Nations, fundamentally, experience the basic pattern of history only once. That is to say that a nation is born, grows to maturity and then dies. Since it only experiences the topography of history once it is fundamentally unable to learn how to navigate this topography. The nation does not live for long enough to understand how history works. It does not see enough of the pattern of history to be able to understand that it lives within this pattern. The Nations of antiquity were generally completely ignorant of the historical dimension. The bulk of hunter-gatherer mythologies construct the nation as having emerged directly from the dreamtime. Their ancestors were the original children of the gods themselves. And this basic conception does not change as mankind entered the era of the great civilizations. In the land of Egypt the orignial humans worshipped Ra and Osiris as do humans now. The nation and its state always existed. And thus within the very symbol set of the nation is an ignorance of the dynamic nature of history. There is a fundamental ignorance of the evolutionary process by which nations are born, grow and change. It is as though the nation perceives itself to be the largest pattern within the existence of the historical sphere, and ignorant that it is but a fragment of the much larger pattern that governs the entire historical sphere. The gods, the ultimate symbols of the nation, are believed to be eternal. For a nation to learn from history it must become aware of history and that awareness of history must be present within its symbol set. For a nation to be aware of history it must be fundamentally and at its core aware that the landscape of history is governed by dynamic and evolutionary pattern. The nation must be aware that it merely operates over this pattern and that other nations too occupy this space. The Jewish nation, born as it was within the catastrophe of Egypt’s destruction, became fundamentally aware of history. Indeed the first commandment frames the deity entirely in historical terms. “I am the god who took you out of Egypt.” I am the god of historical processes. I am the god of the social systems and I am the god that changes the social systems. I am not merely the god of history but I am history itself. I am the pattern, or the intelligence, that governs the historical dimension.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 23:58:17 +0000
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