My own thoughts about Dogen led me to reread the opening chapters of a book by Richard Tarnas, "Cosmos and Psyche". These chapters deal with what has been called the Copernican Revolution, how "mankinds" sense of centrality (along with much else) was displaced along with the earth itself; set adrift, and the "modern mind" begins to form.
Mr Tarnas is quite eloquent and the chapters are very much worth reading. Here are a few excerpts:-
"Another way we might describe this situation would be to say that the modern mind engages the world within an implicit experiential structure of being a subject set apart from, and in some sense over against, an object. The modern world is full of objects, which the human subject confronts and acts upon from its unique position of conscious autonomy. By contrast, the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. In the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects. The primal world is saturated with subjectivity, interiority, intrinsic meanings and purposes."
"Our deepest spiritual and psychological aspirations are fundamentally incoherent with the very nature of the cosmos as revealed by the modern mind. “Not only are we not at the center of the cosmos,” wrote Primo Levi, “but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The universe is strange to us, we are strange in the universe.”
(Just to add, from memory, Richard Tarnas, after the opening chapters, then begins to speak of certain "astrological" notions that I personally found uninteresting - being a Gemini I don't really go for that sort of stuff......
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