Mythopoetics

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....

  Although the sentences produced by an AI LLM are generated probabilistically and "synaptic reinforcements" lead to the construction of sentences that are linked together with meaning, the problem posed by Tarski's theorem does not disappear in an LLM. Never mind the fact that increasingly powerful models can reproduce "quadrillions" of meaningful and intelligent communications. That meaning is assigned to the machine by humans, and all the intelligence we grant to the machine is merely an assignment of our sense of what intelligence is. The human lifeworld (Lebenswelt) is the semantic system external to the AI, just as the organic life process in the earth's environment (Unterlebenswelt) is the semantic system external to humans. AI objects are abstract symbolic objects (Überlebenswelt) that, stripped of their human systemic referent, cannot polarize their linguistic predicates in the dualistic terms required by any language linked to life experience. AI c...

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...

  Los rituales humanos hunden sus raíces en el comportamiento animal, y la pauta animal lo hace en la necesidad de repetición de los organismos vivos, en la estructura cíclica de las acciones fisiológicas. A nivel humano, la conducta ritual conlleva una acotación del espacio y del tiempo, así como una significación distinta de ambos con respecto a la de los espacios y tiempos de la experiencia cotidiana. Ya desde las ceremonias rituales de las sociedades frías, observamos el cuidado y minuciosidad del chamán para determinar con precisión los espacios, los tiempos y los elementos que intervienen en el rito. El espacio sagrado delimita el mundo, no sólo como lugar de la acción, sino el ámbito de significado de las cosas contenidas en ese espacio. Es un espacio cargado de significado: hay un orden en las cosas. El tiempo mismo adquiere su sentido en relación a este orden de las cosas, y cierra cíclicamente el espacio en el “tempo" del rito, un tempo que es símbolo del tempo del Mundo...

 From the point of view of human psychological transpersonality, we are the generations of the future. Our human lineage is a continuum of soul expressions of the Dance of the Cosmos. Passing the torch of the Sacred Fire is like making marks on the path so that we can see them and remember them, already being others, in times that today we consider future, but that are part of this same Trikala, this sphere of temporality in which our civilization moves, recreating the meanings of the past and the future. The general mythopoetic process of our humanity walked an ascending line of symbolization that has followed the paths of the Anima Mundi, the King-God, the Universal Law, and the Human Law. This last mythopoetic stage has never been fully achieved. We have identified the human with a specific way of thinking that has been declared absolute by ourselves: rationality. First, as philosophical rationality and then as technical rationality, to express the forms of control of Nature. Hu...

  Desde el punto de vista de la transpersonalidad psicológica humana, nosotros mismos somos las generaciones del futuro. Nuestro linaje humano es un continuo de expresiones anímicas de la Danza del Cosmos. Pasar la antorcha del Fuego Sagrado es como hacer marcas en el camino para que podamos verlas y recordar, ya siendo otros, en tiempos que hoy consideramos futuro, pero que son parte de este mismo Trikala, esta esfera de temporalidad en la que se mueve nuestra civilización, recreadora de los significados del pasado y del futuro. El proceso general mitopoético de nuestra humanidad ha seguido una línea ascendente de simbolización que ha recorrido los caminos del Anima Mundi, el Rey-Dios, la Ley Universal y la Ley Humana. Este último estadio mitopoético no ha sido realizado nunca de manera completa. Hemos identificado el humano con una forma específica de pensar que ha sido declarada absoluta por nosotros mismos: la racionalidad. Primero como racionalidad filosófica y después como ra...

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I will post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives we humans have developed over the years, throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically about our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis of soci...

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology...

  Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria. Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mira...