a new philosophy and sciences, from Plato and others, but gradually the mystic connection was lost in the Roman domination.

The Jews had their prophets of connection vying with lost souls for their story. Their last prophet, Jesus, showed the way back, and forward.

The Roman’s persecuted the true souls for centuries, then co-opted them to the state religion. The holy books were tailored to divert the central message – to worship Jesus rather than to become as Him. Then declined the Empire as barbarians came from the east.

The knowers actually moved east, to Constantinople, and the knowledge dispersed to the cultures of Islam and Persia.

Later, the circle turned. More eastern barbarians drove the knowledge west again, in wave after wave, as the recorded knowledge was gradually recovered. New ages of renaissance and glorious manifestations: the 11-13C High Middle Ages, 15-16C Italian Renaissance, the 17C Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the 18-19C English and German Romantic Movement, the 20C beginnings of psychology and a new physics, the United Nations and European Union, a new spirituality.

Yet all the while the pendulum of history swung back and forth. The Roman church continued the old programme, the persecution of Cathars, inquisition, destroying of Templars, witch trials, counter reformation, wars of religion… And then science itself took over through the dead hand of materialism – the vital essence of connection, even subjectivity and meaning, denied. A strange turn of events. Europe lost it’s way in war.

Yet lost knowledge cannot forever be denied. It keeps coming back, testified by mystics and sages over the ages. And psychology now understands through such as Maslow and Wilber that the path for all is from ignorance to ever higher levels of spiritual being.

At the end of which we are back in the stream of consciousness,  yet know that we are, conscious agents, inner and outer as one.

Inspired by Merchants of Light: The Consciousness that is Changing the World, by Betty J. Kovacs.