By: Ranilo Abando (Manila, October 20, 2020) ***
The ancient Mesopotamian clay tablet above depicts an enigmatic metaphorical scene. At the middle of the scene is the Tree of Life. Some imaginative writers think that it represents human DNA genetic material being modified by alien gods they call Anunnaki. Personally, I do not subscribe to such theory, as the figure at the center is unmistakably the Tree of Life which I have thoroughly discussed in my previous posts. Palm fronds sprout at the top of the trunk, with undulating branches at the sides and top ending in palmettes. There seems to be a dividing mark at the center of the trunk, separating the trunk into two sections. A similar dividing mark separates the trunk from the unfolded fronds at the top.
At the top of the tree is a winged solar disk, a symbol often used in the ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Persian civilizations. In the above case, it is the sun disk of the god Shamash. Surrounding the tree are four gods, two god-kings near it and two outermost gods with wings that are obviously symbolic of something. Some other similar depictions in Mesopotamian cylinder seals show these two winged gods as bird-headed. Each of the two winged gods holds in his raised hand what seem to be pine cones (fruits of the pine tree) in a picking or offering position. The other hand holds a bucket, a symbol found in other archeological sites, such as in Latin America and Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.
My interpretation of the symbolism in the above scene is the following:
The Tree of Life depicted in the Mesopotamian tablet represents the human mind column, as I have discussed in previous posts. The two sections of the trunk represent the lower mind and the higher mind. The fronds at the top of the trunk symbolically unfolds into the realm where a person’s main seat of consciousness permanently dwells, – the “spiritual realm”. The winged solar disk symbolizes the main seat of consciousness of each of us and it sits on top of the Tree of Life.
The god-kings and the bird-gods represent the highly evolved beings who were born in the past to teach humanity about the knowledge and arts of civilization. The bird-gods hold pine cones – the fruits of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” which is the higher aspect of the tree of life – our higher mind. The pine cones symbolize knowledge that they brought down from the higher mind (upper part of the tree of life). They brought down the pine cones inside the “buckets” in order to give them to humanity as gift, as we know buckets are used for carrying things. It simply means that those beings carried with them the memories of higher knowledge even after being born in this physical reality. The set of wings they possess represent their highly evolved higher mind.
It must have been a big sacrifice for those beings. They were already enjoying the rules-based celestial realities built by the higher mind, away from the pain and suffering associated with this virtual physical reality built by the lower mind. The pain and suffering here are associated with the high chaos content of the lower mind, with the consequent tendency of physical forms to deteriorate (Second Law of Thermodynamics), leading to the need for constant labor, work, and thinking just to maintain order and favorable environments for the mind to develop. In their home celestial realities, these physical rules are not applicable, as their reality world is likely more fluid, time is not necessarily one-directional, and degeneration of matter and energy is likely not a problem there.
An ordinary human seat of consciousness, when it reaches the lower portion of his higher mind after physical death, normally does not have a sufficiently developed higher mind that will allow it to function in a rules-based celestial virtual reality like those evolved beings I mentioned. So instead, the “dreamweaver” aspect of the mind of such an ordinary person awakens in the lower zone of his higher mind and begins weaving a prolonged dream of blissful paradise. This paradise is woven from fragments of his own memories collected from his past life in the physical world. All dreams that one dares to dream really do come true there. But because this dream reality is not rules-based, the thinker aspect of his mind which he carried up there remains in shut-down mode, as his unevolved higher mind cannot build any of the rules-based realities available in that zone. The fluid “thinker” aspect of the mind that we use here in the virtual physical reality is actually not part of the rigid lower mind, but rather, it is a limited fragment of the higher mind that we carried down with us in order to aid us in navigating these depths of the lower mind.
The “thinker” fragment that was brought down into the interior of the human lower mind is metaphorically represented in ancient Greece as Pegasus, the mythical winged white horse which helped heroes, such as Perseus and Bellerophon (who all metaphorically represent the journeying human spirit), to defeat monsters which in turn metaphorically represent the “chaos” and “beast” elements of the human lower mind. The wings and whiteness of Pegasus symbolize the high “spirit matter” content of the “thinker” fragment, which is similar to the composition of the higher mind where it originally came from. The horse form represents the basic concept that the various aspects and parts of the human mind are vehicles of its seat of consciousness, and is similar in meaning to the metaphor of the four horses of the Apocalypse.
With this carried “thinker” fragment remaining in shut-down mode, the seat of consciousness of a departed ordinary person that has reached the lower zone of his higher mind can only passively observe and experience the blissful environment of the dreamworld paradise created by the “dreamweaver” aspect of his own higher mind. Well, until his human seat of consciousness begins to crave for a better learning environment and is ready to go down again to the depths of his lower mind in order to start another one of those unpleasant cycles of virtual physical life.
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(Thanks to pixabay.com for the photo above of the ancient Mesopotamian tablet)