Below I’ve copied in a remarkable ancient Irish text, “The Instructions of King Cormac“, taken from the Book of Ballymote, which dates to about 1390. The “Instructions” themselves are certainly much older — probably they date to pre-Christian times, since they fail to mention God anywhere. Ellen Hopman drew attention to it on the Druid mailing list I belong to.

The thing that strikes me most forcefully about the text is its similarity to Asian philosophies, particularly Taoism. It’s a similarity that many others have remarked on. The juxtaposition of opposites, common in the East, seems to kick the logical mind into neutral, giving the spirit a chance to reach its own understanding. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first of a series of posts on how human consciousness is structured. There are dozens of hypotheses from all over the world about how consciousness can be raised, lowered, changed, and so forth. In this series, I’d like to present some of my favorites: mythological archetypes, the Leary eight-circuit model, western astrology, the chakra system, Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, David Hawkins’s 12 levels of consciousness, and the Tarot. I’m going to describe them briefly and try to integrate them into a single model. (Then I’m going to try to run a 1.5-minute mile, fly to the moon, and cure cancer. Then I’ll have breakfast.) This is going to be challenging, but fun.

In this first post, I’ll describe Jungian archetypes and the Wilson/Leary eight-circuit model, and show how they may be describing (at least partly) the same thing.

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