Posted September 14, 2013

In south Asian Indian, the letters of their early writing system was called "Deva-Nagiri," the letter-forms of the gods. It's sort of true, in that all forms emerge from pre-form patterns in space that reflect to some degree their essence. Some is chance and the art-forms projected by the early inventors and then elaborated by early calligraphers. Can we make letter-forms interesting.

They Mayans of about 2000 years ago on central American region of the world evolved a sort of picture-sign writing, as did the Egyptians 2500 years earlier than that. This mandala below illustrates how primal forms evolve into more differentiated meaning-symbols and sounds or words. None of this is authentic historically, but it carries the message.
In contemplating primal forms I've noticed that the more lines added so that they make a meaningful symbol, beyond the abstract forms permitted by one to ten strokes, the more they need to cohere into a somewhat anthropomorphic shape. The post-Jungian scholar James Hillman called this tendency of projecting human shapes, faces, intentions on what is by no means human is called "personification."

But what if it's so that in other worlds a plethora of symbols does represent reality better than combinations of our letter-forms? What if there can be levels of nuance and inter-penetration of moods and ideas that transcend the capacity of language to describe it all?

In my fantasy, the Everything-Becoming aspect of God enjoys experimenting with creating new words, concepts, symbols, diagrams, beyond what has been created before, just as this Great Source infuses it all with Love---but not attachment. Some memes, fashions, species, words, beings, just won't last in the competition for endurance humans think of as truth. But is that the only criteria? What if a species that "only" survives for a million years or even only a few thousand or hundred years is still a masterful creation in the cosmos, to be cherished as well as a star that lasts five trillion years. God makes no promises to keep things going eternally, not species, nor mountains, nor planets, nor individual organisms.

Implications? To turn a phrase from the folk song, "On Top of Old Smokey": "Don't place your affections on a green willow tree: For the leaves, they will wither, and the roots, they will die; and you'll all be forsaken and never know why." The "why" here has several interpretations: (1) immature love is even more unstable than mature love; (2) dying is not being forsaken if your identity---your affections---is shifted from self-as-material-being to self as part of the great unfolding, a process that includes a whole mess o' dyin' of the component strutures.

Now to turn to letter-forms: Writing is a peculiar way of externalizing what is internal, and we do that through all manner of symbol creation. This mandala suggests that letter-forms evolve from simple to more complex as the culture evolves. The mandala and the history of writing systems also hints at the sheer aesthetic influence in the process of exuberant all-creation.