Myths, Cycles, and Information

Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey

The cycles of the day, of the seasons, of the moon, and countless other great and small cycles have been affecting Earth since the very beginning. For billions of years, the sun rose and set, and the moon circled the globe going through her phases and tugging at the seas and the earth orbited the sun and cycled through winters and summers. Life on Earth has been imprinted with these cycles for billions of years.

The cycles of nature, the rhythms of nature, all kinds of rhythms from periodic, predictable clockwork phenomenon like sunrises and sunsets, to the roaring chaos of the solar cycle, or the slow grind of plate tectonics and pops of earthquakes or volcanoes, or the random rain beat of cosmic rays carry information in transitions, changes of light, heat, or sound. This primordial symphony carries the most basic, most ancient code.

The code is carried at all scales and written into life and indeed into matter itself. In life on Earth, in people and animals and plants it's written in DNA, and in the culture and thoughts of each species. Human language is a specific type of symbolic representation of this primordial symphony. It's several degrees removed, though.

The Tree of Knowledge is the nervous system, where the world pours into us through our senses, and through various active filtering mechanisms and pre-processing systems that condense it down and down and down into code our brains can store and process. We are painfully aware of the limitations of this system. The images and sounds in our mind's experience are attenuated renderings of the reality that's just beyond the tips of our fingers.

Anakin Skywalker Sealed Into his Suit

It is most amazing that we feel this separation from the world. It is a tangible experience. We notice there's a void between us and the world. We feel that our body is like the coffin of Osiris, and has been made by Seth to perfectly seal us inside.

The separation is even more profound when we attempt to recode the primordial symphony in language. We become aware that no matter how much we might write, or how eloquent we might be, our inky scratches or electronic records are sad, dim, cartoonish things. Even so, somehow, when we turn within our poetic language and symbols and art seem able to tap more directly into the primordial code of the universe than the highest fidelity recording of visual or auditory experience can. The wild territory of inner experience is the place the gods live. This seems to be the home of mythology. Art and poetic thought rely on this deeply embedded information we all carry within.