/lit/ - Literature

>>20472136
Yep. Interesting to see how we independently arrived at more or less the same conclusions.

If you look at a very uncertain, fantastically extraordinary possibility of something you might call “occult primo-history,” it seems entirely possible that there’s some source, some primordial ur-religious-tradition emanating somewhere from perhaps Central Asia, the Middle East, Tibet, the Himalayas — somewhere in this area. And that some primordial culture and very high esoteric knowledge was dispersed throughout various cultures and religions, which today the interested “Traditionalist,” “occultist,” “Theosophist,” or person with perennialist leanings might look and see as finding these strange similarities between religious schools and traditions which seem to be totally different from an outside perspective and totally dispersed throughout various times and places. Gurdjieff might call it the Sarmoung Brotherhood of Central Asia, being thousands of years old and originating in Babylon, the Theosophists might have recourse to Plato’s myth of Atlantis and bring up the legendary “Mahatmas” to fall back on, something like Buddhas/Avatars/Jain Tirthankars who apparently decided to telepathically commune with the Theosophists and give them these teachings to bring to the West.

But, funnily enough, you can also see it from a totally opposite perspective and have just as valid-seeming an interpretation — a quasi-Jungian, perennialist one that, “These apparently wildly differing people in wildly differing cultures sometimes seem to be talking about some astoundingly similar things, concepts, imagery and symbolism, not necessarily because they were ‘borrowing,’ derived from, or influenced by each other, but because they were tapping into the collective unconscious, which is the source of all archetypes, which are like ideal symbols and story-lines and concepts projected by the collective unconscious as spurs to our healthy individualization and psychological integration.”

And, fascinatingly enough, this is essentially analogous to the practice and concept Tibetan Vajrayana deity yoga from hundreds and hundreds of years ago as described in the Kalacakratantra, in which the deities are seen as aspects of or some higher personification of oneself!

They were “doing” Jung a thousand years ago!

In the Kalacakratantra, you also have the idea of microcosmic and macrocosmic recursion endlessly repeating throughout it — microcosmic processes of and in the body are held to correlate to external macrocosmic processes, historical cycles, yugas, “wheels of time” (what “Kalacakra” actually means — wheel of time).

And in the legendary Emerald Tablet of Hermès Trismegistus, you have the simple phrase, “As it is above, so it is below,” which has been interpreted by Western occultists in a very similar way.

A primordial Atlantean teaching? A Jungian collective unconscious? Both?