light of nature

Vedic and Greek sources on the relation between matter and the soul.

Veda

It might be interesting to compare Paracelsus’ thoughts, and Gnostic and Renaissance traditions on the relationship of the soul to matter to even earlier sources. The Upanishads (Hindu, 8th and 7th centuries B.C) contain many passages, each from a different viewpoint, illustrating how enlightenment consists of discovering the immortal soul in ourselves. As far as I understand their viewpoint, this realization is intended to transcend our material existence. As one of many examples I quote a part of the Subala Upanishad describing the “Narayana, the indwelling spirit of all”:

There abides for ever the one unborn in the secret place within the body. The earth is his body; he moves through the earth but the earth knows him not. The waters are his body, but the waters know him not. Light is his body, he moves through the light but the light knows him not. Air is his body, he moves through the air but the air knows him not. Ether is his body, he moves through the ether but ether knows him not…Thinking mind is his body, he moves through thinking mind but thinking mind knows him not. He alone is the indwelling spirit of all beings, free from all evil, the one divine, radiant Narayana.[1]

Narayana is not the precise Vedic analogy of the lumen naturae or the “soul”. I am just pointing out one of many parallels from a wealth of the Vedanta which could be compared to later ideas on these subjects.

Plato

Plato (427-347 B.C.) is another important source for thought on nature, time, and the human and world souls. Not only throughout Timaeus, but also in The Republic Plato presents ideas concerning the soul similar to the Hindu concept. It interested me especially when he teaches on the theme of uncovering the clothing of ordinary matter to see the inner nature.

“We must turn our eyes …to the soul’s love of wisdom, and observe what she apprehends, and after what company she strives, led on by her kinship to the divine and immortal and that which ever is; and what she would become if she followed this with her whole being, and by this impulsion were rescued from the sea in which she lies now, and could strike off the stones and shell-fish that cover her; for now she feasts upon earth, and from those feasting that men call happy there has grown upon her a covering of earth and stone, thick and rough. Then one might see her true nature, whether it is manifold or single, or how and in what manner she is constituted.”[2]

What changes?

Man’s attitude toward spirit and matter has a long tradition. Whether this tradition reflects a long and ever-evolving cyclical or spiral development or different phases of all the attitudes that we have within us, is a problem touched on by Jung in Aion and von Franz in her lecture Nike and the River Styx. One of the questions that they ask is: What has changed? They answer: The archetypal spirit of the age. Von Franz, basing her discussion on the last chapter of Jung’s Aion (Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, especially p. 247ff.) says in her lecture:

Hence that which Jung once termed the “mysterious flow of events” has to do with the effect of the collective unconscious on occurrences in the world. The collective unconscious is not static; rather, certain archetypes constellate themselves in it over longer periods of time more than others, and this is what we commonly term the transformations of the Zeitgeist….

…In the case of the…zodiacal serpent, the spiritual temporally-determined ordering aspect [of the unconscious]…qualitatively colors“ so to speak, all the archetypal manifestations of an age.[3]

I wonder how much, if at all, did changes of in ego consciousness brought on by the observations of nature and attempts to understand the world affect this process? Did these changes influence at all the archetypes constellated during a particular age? Did these two “streams” influence each other; was there an interaction, a process of feedback? Or did the light of nature simply change color?

Changes in the collective psyche may even mirror changes in the individual psyche along the path of individuation. The “secular course of events, a continual internal transformation of the Self”[4], called by Jung “the process of individuation”[5] follows the cycle (or more accurately, spiral since it returns to a “higher plane” than the one where it began): Anthropos (Rotundum) ® Shadow (Homo) ® Physis (Serpens) ® Lapis (Stone) ® Rotundum (Anthropos)[6]. The subquaternio (or tetrahedron) of the Lapis “is the world of matter, whose numinosity in the shape of materialism threatens to suffocate the world”.[7]

All these thoughts and questions are too big for me to tackle at the moment. They are, however, part of the fascination.

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[1] S. Radhakrishnan, The Principle Upanishads, Georg Allen and Unwin, London, 2nd impression, 1968, p. 876-7.

[2] Plato, The Republic, §612, page 316 in the translation by A. D. Lindsay, Heron Books (no printing date).

[3] Unpublished translation by S. Freeman of M.-L. von Franz, Nike and the River Styx, p. 22.

[4] Ibid, p. 23 (emphasis is from von Franz).

[5] C: G. Jung, Aion, p. 265.

[6] Cf. Jung, Aion, p. 247 and 259.

[7] Ibid, p. 260.