I have an opinion on this and I’ll speak to it simply and directly soon.
I am finishing up a great book by two of my favorite writers Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince called The Forbidden
Universe.
www.picknettprince.com...
It’s about the contribution of Hermetic philosophy to the renaissance and sceince.
It turns out that ALL the medieval philosophers and scientist from Isaac Newton, who for example, had voluminous volumes on Alchemy, to Giordano
Bruno, who was a died in the wool hermetic who wanted to reform the Vatican. Copernicus, and even Galileo Galilei were hermetic thinkers. This is
documented and in-fact the scientific progress they made could be just as much dependent of Hermetic thought than the scientific method they knew at
that time, which was undeveloped. Of course we know why, and that is because of the repressive Catholic Church who actually burned the great man Bruno
at the stake for his Hermetism and forced Galileo to retract his discoveries.
The book traces the origin of the turning point in science as the Copernican heliocentric theory, such theory postulated within the Hermetica that
heavily influenced the ideas of Copernicus and Isaac Newton later.
Now my point here is that if we examine this history closely and other eras of great change and progress we always see that progress and change
doesn’t occur out of a vacuum.
The contributions of the Arab Muslimeen to humanity came from the Quran and Sufis and the Arabs preserving the knowledge of the Greek masters that
they handed to the Europeans.
The progress of the Indus valley came from the Buddhist and Hindu advanced thinkers and mystics.
In the close study of European change in the scientific realm we see there is a spiritual nutrient that subtly fostered that change, such as in this
case, the Hermetic knowledge. These great medieval philosophers and early scientists studied closely the Hermetica
despite the oppression of the medieval Catholic Church at the time. Were talking about the 16th and 17th century here.
Amazingly practically ALL the great philosophers in this era were influenced by not only Hermetic Lore but Rosicrucian knowledge as well. Indeed from
John Dee all the way to Isaac Newton these men formed an invisible fraternity of knowledge that in the end led to the great scientific method and the
intensive discoveries within that burgeoning scientific era we call the renaissance
So what’s my point?
My point is that these men were able to make change and have progress because they had the nutrient of Hermetic wisdom that propelled that change.
The question is
What spiritual nutrient do we have today?
I believe science has run its course and no longer offers any positive nutrient of change, just redundant materialism, even if it ever did, once it
abandoned its relationship with the spiritual values of these men I mentioned.
It has become a one-dimensional materialistic black hole of false certainty, imo.
We need something new. Either a new re-interpretation of some of the spiritual classics or a second look at systems, such as Hermetism, Sufism,
Qabala, Gnosticism, Buddhism, Vedanta, Integral Spirituality, not in any newagey superficial sense but serious studies where we can find something
that can rescue science from itself, and at the same time progress the calcified spirituality of today and invigorate the human spirit into a new
level of awareness in a genuine merging and understanding of science and spirituality.
These great men of the past ransacked the classics and absorbed and studied them so closely, the Hermetica for instance, that this served as a vital
nutrient to real knowledge and progress despite tremendous odds.
What are we doing today?
Where is our Galileo, our Isaac Newton, our Giordano Bruno, our Mahatma Ghandi, our Jajaludin Rumi, our Pantanjali?
Or more important where is the nutrient that can produce such people in our age?
edit on 25-12-2013 by Willtell because: (no reason given)
edit on 25-12-2013 by Willtell because: (no reason given)