As you read through Virgil’s Aeneid, you can get a good perspective on what people’s minds were filled with at the time.
If you compare this content to what people’s minds are like today, the qualitative gap can bring up a hint of desperation.
The dryness, technology-oriented conceptual framework of our society is hardly related to the poetical wonders and linguistic refinement of Virgil’s verses.
Yet, now that I consider this content under the lights cast by a sitting meditation session, it appears clearly that, on another level, they appear to be quite similar and reveal that people’s minds do what mind have always done … a few centuries don’t change anything :
Minds collect, gather
and agglomerate content they can later ‘play’ with and be trapped into.
They sustain and develop a relationship to that content and get involved in the process of permanently sculpting, reassigning this acquired identity,
They use this content, keep referring to it when it comes to understanding reality.
These two contents, in spite of their qualitative gap are both as mentally generated and therefore as useless to help us on the way down the consciousness road.
They both need to be passed through exactly the same way.
Franck – October 2022
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Notes & Silence 
You have a point. Methods change, not people. Homer’s love of slaughter hardly differs from the violence of the cinema.
But, maybe, those old stories, myth based, hide signposts to the spirit?
J’aimeAimé par 1 personne
Can you elaborate a bit on the signposts argument ?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean…
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Not so much an argument as a half formed idea.
The Aeneid has explores concepts of duty and self-sacrifice (quite literally, with poor old Dido). There is the interaction of brutality and heroism, rage and grief in the Iliad; persistence, fidelity and betrayal in the Oddysey, and the relationship of journey to goal. Investigations of the psyche.
Not « scripture » (thankfully), but the ideas developing at the time.
Karen Armstrong, in « The Great Transformation », argues this describes a process of « ecstasis » – stepping out from, and beyond, oneself. She traces parallel developments in China, India, Greece and Israel. The book is worth a read, but is substantial. I do not know if there is a French translation.
J’aimeAimé par 1 personne
This made me think of the Baghavad Gita.
Thanks for the reference. I have not heard about this person or her work.
I cannot even start to remember how I ended up referring to the Aeneid in this post. I do not eve own a version of this work at home, nor have I ever read it myself as part of any class content.
Mhhh…Must have been someone I met.
Or was it you…maybe ?
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I have no recollection of referencing the Aeneid, and it is many years since I read it. I am more likely to have mentioned Homer.
It’s a while since I read the Bhagavad-Gita as well. I may have to revisit it.
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