Explorers of synergy

I closed my latest blog with “How can we identify what it is that creates a sense of awe or reverence or gratitude in an individual, even as it is not being felt or recognised by another? If it were possible to identify and explore such a characteristic, we might cease with the replication of images or messages being churned out in the hopes of creating a more unified or sustainable world. It is not that our endeavours are lacking in purpose or value, but they encourage us to concentrate our resources upon looking for something which by its nature is impossible to find. I guess a more succinct way of phrasing this would be to ask ‘who or what is doing the looking?’”

One of the reasons why it is natural to stumble when we endeavour to peer into the nature of consciousness is that the human mind has an inclination to jump into its information storage-retrieval mode. Most cultures encourage us to identify objects through having labels from an early age and we learn to do the same with experiences. ‘What are you looking at?’ seems a natural question and yet there is nothing natural about it, given that the filter we assign to whatever is being viewed effectively short circuits any deeper exploration of our state of being in the midst of encountering an object or experience. 

What if we were customarily asked ‘how do you experience this object?’ and were encouraged to explore our senses and our state of being on each occasion - would that be so weird? Possibly, in a culture which encourages clarity and consistency with regards to a topic of reality and communication. Isn’t that why we have created a place for art, so that we can dive into the essence of our being and retrieve images, colours, textures, sensations, sound?

But is it natural that we should strive to segregate our relationships with one another and with an ineffable and sensorial nature of what we are? It might not feel natural, but it will seem the right thing to do if we are immersed in a collective of everyone else behaving in exactly the same way because they too have been conditioned that a more fluid expression of themselves is inappropriate. It is as if we have collectively agreed to flick off a switch inside of ourselves or at the very least to install a dimmer dial. 

It is amusing to consider whether an extra-terrestrial species would communicate with one another through an ecstatic and fluid expressiveness of sound and colour as part of an energetic language or frequency. If such beings were to view our electromagnetic or energetic range, they might find it puzzling that we should choose to communicate with one another in limiting or oscillating patterns, despite having access to a kaleidoscope of information from which we could express.

Coincidentally or not as I had been contemplating this, I came across a video the day after and which spoke about how reading Egyptian hieroglyphics is not simply about learning how to decode a language, but is about a whole mindset. 

In the video, Normandi Ellis shared that when she was younger, she couldn’t decide whether to be a painter or a writer and so when it was time in the course of her studies to translate a language, she gravitated towards a language that was both. She explained that there was no difference in the ancient Egyptian language between being a writer and an artist. As she was learning and copying the glyphs, she said that she found the learning came through her hand - that she could feel the hieroglyphs’ impression and was gaining an understanding of their meaning in a physical sense. 

She went on to say that Egypt was originally called the ‘Land of Kem’ (from which we get the words alchemy and chemistry). The practice of hieroglyphs was a process of learning alchemy, but not in a sense of a chemical process but as a magical practice. The language of hieroglyphics being about the nature of things. 

Normandi has written a book which goes into the various ways in which ancient Egyptians believed that the world comes into existence, one of which is the deity Ptah opening his mouth. The hieroglyph for this is an oval or symbol of an open mouth depicted over what looks like water ripples – effectively, the word over the water, which is similar to the story in Genesis of a vibration of language and consciousness to create something. 

It would seem that alchemy or the quintessential Egyptian magical practice was essentially about consciousness and language creating something. My intuition is guiding me to suggest that one way to comprehend language, whilst it represents a small mode of expression of our being as we are engaging with it presently, is like a portal in that it can open us into a terrain of who we are as conduits of creativity of the cosmos. We know this intuitively when we encourage one another to ‘speak our truth’ and when we sense that our actions in the world (our expression) are not in coherence with an innermost integrity.

But back to the video, the interviewer pointed out that until the Rosetta Stone was found, there was no way to validate any intuitive feeling or effort to interpret or translate what the hieroglyphs could mean. Normandi agreed and said that one of the things she feels that we have had a mistaken idea about when translating a language, especially when working with a Roman alphabet, is that it is an abstraction which means something. She said that when we look at a pictograph or a hieroglyph, we think that the hieroglyph which we are looking at is the thing itself. So what we are not taking into consideration is that it is a symbol and that there are associations such as sound which go along with the image – ancient Egyptian language was both nouns and verbs. 

My intuition will add to what Normandi is saying, is that a thing cannot be understood simply in terms of ‘this or that’ but ‘both and’. In respect of language, expressed particularly through a pictorial or hieroglyphic means, it is the conveyance of multiple streams of information simultaneously – moving us into a different relationship with and comprehension of what we are seeing or perceiving than if we were processing information in a linear or abstract fashion.

Normandi shared that when she started to study hieroglyphs, she would start with a word and write it down, for instance the word ‘Heka’ which has this hieroglyph:

and can also be shown with the scribe’s palette and three seeds, which is the whole word for Heka. 

As the interviewer pointed out, this could be a complex image and from Normandi’s writings, Heka is a word which refers to magic. Normandi breaks the word down so that there is the ‘H’ sound and the ‘Ka’ image and then what is positioned at the end of the hieroglyph is the determinative, which informs as to the quality of the thing itself. Heqet (Heqat, Heket) was a goddess of childbirth, fertility, transformation in ancient Egypt and would be symbolised as a frog or a woman with the head of a frog. Her name was written as hqt with the determinative ‘frog’. The concept of Heqet moves into the Greek with the word Hekate/Hecate and of witchcraft as a negative concept of making magic. 

Normandi says that her intuition suggests that H Ka can also be viewed as in having a meaning of ‘beautiful sentence or utterance’ as in Haiku, suggesting that H Ka and Egyptian language itself is closely related to our concepts of poetry. Normandi says that what intrigued her as a poet setting out to look at hieroglyphs, is that she could take one word and see it moving in lots of different ways. This suggests to me the fluidity of this ancient mode of language, something that we are going to be unaccustomed to if we are trying to relate to and gather information from something being conveyed in a closed or abstract fashion. Normandi pointed out that there were no spaces between the words and so one word would run into another word. Hieroglyphs can be read from left-right or from right-left and this too can create meaning.

The interviewer referenced a book which I am going to read, called ‘The Alphabet versus the Goddess’ by Leonard Shlain, in which he suggests that the problem of patriarchy and the suppression of women is associated with the alphabetical languages, whereas in the earlier ancient Egyptian culture, notably the Old Kingdom, men and women were much more equal. Leonard Shlain suggests that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs called for people to use both sides of their brain equally, but as we developed the alphabetical languages, which he sees as more linear than pictorial, we began suppressing part of our mind and that the appreciation of the female has a lot to do with graphic images. It might be revealing to review any research that has shown a correlation between the prohibiting of graphic imagery of any kind in a particular culture or religion with a high indication of suppression of women.

Normandi pointed out that some of the earliest examples of pictographs which we have were on pots which the women would have created and that the development of the hieroglyphic language began there. One of the reasons for this being that the women would have traditionally stayed in one spot as an anchor for a culture, whilst the men were out hunting game. There would have been a concept of a ‘sacred vessel’ being intuitively understood by both men and women at that time. 

She goes on to say that what is interesting at this time is to notice that the mental process is usually what takes precedence and not the ‘mater’ or ‘mother’ process (which in the language of Kem or hieroglyphics would have been grounded in the nature of a thing itself). Ancient goddesses were usually always depicted as fertility goddesses of the earth and as grounded. In his book, Shlain points out that we would have had the concept of a sky god and it was this concept which became associated with the alphabetical and linear languages and in a way has contributed to creating a sort of disconnect with the earth itself. 

Normandi points out that there used to be an ancient festival associated with a different sky god called Amun, who was alone in the world and had a longing for an ‘other’, so it created the ‘beloved’ or the other; a version of the name of Isis and is all vowel sounds and means the ‘hand of God’. Effectively, god is making love with itself, as it is still one being which has elected to divide itself through sound (or frequency) and is an origin of our stories which speak about modes of thinking or modes of being. From a perspective of a macrocosm of the cosmos being reflected in a microcosm of a human mind, as in a holographic universe, this concept of a universal being creating a complementary component is interesting in view of the differing functionalities of the left brain vs right brain. 

Recognition must be given to the influence of a period of our history when perception of the natural world was inter-twined with the presence of and goodwill of multiple deities. A sudden onset of or a prolonged drought for instance, or flooding, together with any food shortages or destructiveness, mobility of tribes and an intermingling of cultures would have progressively changed the emphasis given to these deities and their influence. 

This is important for us to be aware of, particularly in the midst of our current age and its converging crises, so that we are willing to comprehend how it is that our perception of an order of things in the natural world is at any one time being expressed through our differing languages and cultural world views. 

Once this has been recognised on an individual basis and we are willing to embrace something more than an inclination towards judgment or blame, we can join in those collective efforts being implemented towards finding ways of transcending the technologies of our language and of allowing ourselves to relate to one another from a place of holistic well-being-ness. 

Will it be art, music, dance or poetry that we have to actively embrace more of in order to accomplish this – or will the essence of consciousness with its fractal, intuitive nature and of our simply ‘knowing’ come to save the day? I suspect that the answer lies in synergy.