Have you ever found it difficult to make sense of ancient mythology or religious parables? Maybe you always had a lingering intuition that there was something more to it, but could never quite put your finger on it.

In our modern culture, the predominant, institutionalized association of the word mythology is a falsehood or fiction. Yet our ancient ancestors, some of whom we remember and consider very wise people, spent a significant amount of attention and time developing these stories, memorizing them, and passing them down to us.

Why?

Could it be that these stories are trying to convey deep, essential truths about our nature, our history, and the sense and aim of our existence?

And if that is the case, why do our institutions in academia, government, the media and certain religions prefer literal interpretations of these stories that minimize their intended purpose?

Perhaps the stories themselves are not really enigmatic and the problem really lies with the receiver. For example, in the Gospels, the Kingdom of Heaven is spoken about as something that is at hand or near, but requires a change in us to see it.

Normal Communication

In the chapter called Religion in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G.I. Gurdjieff (the 20th century teacher of a path of human development called The Work) through his main character Beelzebub, explains how we, modern humans, do not consider that our ancient ancestors perceived and thought differently than we do.

He emphasizes that their minds still functioned ‘normally,’ that the transmission of ideas and thoughts was in consequence still allegorical, and that allegorical teachings were used to explain metaphysical and spiritual truths by referring to the understanding of similar everyday acts which people were already familiar with.

It was absolutely critical that shared language was not just about the words spoken, but that the underlying form or image representing the words was also mutually understood. The ancient teachings transmitted those truths through concrete words and images, expecting the hearer (since these were almost always oral teachings) to be able to discern the analogical relationships between the concrete idea that most people would be familiar with (farming for example) and the abstract principle (cultivating one’s soul).

Take Jesus’s Parable of the Sower as an example, a parable that explains this method of transmitting knowledge. The parable describes a man who goes out to sow seed. Some fall by the wayside, which birds come and devour. Some fall on stony places where they didn’t have enough soil and immediately spring up, but are scorched by the sun because they have no roots. Some fall among thorns, which spring up and choke them before they can grow. But some fall on good ground and yield crops thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and a hundredfold the original seed.

This parable is teaching us about our inner state of attention in the moment we are perceiving higher teachings.

Jesus later explains this through the prophecy of Ishaiah:

“Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,

And seeing you will see and not perceive;

For the hearts of this people have grown dull.

Their ears are hard of hearing,

And their eyes they have closed,

Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,

Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,

So that I should heal them.

- Mt 13:14-15

Modern Equivalents

The late John Anthony West rightly pointed out that the closest thing we have to this kind of communication in the modern world is the political cartoon. A single image can convey a thousand words and any person’s ability to understand the meaning depends on the state of their own understanding derived from their experience.

Mr. Anthony West said that in the 1990s. If you’re under the age of 30, you realize that this insight of his applies to memes. A powerful, insightful meme hits hard and instantly resonates in us because it communicates with inner psychic faculties that move faster than thought. Explaining a meme to someone is a lot like trying to explain an inside joke.

This form of communication is in contrast to the long chains of descriptive words (verbal or written) that we use to communicate (like I’m doing in this post).

We Have Three Brains

If you want to understand Gurdjieff’s point that allegorical communication is actually ‘normal’ (at least for human inner development) and that our ancient ancestors perceived and communicated differently than us, in the same way that you understand a powerful meme, you first need to become aware of his three-brained model of the human psyche.

According to Gurdjieff, human beings have three brains: thinking, feeling, and moving/instinctive. Each of these brains serves a particular purpose and needs to work in harmony with the other two in order for us to fulfill our potential as adults.

When you perceive anything, your head, your heart, and your gut are all giving their hot take on what is going on according to each of their own interests. But if you’re like me, then sometimes it can feel like the signals coming from them are a cacophony of sounds orchestrated by a madman. My head is telling me that I should do something, my heart is telling me to avoid it, and my body just wants to lay down and eat a cheeseburger while doom scrolling.

According to Gurdjieff, however, we can really only begin to understand anything when all three brains are fully aligned and triangulating reality.

And his diagnosis for what has gone wrong in us modern humans is that due to a mix of factors including biology, heredity, and the abnormal education we receive from the institutions and social relationships he calls the ‘abnormal conditions of ordinary being existence,’ our brains and our sense of self begin to become disconnected.

As one of my teachers once said, “the thinking is supposed to enlighten the feelings and the feelings are supposed to warm the thought.”

Without that inner relationship between those two functions and their unison in communicating with the body, our thinking will become sequential and one-dimensional: an automatic flow of (usually verbal) associations that we take to be real thinking including repeating images, songs, things your 3rd grade teacher once said to you, concerns of yesterday, hopes of tomorrow, etc. It’s something that you’ve probably heard about under some name like ‘the monkey mind,’ which many people feel the need to escape from.

The Absurdity of Literal Interpretations

The unfortunate result for us when we’re stuck in this disconnected state is that we end up interpreting the ancient teachings literally. As in, we place more attention on the concrete aspects of these stories than their deeper, inner meaning. It would be like interpreting Jesus’s parable of the sower as practical farming advice.

Some of these stories are so absurd in the literal sense that even academics can’t help but question why they exist, like the famous Battle of Kadesh found all over Ancient Egyptian temples that depicts the Pharaoh single-handedly defeating all of his enemies. Surely the king could not have defeated all his enemies by himself. Our so-called ‘experts’ would say that this story is simply political propaganda used to glorify the Pharaoh and convince the common people of his power and glory in order to justify taxing them or something like that.

Seen through the eyes of the ancients, the Pharaoh or King represents the prototype of humanity, the idealized, divinized man. Adam before the fall and the state to which we can return through conscious inner work on ourselves. His enemies represent the worldly forces of chaos, destruction, entropy. His glorious victory is the conquering of what is Divine and immortal in us over what is temporal and disorderly. This is the victory of Horus over Seth symbolized through the Pharaoh, the head of his civilization and the leaven of his people.

According to Gurdjief, we end up with a “nonsensical literal” interpretation of these ancient stories when we fail to fulfill what he calls being-Partkdolg-duty or conscious labors and intentional suffering. At a basic and simplistic level, this is the inner effort required to pay attention and unify the activity of all three of your brains. Without this inner effort, we lose the capacity for what he calls being-pondering, which is necessary for us to make sense of such stories because grasping their inner meaning requires us to both weigh, confront, and compare what is being said with our own experience.

But you don’t need to take Gurdjieff’s word for it. We can go to an older story, one you’re likely familiar with, and see evidence for a similar understanding of our condition.

Adam and Eve

The story of Adam and Eve is one of the most well-known stories on Earth, yet in many places, it is taught in a way that often creates more shame and misunderstanding than genuine insight into our human nature.

The basic story goes like this:

1. God creates Adam as the first man.

2. God tells Adam that he can eat from all the beautiful trees in the Garden of Eden except from the tree in the middle, the Tree of the Perceiving/Knowing of the knowledge of good and evil. He warns Adam that if he does, he will die by death.

3. Putting Adam into a trance, God creates Eve, to be his companion, from one of Adam’s ribs.

4. Adam and Eve are alone together in the Garden of Eden with all the plant and animal life, including a cunning serpent.

5. Adam disappears from the picture, and Eve is approached by the serpent who contradicts God’s commandment and tempts Eve. He tells her that she and Adam will not die and that God doesn’t want them to eat from the tree because when they do, they will be like gods and know good and evil.

6. Eve sees that the tree is “good for food,” “pleasant to the eyes,” and “beautiful to contemplate.” Giving in to the serpent’s suggestions, she eats the fruit. She then convinces Adam to partake.

7. Their eyes are opened, they feel shame because they are naked, so they cover themselves with fig leaves.

8. Some time later, God’s voice is heard in the Garden, and Adam and Eve hide. God asks Adam where he is, and Adam explains that he is hiding because he is naked. God realizes that they have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and banishes them from the Garden of Eden, lest they eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.

If we step back and look at this story through the eyes of the ancients, we see relationships. They are between God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent.

Since all of these stories are trying to tell us something about ourselves, and we are supposed to reflect on that aspect, we can look at the inner corollary of these relationships.

We can use Gurdjieff’s understanding of the human psyche to interpret this story from a new perspective:

• Adam = the active part of our head that can observe and be aware

• Eve = the emotional and feeling part

• Serpent = the body and its various impulses

• God = our connection to Conscience and Objective Morality

Notice that Adam is absent in the interaction between Eve and the serpent. He isn’t paying attention.

In his absence, the serpent makes suggestions to Eve, and her attention is hooked onto ‘good for food,’ ‘pleasant to the eyes,’ and ‘beautiful to contemplate.’ In other words, losing perspective, her understanding of the essential nature of the fruit is topsy turvy, perceiving only its physical appearance and worldly aspects.

We aren’t told much about the interaction between Adam and Eve when Adam returns, aside from learning that Eve gives the fruit to Adam and Adam eats it. Note that Adam was put into a trance when Eve was created and is seemingly returned to such a trance-like state in this moment, for he also loses perspective and cuts himself off from God’s Word.

This disconnection is the real fall of man. It’s like when your head checks out while you’re in class and you start day dreaming about that crush of yours only to wake up at some point and realize that you left your tender heart alone with your sleeping body which is now drooling all over your desk right in front of the said crush. Overwhelmed by a feeling of shame, you quickly gather yourself together and pretend it didn’t happen.

It is through inattentiveness and disconnection that we actually stray from the path or miss our mark (the literal meaning of the Greek word αμαρτία that we translate to sin in English).

This state of disconnection from God that Adam and Eve experience is repeated in our own inner disconnected psychic state that Gurdjieff points out is the reason that we fail to understand the inner meaning of the ancient teachings. The head is off doing its analysis while the heart, distracted by the body’s needs, is more concerned with what we’re going to eat for lunch or what our colleagues will say about our off the beaten path ideas.

And it is also in this state that our attention is pulled in many different directions because there is no inner unity or cooperation within the psyche. Where our attention goes, our life goes. Our ancient ancestors understood this, and they were trying to provide us a warning, so that we could hear the inner call back to the Creator, symbolized by the Tree of Life, that was at the essence of their mythological teachings.

Eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge made us like gods, different from the other animals, but it didn’t make us divine beings. In our disconnected and inattentive state, we became fascinated by good and evil, i.e. the polarities manifest in our world of appearances.

Instead of recognizing the wealth of abundance in their inner connection to God, Adam and Eve fall into a kind of vanity about appearing physically naked. And in the fear of their own shame, they try to hide themselves.

Likewise, our attention becomes fixated on and we are satisfied with dead-end descriptions of the world, rather than with their living essence, and as a result, we are unable to reconcile our personal and collective contradictions.

Thus, we interpret the food for thought that was left to us by our ancestors who understood our condition intuitively, and were trying to shepherd us through our next stage of development, either as children’s fairytales or literal absurdities.

And in this light it is worth pondering Christ’s response to Satan’s first temptation after fasting for forty days in the wilderness:

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” Mt 4:4

If any of this resonates with you and you would like to chat, send me a message at dino@theseekersoftruth.com

You don’t need to venture out too far to see that we live in interesting, but turbulent and nearly unhinged times.

This is evident on social media, in the news, in our art and architecture, and in our leadership. Technology, news cycles, and social media move at breakneck paces, but we’re all left wondering, ‘what for?’

It doesn’t seem like anyone has an answer to that question because our civilization lacks a telos or aim, which means we are, by definition, aimless.

Modern humanity is missing its inner compass and internal mooring because it lacks the mythology, institutions, rituals, and quality of human leadership necessary to serve as the living examples of transcendent ideals; the information absolutely essential for any developing human being to sense and feel that they can be much more than they are because there is living proof of that miracle around them.

We fool ourselves into thinking that our exciting new technologies will solve all our problems or that the next election cycle will resolve our existential angst. We measure ‘progress’ with quantitative metrics like real GDP per capita and other metrics of external wealth.

Yet it seems obvious to any sane-thinking person that we don’t collectively or individually incarnate the wisdom necessary to use the technology and wealth that we currently have, let alone the powerful technologies our leaders predict we’ll have tomorrow.

I think we once embodied that wisdom, but it was lost to cataclysm, war, revolution, forgetfulness, and distraction. The line was broken, but we can dig into our past and reclaim it.

How can we do that?

It begins with humility through some realizations:

• Why do I think I’m so ‘progressed’ and ‘advanced?’ Is it just because I live in the 21st century and I can look up any so-called ‘fact’ with ChatGPT?

• Aren’t Homo sapiens not really anatomically different today than they were 100,000 years ago?

• Wasn’t the ‘content’ that was passed down by the ancient world from generation to generation through mythology, art, architecture, etc. created by sages and wise people, like Pythagoras, Socrates, Ibn Arabi and plenty of more people I haven’t heard of?

• The further back we go, communication about abstract metaphysical truths tends to be symbolic, allegorical and catered to the particular mindset of humanity at that time. Didn’t Jesus teach in parables?

• To understand that content, don’t we need to perceive the world through the eyes and ears of the people who produced it?

• Who am I to judge otherwise?

We’ll be examining these questions, the frame of perception of the ancients, and much more along the way in order to understand the past and relate it to our present and to the future, not in longing for a bygone era, but to remember what was lost and reclaim the glory deserving of a creature made ‘in the image of God.’

I think it’s our duty and imperative to do so because civilization requires a hierarchy of motivations to properly function in order with cosmic harmony. What motivations we act on are what we value.

All past sages and wise people understood that a civilization needed to nurture and cultivate the highest impulses for its people to fulfill their spiritual potential.

We can’t change the world, but we can start with ourselves.

Answers and help exist if you know where to direct your attention.

You can find guidance in many places, like the Gospels: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all else will be added to you.” Mt 6:33

And if Jesus isn’t your thing, the spiritual sage Snoop Dogg once said, “If you stop at general math, you’re only going to make general math money.”

And if I have any useful insights or perspectives along the way, it is because I have received an inordinate amount of help outside of myself; from men I never personally knew like Gurdjieff, Schwaller de Lubicz, John Anthony West and from personal family, friends, and mentors who will go unnamed, but know who they are.

May your inner sun grow ever larger.

- Dino

Winter Solstice 2025