Time, Dharma, and Consciousness: Compassion and Mythic Cosmology in the Wer-Auld

By John Knight Lundwall

It has been said that the modern world was defined when a poet-philosopher stood upon a stump and decried “God is dead!” This declaration, whatever its original intent, has been fundamentally embraced by modern, secular culture, from Darwin to Heisenberg, from Freud to Russell, as an underpinning to the very idea of the Age of Reason: humankind does not need God; we can create our own paradise. Indeed, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the popular idea of the scientific community was that the Golden Age was just around the corner–Reason had created industry, technology, modern economy, and science, of its own standing and natural course, and would eventually solve all problems and suffering. This humanistic belief in god-is-dead-ology persists today, in some ranks, ironically, with wholesale blind faith.

Yet, as a rising body of social and scientific critique emerges from the horizon, with such titles as Dark Age Ahead, The Coming Plague, Twilight of American Culture, Twilight of Common Dreams, The End of Education, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and many more, a new cultural consciousness is emerging which recounts the old words of Marcellus, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Hamlet I.iv). It seems from circumference to center the Age of Enlightenment is dimming down, and the neo-post-deconstructionist age may well be defined by another poet-philosopher standing on the self-same world stump declaring, “Man is an idiot!”

In the rush towards interminable material progress humankind has stifled their true nature, which has always been inexhaustible spiritual potential (Tillich 104). Living within this contradiction–the material versus the spiritual, gain versus authentic growth–humankind lurches forward, from age to age, raising up as standards of both gain and growth one dogmatic neurosis after another. Religion, science, psychology, ethics, philosophy, or any other epistemological paradigm held as the center axis of being unattached to the universe as it really is can only lead to endless suffering.

Curiously, in mythologic systems the nature of consciousness was well observed, and even tracked in grand cycles of time. Nearly every mythic tradition held a belief in a series of world ages which transcribed these cycles. The very word “world” identifies this ancient eschatology: wer-auld literally means “man-age” and refers to the long cyclical ages of consciousness in which humankind participates . In mythic time, there are generally denoted four world ages. The Greeks declared that there was a golden age, a silver age, a bronze age, and an iron age. Each age was aligned with a form of consciousness which, in the golden realm of being, was akin to the gods. The iron age, on the other hand, is an age of stifling lust and pride and the current age in which we live. These ideas of time were themselves thought to parallel the rise and fall of civilizations, where each civilization went through four epochs of consciousness–in the Greek terms: olbus, koros, hubris, and ate. As Hugh Nibley notes, olbus means filled and fulfillment, having everything that is needed; koros is taking more than is needed, overeating or over filling; this leads to hubris which is overconfidence in self and a total disconnect from nature as it is, placing self above all else; which terminates in ate or the point of no return, things break down and run out and nothing can stop the entropy cascade of destruction (Nibley 41).

Both Buddhist and Hindu cosmology also express the four world ages. In a treasury of Buddhist teachings entitled The Encompassment of All Knowledge the four world ages are clearly named: “formation, abiding, destruction, and vacuity” (Taye 62). In Hindu cosmology the four ages are Krita, Tretā, Dvāpara, and Kali (Zimmerman 13). These ages in many ways parallel the Greek understanding, for they both address a physical creation as well as an evolution (or de-evolution) of consciousness. As Zimmerman explains, the Hindu ages exist upon Dharma, “the moral order of the world” (13). With each successive age there is a decrease in Dharma until the Kali age, where “man and his world are at their very worst. [...] ‘when society reaches a stage, where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union [...], falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion [...]’ then we are in the Kali Yuga [...]” (15).

So it is that the so called Age of Enlightenment has proved to be nothing but eye wash and special effects–a spectacular opening act invariably leading to a final culmination of hubris whose closing curtains are cued by a dirge for inner awareness. Despite the vast armada of technical doohickeys with which we append ourselves with great self-congratulations, these accouterments are a horse and pony side-show preventing true awareness of the disproportionate state between man as he is and the universe as it really exists. The greater the distance between these nodal points of consciousness the greater the neurosis that develops. Indeed, the hubris of modern homo sapiens is a neurosis constructed to obfuscate the famine ever growing within the psyche. As Carl Jung observes, “Modern man believes that he can do as he pleases and is perturbed that inexplicable anxieties plague him. True to his rationalistic bias, he has tried all the usual remedies–diets, exercise programs, studying inspirational literature–and only reluctantly admits that he can’t seem to find a way to live a meaningful life” (Sabini, ed. 16). Ironically, modern technology itself is nothing more than a subset temporal moral philosophy; a philosophy which worships the ego and as a result serves only the most superficial needs of humankind.

Not surprisingly, the cycles of the world ages and the forms of consciousness that go with them have been the subject of immense examination by those seeking a way out of the horse and pony show. Leaving this circus is no easy task. It turns out every exit offered by the world leads back on itself in a spinning wheel motif that counterfeits the Dharma of the cosmos. Escape has been replaced by escapism–which is ironically just more of the same.

It is in this context that Siddhartha Gautama sought enlightenment. Gautama, or Buddha (the Awakened One) as he was later called, traveled the world seeing the truth of it, for he:

“[...] encountered terrible misery. [He] met families with nine or ten children, every child racked with disease. No matter how hard the parents toiled day and night, they could not earn enough to support so many children. [...] He saw the handicapped and infirm forced to beg in the streets, [...]. In addition to poverty and disease, [the people] were oppressed by the brahmans, and there was no one to whom they could complain. [...] He knew that even a king had no power to change the situation. [...] People were entrapped not only by illness and unjust social conditions, but by the sorrows and passions they themselves created in their own hearts and minds. [...] He knew that the attainment of inner peace would be the only basis for true social work [...]. ((Hahn 64-66)

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s eloquent biography of the Buddha, Old Path White Clouds, Gautama departs from his palace and family to seek the true way out of the human predicament encased in its wheel of time and cyclical world ages. Coincidentally, on leaving his old life behind he says, “Birth, old age, sickness, and death are heavy burdens each of us carries in this life” (71). So it is that Gautama personifies the four world ages and cycles of consciousness which accompany them. In fact, these wer-aulds become the foundation for his search for the one central truth of life--transcending the ego-self completely by escaping the circus of material time and cares and entering into the cosmic plane of nirvana which is ultimate time, space, and consciousness.

In Gautama’s process of awakening he discovered the truth of the four world ages naming them the Four Noble Truths, paradoxically listed in the reverse order to the cycles of consciousness: “the existence of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path which leads to the cessation of suffering” (147).The path which leads to the cessation of suffering he called the Noble Eightfold Path, which was nourished by living mindfully. “Mindfulness leads to concentration and understanding which liberates you from every pain and sorrow and leads to peace and joy” (147). Ultimately, however, mindfulness leads to the virtue of awakening, imbuing one with the Dharma nature–compassion:

“In this world, few people look with the eyes of compassion, and so we are cruel and merciless toward each other. The weak are always oppressed by the strong. [...] Love and understanding can ease the suffering of all beings. The truth is the truth, whether or not it is accepted by the majority. Therefore, I tell you children, it takes great courage to stand up for and protect what is right.” (33)

In modern secular terms the idea of compassion is wholly humanistic and metaphysical, having nothing to do with the mechanistic universe’s properties or processes. The old cosmologies, however, have a very different view of the cosmos. In Buddhist cosmology, for example, the term “universe” was written in Sanskrit as loka-dhātu:

It refers to a place that has come into existence through the karma (actions and their enduring results) produced by living beings. The universe is also maintained by karma and disintegrates through the action of karma. [...] The term universe came to have such a strong connotation of human life and destiny that it almost ceased to connote the universe as a spatial entity. (Sadakata 25)

In antiquity, the cosmos was its own form of consciousness, interrelated and crossing through the very fibers of human being. As individuals acted the cosmos unfolded in a unique way. As the cosmos unfolded it influenced the action of individuals. Like the cosmic tree, life was a continuum of energy flow from rooted course matter, to the material temporal mind, upwards towards branching celestial space, finally blossoming in transcendent time and consciousness. Thus, it is not surprising to find the Buddha teaching transcendence out of the wer-aulds by obtaining to a conscious state that was beyond human care and illusion but hermetically bound to the palpable rhythms of a conscious universe–the universe as it really is. This is revealed in the Buddha’s statement, “But suffering is not the true nature of the universe. Suffering is the result of the way we live and of our erroneous understanding of life” (Hahn 152). In this light, the Buddha’s revelation was that the universe was not just a spatial entity but a time-transcendent, conscious reality in which anyone could participate upon awakening.

This idea is not original with Buddha. Rather, the idea of awakening true consciousness and transcending material time (around and through which the ages of humankind marched in circles) belongs to a very ancient mystery teaching which inherently involved man and was enwrapped in the sacred idea of macrocosmos (the conscious universe birthed, aged, diminished, and resurrected by karma) and the microcosmos (the human soul’s interaction with all other forces until its own real genesis could occur, i.e cosmic man or buddhahood!). In fact, the whole purpose of the wer-auld was to initiate the human soul into ever widening streams of enlightenment and transformation as microcosmos, all the while the river of time ran its eroding course of entropy. The Earth is the island in the middle of the celestial river. Thus, the Earth is the stage upon which all celestial influences run, like tides from a cosmic ocean breaching the material plane. In the ancient cosmologies the Earth was the lowest step on the universe’s ladder, but it was also the nexus where true transformation could take place. This revelation birthed the geocentric system, which has been misunderstood by all of modern interpretation. In Jacob Needleman’s A Sense of the Cosmos, Needleman argues that ancient geocentric cosmologies were not to betaken literally, but philosophically:

It is geocentrism, without the idea of microcosmic man, which modern science rejected. But a purely external geocentrism was never the whole meaning of this idea in the ancient world. It is only we, who have lost the idea of the microcosm, who see it that way. But taken with the idea of the microcosm, geocentrism reminds us that objective reality contains many kinds of influences that can act upon us, that there is a scale of being to which man is born would he but search for it as diligently as he pursues the satisfactions of external life. (28)

Ancient geocentric cosmology was itself, in Buddhist terms, part of the Eightfold Path of Enlightenment, in that it tried to instill in the neophyte the interconnectedness of all things–above and below. The Eightfold Path was: “right views, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration” (Palmer et. al. 53). This path is more than just righteous moral and ethical conduct, but as the last three modalities indicate it is an unfolding of a conscious state where all objects and experiences are seen for what they are; a state only possible when an individual sacrifices his entire ego and loses himself in the relationship of other: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). Right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, in conscious terms, births a savior, a being of compassion, an awakened one whose role on Earth has transcended the illusions of the wer-auld and has become born again into a new consciousness which shares in all macrocosmic activities.

In modern psychological terms such awakening is called individuation. Paradoxically, the word individuation centers on the individual, but as this psychic process unfolds the individual finds himself spiritually and psychically connected to all living things. Carl Jung writes:

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing [...] with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world’s and the psyche’s hinterland. (Jung 225-226)

Microcosmic man is, as Buddha puts it, always mindful of the other, to such a degree that there is no real distinction between self and other; self and nature; self and cosmos. On the other hand, in this awakened state there is no real distinction between other and self, nature and self, and cosmos and self. Already Zimmerman has noted that Dharma was the moral order of the world, a kind of substrata of energetic particles created when microcosmic man walked the Eightfold Path of right works, thoughts, and deeds. The less Dharma in the energetic substrata the greater the entropy in the river of time and the more erosion of authentic consciousness took place. Thus, to become awakened or individuated affects the unfolding of time and cosmos itself, just as to stay in ignorance and suffering serves only to further drive the physical and psychic forces of entropy.

Again, these relationships between cosmos, time, Dharma, and consciousness have very ancient roots. In the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead the deceased neophyte is faced with two judgements. The first is a series of forty two judges who judge him on his works, deeds, and thoughts. Like the first five steps of the Eightfold Path the neophyte must pass each judge with his heart intact, declaring that he has lived an upright and moral life. Secondly, he enters a chamber where his heart is weighed in the cosmic scales against the feather of Maat, itself a symbol of right being. Maat was often used for such ideals as: “right, true, truth, real, genuine, upright, righteous, just, steadfast, unalterable, etc” (Budge 417). However, this second judgement is not a judgement of moral behavior. It is here that Thoth stands by the balance beams recording the weight of the heart. Thoth is the deity who spake the word of truth from which the universe came into being, and he is directly associated with Maat. From this association it is thought that the weighing of the neophyte’s heart in the cosmic scales was an assessment of another order altogether–testing to see if the deceased had attained a countenance beyond that of a just and righteous man, but one who could co-create the cosmos because he had already linked himself to it. Thus, inside the heart of perfected man was the entirety of the microcosmos. To pass this judgement was to ascertain a state of consciousness where one became an Osiris, just as obtaining authentic awakening one becomes a Buddha.

In both cases the one seeking salvation becomes a transcendent being, one who is not just true and benevolent, but one who has become an Osiris, a Thoth, a Buddha, a Logos and co-creator of cosmos–or in other words, an ego-less being of compassion. Indeed, from these examples we can assert that such an individual contributes to Dharma, the energetic substrata of cosmic unfolding, and therefore helps to reset the wer-aulds back to the beginning of the golden age, where a new cycle of being is upheld allowing for another great epoch where individuals may find the path to enlightenment and escape the wheel of material fate.

Finally, there is a concept in Maahayana cosmology which bears mentioning. Karma is the self-exacting justice by which all living beings endure eternal rounds of birth and death. At least until one can work out his salvation and escapes the eternal wheel of material time which snares him in the corporeal world. Because enduring an eternal round of rebirths may be intolerable, there are beings of such true compassion that they withhold their own ultimate transcendence in time and space but bind themselves to the wer-aulds. Such beings are called Bodhisattvas, and their decree is essentially, “My fate shall be your fate.” In this way, every sentient being is aided by another level of Dharma and cosmic unfolding.

One of the most popular Bodhisattvas is Avalokiteshvara, whose image encapsulates the concepts of time, Dharma, and consciousness. Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of compassion. With one thousand eyes and one thousand arms, that is to say with innumerable sight organs by which observation of every aspect of cosmos is perceived and innumerable action appendages from which the cause of a new order of things may appear, Avalokiteshvara exists as the see-er of humankind’s plight, the hearer of the worlds cries, and the pathway out of the Human Predicament. It is no surprise that Avalokiteshvara is often depicted in 33 forms, and in other places with eleven heads on three levels (Leighton 170-171). Eleven, three, 33, are all cosmic numbers describing the relationship between Earth, Moon, and Sun. Thus, Avalokiteshvara is the Bodhisattva of the cosmic Earth in its entirety, constituting all the world ages that will ever unfold. As both a male and female power, this Bodhisattva of compassion also encompasses the entirety of human experience. Avalokiteshvara, while binding himself to material time, has become timeless in his distribution of compassion, aiding in the Dharma of the Earth’s unfolding, which engenders new potentialities for awakening.

Again we see that salvation in the ancient cosmologies is bound up with the idea of compassion. Authentic compassion is the end result of individuation and awakening. To be truly human is to be genuinely compassionate. Even in an age of humankind where the masses declare “God is Dead” with hubris, ironically writing a suicide note from their own diminished, conscious states, things can change rather quickly, as long as compassion is in play. The principle of Avalokiteshvara is woven into the cosmic fabric of time, Dharma, and consciousness and allows for infinite decay because there is always infinite potential and growth. Thus, in whatever wer-auld human beings find themselves, there is always a set of circumstance which allows for personal transcendence–a way out of the circus. Time may very well be a subset of consciousness, and thus always at the service of a new birth.

Works Cited

Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Gods of The Egyptians. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1969.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha. Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1991.

Holy Bible. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Publishing, 1998.

Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Leighton, Taigen Dan. Faces of Compassion: Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and Their Modern Expression. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2003.

Needleman, Jacob. A Sense of the Cosmos: Scientific Knowledge and Spiritual Truth. New York: Monkfish Book Publishing Co., 2003.

Palmer, Spencer J. et. al. Religions of the World: A Latter Day Saint View. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young UP, 1997.

Taye, Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö. Myriad Worlds: Buddhist Cosmology in Abhidharma, Kālacakra and Dzog-chen. New York: Snow Lion Publications, 1995.

Sadakata, Akria. Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins. Tokyo: Kösei Publishing Co., 1999.

Nibely, Hugh. Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 1. Transcripts of lectures presented to an Honors Book of Mormon Class at Brigham Young University, 1988-1990. Provo, Utah: Foundation of Ancient Studies and Mormon Research, 1993.

Sabini, Meredith, ed. The Nature Writings of C. G. Jung. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2005.

Tillich, Paul. The Courage To Be. New Haven: Yale UP, 1952.

Zimmerman, Heinrich. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Posted by john at July 27, 2006 04:33 PM