Constellations and the human mind (as above, so below)

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⚘ Branch thought from: Creating cultural resources against reality’s impermanence – Waterways for flooding states of mind

⚘Branches: Metaphors are keys into mind territories

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“That which is Below is like that which is Above

and that which is Above is like that which is Below

to do the miracles of the Only Thing.” 

Emerald Tablet, verse 2, late 8th–early 9th century CE), Isaac Newton’s translation (c.1680).

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Like so much in life, constellations are projections of the psyche. The psyche seeks to know itself, so it looks for shapes that somehow correspond to it and allow it to observe itself. Because the overactive mind is ethereal, slippery, protean liquid. It needs to clamp itself upon the physical in order to maintain some kind of constancy and decelerate the time and hypersensitivity that its thoughts are commonly subjected to.

And perhaps we are vessels of the universe projecting its inner world onto something, trying to understand itself.

The starry sky is the first canvas. But it is not a blank canvas, a tabula rasa, nor a grid. It is rather an infinite web.

All in the world is an anchor for our liquid minds. And our thoughts are toys to the world, for all things in the world bestowed with a certain permanence (and some things even if not solid anymore have left their mark in our minds. It’s as if they were engraved into it, just like the silhouettes of constellations look engraved into the sky to those who know them).

And thoughts without these grounding rules, these seeding structures, are powerless. They hopelessly dissolve in their transience. And in their formlessness, their flimsy boundaries falling short of defining something endurable. They try to pin themselves to the mind’s liquid background, inevitable swept along by the fickle ties of our consciousness.

The anchoring rules that the concrete thing with its structure (like the star nodes populating the starry sky) establish do not limit, but scoop thoughts up from the depths of the fluid mind sea to the surface. It manifests them in a durable form, like a viscous entity sticking into and moulding itself to the object we used to scoop it up from the water. It is never the ultimate definitive form, because what makes the mind so powerful and limitless yet untameable is its oceanlike quality: impossibly deep and vast, yet stormy and ever-changing. Thoughts are transient shapeless things, dissolving and mixing amongst each other like currents underwater until they come in contact with a solid object.

And like alchemical transmutation they react to the object’s nature and its structure and thus obtain the stable shell that allows them to manifest in the world as thoughts, concepts, groups of interconnected thoughts with some hope of coherence. The shell in a way animates the ghost, and the ghost brings the shell a particular radiance: who can deny that the presence of constellations with all their sacred and beautiful associations do not bring a particular radiance to the night sky?

So there is no real delineation that separates thought and object: the thought conditions the object and the object manifests the thought. Objects are not vessels that are merely “objectively” defined by physical properties and functions upon which we impose arbitrary meaning according to what symbols we want to attach to them. This is perhaps a reason why objects affect us subconsciously, why aesthetic experience and the nature of the arrangements of objects (including all things in the world, even natural things and abstract things) are fundamental to our experience of being a thinking and perceiving being in the world.

Music is the perfect example: a piece of music always begins with a motif. It needs that primary moving force to which the next moments of the piece will react to and thus make sense within the progression of the piece. One motif repeats a few times, then another enters to create contrast and tension and create expectations “will the first motif return? Where did that beautiful musical phrase go? When is it returning?” and then the first motif returns with variations, more powerful than ever.

Our minds (actually it would be more accurate to say our whole embodied being-ness) need that same prime moving, seeding element, and solely our minds and their force of will cannot do this. They consistently fail to tame its magnificent yet terrible oceanlike tide. We find this solid grounding somewhere else, in things that seem arbitrary but they are actually structuring a certain motif, a certain identity to what we think and how we think (think of the name “Beatles”: it seems almost like an accidental slip that carried on as a residue as the band evolved, but then it became part of its identity. The same happened later with their record label called “Apple”. Even though an apple seems arbitrary, it is that structuring first motif from which the idea of their company could grow. It was the trellis to the company’s vine. And both are equally as interesting.

But enough digressions. Objects are ideas and ideas are object. The starry sky is not a blank canvas; some constellations are almost unavoidable for the naked eye such as Orion’s Belt. Even though this form has taken different meanings across cultures, its structure remains the same, as does its quality as being an unattainable, awe-inducing celestial body. These inherent characteristics of the thing that Orion’s Belt points at, are not empty vessels for arbitrary meaning. Yet at the same time, they will never determine the full nature nor potential meaning that these enduring qualities can scoop up from the deep vast ocean of the human mind.

The idea of a subject giving meaning to a meaningless object is not a universal truth, it is simply a motif itself: as above, so below.

Arthur Rimbaud, 1872.

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