The Morgan Library and Museum located in Manhattan, New York City is reputed to have one of the world's greatest collections of ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals (small stone cylinders engraved with images for transfer to clay by rolling). On the museum's website it states, "Ancient Mesopotamian seals are among the earliest known objects to reproduce pictorial symbols to communicate ideas. In a way, their designs precede the illuminations of medieval manuscripts through their symbolic content and the record they provide of their own time and place of origin."
What interests me is how information is able to be coded through the use of symbols and why this mechanism might be necessary or essential in order to preserve the integrity of a message.
Firstly, it would be important to be open to and to recognise whether a message has been encoded at all. Many today, for instance, debate about whether particular religious texts should be taken literally or if they were only ever intended to be interpreted as a sequence of allegories. This mode of vision has significance that is irrespective of the nature of the texts being examined.
Historians look to ancient artefacts as a means of obtaining information about a particular time in history, but whilst it may be possible to determine environmental conditions or lifestyle with some degree of accuracy, perhaps it is not so easy to gauge the intricacies and intelligence of the way that earlier communities of people viewed themselves and the world around them. Just as misconception exists between advocates and non-advocates of religions and philosophies today, it is possible that prejudice or assumption could cloud the way in which a modern day person would view the spirituality for instance, of a person who lived some 4,000 years ago.
The Oxford dictionary defines 'esoteric' as: "Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialised knowledge or interest.."
The nature of the esoteric has popularly come to be associated with the purpose and existence of secret societies, the transmission of alchemical processes, of mystical secrets and illumination.
Irrespective of whether an intention has been to protect or to serve as guardians or stewards of information that has been deemed of having high value, there is still the presence of a sense of exclusivity in the attitude of those who seek to restrict the viewing of such materials from being accessible to the populace, regardless of whether such information has been understood. The reasons for this sense of exclusivity can appear complex or justifiable, but are fundamentally entwined with judgment and ideas about worthiness, merit and disdain.
The concept of truth is something that human beings seem to value the most highly of all. Various interpretations of it have been fought over for centuries and it factors in why many hierarchies and networks of power have sought to manipulate information and wherever possible, to try and hide any form of revelation from the masses. Whilst truth isn't a commodity in that it can be bought or sold or mapped in such a way that it can be followed with precision, there are codes or cyphers that can communicate directly with a state of consciousness and in this way, bring about a heightened state of awareness or illumination of reality.
Is it possible that ancient civilizations or elders within these communities understood the mechanism of the human mind and of how information and knowledge is conveyed far better than we give them credit for today? Is it possible for us to conceive for instance, in our modern age of information technology and file sharing and with so much information readily available at our fingertips, we have become so flooded with data and overload, that our minds cannot grasp the immensity of what we are being presented with? This may be the first time that humanity has had access to so much raw data that it can be a conscious choice as to whether or not it tunes out or tunes in.
If we choose to tune in, we may find ourselves in a position of trying to find the equivalent of a needle within a haystack. It is always a process of our own discernment, but perhaps there are keys left by others and which can help us on our journey? Wisdom that was known by ancient civilizations throughout their own era or age of information and knowledge and that became encoded in such a way that the keys to unlocking it would be available for us in our particular age of information and knowledge? It would quite literally be a communication or a letter from one civilization or cycle of humanity to another, something which has survived through the passage of time as well as remaining timeless by its nature. Knowledge can shift and change, being attainable through experience and time, but wisdom is essentially timeless or as the ancients might have described it, immortal.
It has generally been accepted that the ancients were skilled astronomers and possessed much understanding of the nature of cycles, both planetary and cosmic. Perhaps what has been given less reverence today than it had in ancient times, is an esoteric nature of cycles? We may be able to use some very impressive pieces of equipment to measure cycles and are capable of furnishing ourselves with all manner of statistics and correlations, but this information is lacking something quite substantial if it only ever gives us data about potentials rather than informs us directly.
The capacity to be still and to listen, literally to receive, may be what is going to become increasingly urgent and beneficial for humanity in the immediate future, that is, if we are looking to experience ourselves as being more than a rigidly hierarchical and reactive species. I believe the ancients had a great capacity for paying attention to and listening to the cycles of life and heard far more than is generally known today. This ability to tune into the cosmos will have given them a multitude of insights and considerably increased their level of intelligence. It would explain why they were capable of performing some of the engineering feats that are beyond the realms of many of us today.
Is there a word or a phrase that exists in our language that incorporates both an observing of and an interpretation of the planetary cycles as they relate to human experience? Certainly, the mystery schools and esoteric teaching have recognized the potential of the 'universal androgyne', the 'universal hermaphrodite' or the world soul. Such a being combines within itself the principles of both the masculine and the feminine or what could equally be termed as the exoteric and esoteric.
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