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From 'The Origins of Man and the Universe' by Barry Long The themes of this book are so extraordinary, complex, interwoven and far-reaching that an extract cannot be representative. Nevertheless, here are three passages about 'The Myth That Came To Life'. The Solar System is part of the myth of the northern constellation, Draco, the dragon or serpent . . . First, let me explain the character of myth. Myth is the only means at our disposal to describe the reality behind human existence. It is the language, the handwriting, of the spirit, conveying the significance of things perceived; the otherwise untellable truth behind the fragmented physical appearance of things. So in reading what follows it is necessary to 'look through' the actual appearance of the part of the heavens I will be describing and to try to relate to the supporting structure of myth or truth behind it. This is what the ancients managed to do. They did not invent the myths. The myth, or truth, was already there, as it is at this moment. It would be completely wrong to regard the Draconic Myth as imaginative fiction. This myth - which necessarily will be seen to touch upon myths of all ages, in all places - is nearer to the whole truth, the truth, than any statement that can be made from sense-perceived experience. The solar system is part of the myth I call The Draconic Transverse. As every myth must have its physical symbol, its appearance in the world, The Draconic Transverse is represented by a gigantic sphere in space, thousands of cubic light years in volume, with the constellation Draco at its north pole. The physical extent of The Draconic Transverse is so enormous that its main stars as seen from the earth are regarded as fixed ‹ never-moving. As far as the tiny earth within it is concerned, The Draconic Transverse represents our field of reality, the world of myth. We can only observe and know the rest of the universe through it. The rest of the universe can have little reality for us until we at least have begun to understand the draconic mystery or truth which, as I shall show, is so intimate to our earthly existence. The Draconic Transverse determines how we exist, evolve, perceive, live and die to exist again. At this stage of evolution we cannot go beyond it except as it, our reality, permits. from pp173-5 • The beginning of the universe and man is not some time in the past. It is now, this moment, which is demonstrably the same now as always. What stops us from realising this is that we regard what happens as the only important consideration and dismiss entirely the continuous moment it all happens in. If we could give equal cognisance to both we would immediately perceive the truth of now, man and the universe. But as it is, we are distracted from the truth by perceived events which immediately become for us fixations of the past. Each of us measures his life by those events, and so we live mostly in that past. Actually, all we are doing with the years of our lives is measuring the past, the interval we have left behind, our distance from our assumed beginning, our birthdate. Science tries to do the same thing with the Big Bang theory by giving a date and start to the universe. But both beginnings are illusory. Reality is neither past nor eventual; it is now. Now is the original and only state of things. Nothing ever has happened or can happen outside of now. Although self-evident, the significance of this is extremely difficult to concede. We are involuntarily, unconsciously terrified of it for it means giving up the past and seems to predicate losing all of the established foundations from which we gain our psychological sense of security. Through the feeling of having been, we get the feeling of being someone, something. It is a substitute for being now. It is comforting, reassuring almost to the point of necessity for most of us; but it is not the truth. To be someone or something at any time requires living in the past. To be able to perceive the beginning of the universe and oneself as now is the beginning of immortality in the individual. To cling to any other beginning in the face of the real is for the individual to continue to calculate his own inevitable and equally unreal death. Certainly, each of us was born as a life-form on earth. But that proves nothing apart from the fact that each of us was born as a body. To regard the birth of any form as a beginning is totally presumptuous. The question is, can the reader recall any time when he was not? The answer is no. But if I cannot remember, it is an absurdity to assume that there has been a time when I was not what I am now. This is the assumption of death of which most of us are guilty. Our delusions change as our past grows, but we do not. No man feels he is 40, 50, 60, 70, or any age. He may feel pain and the restriction of the body - his past - but the man, the pastless I in him, never feels any older. However old, the man is ageless. I am not an event: not a body, a birth certificate, a memory or a bathroom mirror which by reflection on the past that is my body, reveals to it its age, past or mortality. That body and all that helps to measure it by reflection and memory will die. But I cannot - any more than my birth can be my beginning. To summarise: We are beings of now, as the universe is the expression of now. As part of the universe we cannot be separate from it, except through the illusion of past created by our evolving earth-intelligence. In truth there is no time but now. Now is exactly the same instant that the intellect formed in the mind and the universe began. In truth nothing has changed, nothing ever will. The thing that does change and therefore is evolutionary, or at any moment not yet itself, is intelligence. Intelligence invented interval, the past and the Big Bang theory because it is not yet up to living in the now. I am now proposing that it is possible for man to 'jump' his own time of past and interval and to realise for himself that eternal moment in which he and the universe are as they always have been . . . from pp 198-200 • The mythic universe is behind the universe we see with our senses. It is also behind our concepts of the universe and the innumerable scientific theories about it. In other words, the mythic universe is behind the human mind and is the source of all existence. Only myth can describe what is behind the human mind. Science has no myth so science cannot do it. Religious myth has endeavoured to. So have the myths of the ancients and the primitives. Each has told its story of what's behind the universe. And the stories are as numerous as the stars in the sky. That's because, in the mythic universe behind what we see, every star represents an idea in the mind of the Great Being - God . . . Such talk is mythic. The scientific mind cannot stomach it. But to the man behind the scientific mind, and the man behind the human mind, such mythic talk can have a strange uplifting quality - uplifting of course towards the most high, the absolute God. Where else is there to go in a life that never ends? Only in the scientific mind and human mind does life end and therefore have no enduring purpose. Myth has no before or after, no past, no future. We can never establish to the satisfaction of our rational minds that myth is true or real; we can only believe it or not believe it. The contemporary demonstration of myth in action is the appearance of UFOs - Unidentified Flying Objects. UFOs do not come from the outer universe as is popularly believed; they come from within - from the mythic universe. At a speed far in excess of the calculated speed of light, they emerge from the depths of the universal mind, enter the Draconic Transverse, then the solar and terrestrial minds and finally sensory existence. Here, due to the resistance of the past, their speed is vastly reduced; as is their ability to stay visible for long. Being mythic, meaning really non-existent, they have to consume the immediate past around them to exist. As soon as this is exhausted they vanish. from pp 259-60 © Barry Long |
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| © The Barry Long Trust |