I have this teaching I want to communicate, but I'm not sure how to explain it. If you have time, please read this and ask questions to help me figure out how to make it clearer?
We are usually told that, in ancient days, people thought that the earth was at the center of the universe. And that later, it was discovered that was in error, and actually the earth goes around the sun.
Now, it is certainly true that the path the earth traces through space, if you fix the sun as the single unmoving center of the world is a simpler shape than the path the sun traces through space if you fix the earth and let everything else move around it. BUT...
The fact of the matter is that THERE IS NO CENTER. Everything which exists rotates in complicated ways around everything else. But we're all still so wedded to Heliocentrism that it's hard for us to even see what a huge and blinding mistake it is.
The first understanding of the Divine is along a line. You can down, or you can go up. There is Earth, and the Things Above the Earth, and the Things Below the Earth. Up and Down are very different, though. Going down is easy, and going up is hard. The "center" is where I am.
Next, we understand that the earth is round; "down" isn't a direction relative to us, it's "toward the center of the earth". By understanding the earth as a sphere that we live on the outside of, we know that "the center of the world" isn't actually actually in "the world" we live in. Big jump, and a hard one. Remember when you were very little, and you thought people in Australia were upside down? Remember when you were so foolish as to think "north" meant "up"?
But then, we made the move to heliocentrism, the idea that the center of the world wasn't just really far away, it wasn't a thing we could always feel. In the day, we could spot the exact center of things, but by night, we could not. Not just that I'm not the "center of the universe". Not just that the difference between "down" and "up" are completely clear. You can feel where the Sun is, but you can also avoid feeling it.
The mystic power that keeps the Earth in motion around the Sun is THE EXACT SAME POWER that pulls us to the heart of the Earth. When we talk about the power the Earth exerts on us, it is so obvious as to be undeniable. The Sun has far more gravity than the Earth, and the effects of the Sun's gravity are everywhere, they make possible every moment of your existence. And yet, it is so subtle that you forget about it until you stop to think. But still, the Sun is reassuring "real"; it shines on every point on earth. You can see it in the sky, and feel its warmth kiss your skin. It will burn you if you remain too long in its glare, and staring directly at it will make you go blind.
But, the SUN IS NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. That's not because the Sun orbits around the Galactic Center (although it does). It's not because out galaxy is also slowly dancing through the void. It's because the very notion of a "center" is ABSURD. There is not such thing as a center. It's NOT TRUE that down is different than up, it just seems that way because you are small and Earth is big. You pull on her EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT that She pulls on you.
A plane doesn't have a center, a circle does. Only bounded things can have centers (There's a technical caveat here, email me if you want to hear about it) It seems like the universe goes on and one and on forever when you look out into it, but it seems like each of us has a center; that you can only go so deep inside yourself before you reach some kind of singularity. But that's actually nonsense. Just like the happenstance of being smaller than a planet is what leads you into the error of thinking that "up" is different than "down". It's the absurd happenstance of having a body that makes you think that "out" is somehow different than "in".
When we think about Divinity, about Power, and Being, it's easy to think about there being two "kinds" of divinity....the "small" divinity we find inside of ourself, and the "big" divinity that lives.....outside of us...away in the heavens. Those only seem small because you are obsessed with idea of their being a center. But the whole idea of centers is ridiculous. In/Out, Up/Down....the demonization of the cthonic, the disempowerment of the cthonic, the idea that there's a difference between "the god above" and "the god within"....all of those are artifacts of the insistence, not that Man is not the center of the Universe (although that is true). They arise from the illusion that there could even be a center.
People were in some ways mistaken when they believed the Earth as the center of the universe. They are still mistaken when they make the Sun as the center of the universe. They are mistaken when they worship the Creator of All That is as the center of the Universe. They are mistaken when they look for the center of the universe by going inside of themselves. The whole notion of centricity is bullshit. The points of view that create elliptical paths are not truer than the ones that create spiraling ones. They are sometimes more useful for certain operations. They let us see a bigger picture. But no matter how big you make God, he is still too small. As long as you're looking for a center, you are no longer observing the way that things actually are, you are making a model of the world to help other people understand it. And that is good and noble work, because one of those people will eventually see further than you can by standing on your shoulders. BUT, don't ever imagine that anything you can see from where you are is anything even near to everything that is. The world is so much weirder than any model you can possibly imagine right now. ALL of science is ALWAYS WRONG, because science is the literal, actual process of falsifying things.
Technical jargon: Because Truth, necessary truth, is necessarily incorrigible, science cannot possibly help you say anything at all about Truth, it can ONLY tell you what's false. There are things in the world that will never be understood, but the only way to see them is to try and understand them as best as you can, and fail, painfully, shamefully, and absurdly, forever. You will never find the center. You will never escape from it's pull. There is no fucking center.
