Is the concept of human rights rooted in reality, or is it merely a convenient fiction, much like the whole matrix of the legal system could be seen as a mere human invention?

Are human rights just an ideological construction, a beautiful lie which is, however, fundamentally beyond any possibility of a satisfactory realization, or are human rights in some sense real, because, after all, what could be more natural than the basic rights of real human beings?

The debate also concerns questions like whether it is beneficial to protect the dignity of all human beings under all circumstances in the absolute sense – which absolute conception implies that human dignity is seen as the highest value that must be upheld over any and all other values and benefits – or whether to assume the relative conception of human dignity, according to which human dignity stands as an equal member of an ensemble of other values that can be measured with each other. Thus the other values could potentially take precedence over the dignity of an individual, diminishing its protection, or even removing it altogether, should this course of action be justified by rational discourse.

Various states and governments differ in their understanding of human dignity, but the internationalization of human affairs makes this status quo impossible to sustain.

It is no wonder that the topic of human dignity rose to prominence after the Second World War, and that it is Germany which has established the absolute conception of human dignity as one of the foundation principles for its Basic Law (constitution). In modern Germany, human dignity is seen as an immutable super-law, derived from the nature of the human being and connected to the central status of the human being within any legal system.

Nowadays, this conception is becoming a minority position, having to face many a controversy and assault, as modern man has for a long time lived in a state of an apparent peace. There is no such a thing as a stable legal and philosophical opinion on this issue. We however dare to point out that behind this discourse lies an important philosophical matter, namely the urgent question: “Who is the human being?”

We could also add to this in a more topical manner:

Who is the modern human being?

We can conceptualize the modern man as a cultivated, subtle being, a loving being, a dutiful citizen, gifted with much knowledge and a plethora of skills and abilities to influence the world around him or herself.

But is that all? Is this culture the same as human nature, or is it only a solidified crust covering and, yes, hiding the nature of the human being, having no real power to change the human nature itself?

There are some who have seen through the outer layers of culture. Many a modern human being can experience in his or her personal life the acute bondage to the same old urges and desires. The human being is still a slave to the instincts: to continue living, to possess things, to have power and influence and the sexual urge, to name but a few.

The consciousness of the modern man or woman is being broadened by the experiences with communication and social networks, and the nerves are under constant tension, stretched taut like a rubber band by all the stresses and pressures of the modern, fast-paced, – race around the clock – rhythm of life.

Is then the modern human being more of a languid and deluded weakling than a truly sentient being? Where have the depth and fulfillment disappeared to? Is he not a mere animal driven to its utmost, forcibly cultivated over the longest periods of ever repeating conditioning, and dulled by experiences?

What makes a human being… human? What makes him or her differ from the animal? And can the modern human being be humanized?

How can a human being become a true human being?

In their depths, these questions go even beyond the existential level, because they concern what transcends the temporary human life. Indeed, human life can sometimes be seen as transitory and with no apparent meaning, but the medieval and renaissance thinkers, like for example Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, also known as The Prince of Concordance (Princeps Concordiae), who also apparently posited these questions, came to completely opposite conclusions!

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was born on the 24th February 1463 in the city of Mirandole, in northern Italy, and died aged 31 on 17th November 1494.  He wrote his Speech on the Dignity of Man (Oratio de Dignitate Hominis) at age 24. His speech was a preamble to his 900 conclusions (Conclusiones), which he formulated to be the sum of all philosophy and theology, and which he published in December 1486, with the plan to organize a public discourse in Rome. 13 of these theses were subsequently condemned by the pope as heresy (on the grounds of them being “magic” and “kabbalah”).

Pico introduces a new anthropology compared to his predecessors and contemporaries (i.e. Marsilio Ficino). Pico places his accent on the human free agency to the extent that man in his view self-creates himself and decides his own place in the hierarchy of creation. Thus if the human being lives according to the urges and senses, he or she lives an animalistic life unworthy to be called human. Dignity therefore does not pertain to all of mankind, since many remain in a debased, animal state. Rather, dignity is connected with an evolved state of humanhood, as a potential, a seed, a challenge.

The Renaissance conception of Pico is not ready-made for the modern discourse about human rights and human dignity, because Pico considers the dignity of the human prototype, of “Adam”, of the created archetype. Much like Jan Amos Comenius did after him, Pico firmly differentiates between the terrestrial, celestial and supreme (ultramundanum) Works – what Comenius called physics, metaphysics and hyperphysics.

But, let us now allow Pico himself to speak to us. He begins his Oratio with these words:

“…what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world … there is nothing to see more wonderful than man! A great miracle… is man! However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions, all these reasons given for the magnificence of human nature failed to convince me: that man is the intermediary between creatures, close to the gods, master of all the lower creatures, with the sharpness of his senses, the acuity of his reason, and the brilliance of his intelligence, the interpreter of nature, the nodal point between eternity and time… the intimate bond or marriage song of the world, just a little lower than angels…I concede these are magnificent reasons, but they do not seem to go to the heart of the matter, that is, those reasons which truly claim admiration…

After thinking a long time, I have figured out why man is the most fortunate of all creatures, and as a result, worthy of the highest admiration and earning his rank on the chain of being, a rank to be envied not merely by the beasts but by the stars themselves and by the spiritual natures beyond and above this world.”

Pico considers the following as the chief reasons for the wonderfulness of the status of humankind:

“God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe, built this home, this universe we see all around us, a venerable temple of his Godhead, through the sublime laws of his ineffable Mind.“

This architect has furnished every level of this house by His creations. And in the end, he thought of man.

“But he had no Archetype from which to fashion some new child… nor did the universe contain a single place from which the whole of creation might be surveyed. All was perfected, all created things stood in their proper place…

Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature.

He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live… according to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live… you may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world’s center so that … with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”

Pico thus gives conclusion to his thoughts:

“To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be! … man, when he entered life, the Father gave the seeds of every kind and every way of life possible. Whatever seeds each man sows and cultivates will grow and bear him their proper fruit.

If these seeds are vegetative, he will be like a plant. If these seeds are sensitive, he will be like an animal. If these seeds are intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, satisfied with no created thing, he removes himself to the center of his own unity, his spiritual soul, united with God, alone in the darkness of God, who is above all things, he will surpass every created thing. Who could not help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how could one admire anything else?”

Pico rightly gives us the following counsel:

“…we need to understand that we must take earnest care about this, so that it will never be said to our disadvantage that we were born to a privileged position but failed to realize it and became animals and senseless beasts… let a holy ambition enter into our souls; let us not be content with mediocrity, but rather strive after the highest and expend all our strength in achieving it.

Let us disdain (consider as unworthy) earthly things, and despise(look down on) the things of heaven, and, judging little of what is in the world, fly to the court beyond the world and next to God.”

 

The challenge towards true humanness as a spiritual path

Pico later shows us the inner path, that is, an actual way of turning his sublime words into reality within our own life. He speaks about man knowing him or herself, about the recognition of the dialectical (that is, contradictory) nature of reality, about the purification of life in the moral and rational sense, and about the unification of the soul with the spirit.

May the “King of Glory, the Father” enter the House of the Soul as a guest of the soul. The soul, as a bride, adorned with a golden gown, shall take him for her husband, never again to be sundered from him, “forgetting even her own self and desiring to die, so as to live within her husband”.

Pico helps us unmask our own state of being, that is, the state of debased fallen humanity, but also shows us that there really exists a seed of true humanness and that there is a pathway towards it, a well-trod, solid path! This amounts to the supreme challenge for the modern man, man as a being, as a creation within the Universe.

Primary literature, quotes:

1. Oratio Ioannis Pici Mirandulae Concordieae comitis (De dignitate hominis) in PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, Giovanni: O důstojnosti člověka. OIKOYMENTH, Praha 2005, p.135

2. HOOKER, Richard: Pico Della Mirandola: Oration On the Dignity Of Man (15th C. CE).http://public.wsu.edu/~brians

Each of us answers this question in a very personal way, but the answer may have something to do with our relationship to individuation and freedom. Our era witnesses the strong development of both, at the expense of old religious affiliations.

Maybe it is time now for an essentially free spirituality, free in the most intense way. Free to be, free to have been, free to pass after a century – or less – of personal experiences, free to become. What are we experiencing during this period of time? Is it the absence of freedom?

A Gnostic vision of the human being could be expressed as the absolute freedom of men and women to become free and alive. The human being enters life with a consciousness that cannot be considered absolute. Immersed in a life in which he experiments, in a reality that he starts to partially grasp, he must deal with his own complex nature and his imprecise senses. They bring him to the point of creating his own vision of the world and of himself, a personal and individual vision. Human beings don’t share reality in an absolute way. The most elaborate way of sharing probably remains language. “There is another reality, larger, transcending, and spiritual”. Those words create in each of us an inner reality that is different and our own.

Freedom can be comprehended in different ways. As long as the feeling of lack of liberty seems to be related to external constraints, to limitations inherent to the life context, then this lack of liberty is experienced on a basic level, that of daily life. Then one day, traces of a different reality suddenly appear within; an aspiration emerges with an intensity that words cannot translate.

This reality is beyond the bodily senses and beyond the consciousness that has been developed. Can human thinking comprehend it? Becoming aware of a larger reality is already a process that takes time, and often, awareness only emerges through crises, painful life events and self-questioning.

Can man define that part of himself that is not yet articulate or fulfilled? Can he confront his deep aspiration to a life more complete, more magnificent? The chance in his life of unveiling a foreseen possibility occurs to him in a palpable way. Does he succeed in going beyond his own frame of reference and finding answers beyond this frame? This frame of reference is collectively enriched throughout human history. The past two centuries have deeply modified how we represent ourselves. The social framework now holds less sway over the human individual, so he or she can now more freely accept his own singularity, his freedom of choice in essential life domains such as profession, choice of love partners, lifestyle, place of living, food, etc.

Beyond everyday rationality

Awareness and inner realizations can break like a new dawn into our consciousness. But they are often followed by a skeptical denial. It is the well known “principle of reality”, that can be life denying, causing us to mistrust our insight and intuition. Everyday rationality can exclude the discovery that has been made from the consciousness. But if this consciousness space opens the door to truth in us, to a transcending possibility, how, then, can it evaluate its own accuracy? With its own perception? “I feel that it is right.” With its own consciousness? “I perceive that it is right.” How far do education and internalized norms influence those perceptions and feelings? Can the consciousness space answer clearly and precisely to the question “who am I?”? Can the answer to this question be final?

Through these questions, to which no final and irrevocable answers can be found, man can enlarge his field of perception, his field of consciousness. Inner resistances are plentiful and are often far more imperative than external restraints.

It is difficult to accept that humanity imprisons itself in the hell of a collective creation, that individuals do not take the risk of giving up their mental and emotional constructions, and to thus aspire to a self-confirmation. They do not risk an inner discovery that would radically question their being. Unprepared to lose his fixed image of what he would like to be, man is left with only the humdrum of his daily existence. But he is unavoidably driven through centuries by immortal injunctions such as “know yourself and you will know the universes and the gods.”

Man ends up questioning the meaning of freedom, of his life paradigm, of his frame of reference. He questions the seemingly irreconcilable opposites within him. Yes, two realities live together within him: one that he perceives and grasps with his senses, his consciousness; and another that he understands with his atoms, his vibration and his inner sensitivity, that he catches with his own light. And becoming more aware, more sensible to his own light, he makes it brighter. He becomes a living light, struggling with its own darkness. He becomes more sensitive to other peoples’ light. He becomes sensitive to the expression of eternal truths. His regular frame of reference is no longer closed. The universe talks to him and lights up something eternal in him.

A new reality

Eternity in man is a reality. It is linked through him to matter, to the material reality of his being, so that he can master it. He must realize it by changing his own reality. There is no other way towards divinization. Man must understand and overcome the laws of right and wrong, of good and evil. He must go along the path of knowledge, then of transfiguration. He must extract the eternal from the temporary. Making his way through the realms of time and matter gives him the wherewithal to learn from it, and to eventually transcend it. Although this process is not automatic, the human being will inevitably pierce, at a given moment, the veils of illusion, and he will discover his true nature in order to fulfil it. This will continue until every human being has found the path of absolute freedom.

Beyond the material world, spiritual reality is a vast unifying and transforming reality. Possessing a body is essential for the individual to go along this path of self-knowledge in unity with this spiritual nature in its greatest expression.

But if the divinization process of the human individual inevitably impacts on multiple human lives, how can it be reconciled with the fact that humans are more and more attached to their own uniqueness as individuals? Man accepts freedom deprivation in the professional context or out of respect for social obligations that are necessary for community life. Education has taught him to moderate the impulsiveness of his needs and desires to respect these rules, each individual achieving this in his or her own unique way. If belonging to and being part of a group can galvanize and nurture his mystical emotionalism, and open him through his soul to the feeling of community, does it not also constitute an alienation, and a loss of freedoms?

Being an autonomous individual, free…

Can we transform ourselves while ignoring the progression of others? It is one of the great paradoxes of this path. The individual must undo his lack of freedom at it’s tightest knot. He or she may then answer the question of freedom, discovering the superior octave of freedom and unity. Unity becomes a living and linking tonality, which exists as a potential in all, yet which each of us is called to co-create. Then the world is no longer separate or exterior to him.

The scope of the Mayan calendar embraces disciplines as diverse as cosmology, philosophy, everlasting wisdom, spirituality and mythologies relating to the ages, that provides a great galactic worldview unparalleled in the traditions of humanity. In essence, the Mayan tradition defends, elucidates and explains the teachings of the universal wisdom that reside in the heart of all the great traditions of humanity.

Simply put, the experience of collecting data through time of archaeological, anthropological, cultural, and astrophysical discoveries is like an increasingly profound initiation path that surprisingly unites us to the worldview of a Creator, of His Creation and of His Creatures. One can never stop being a student of Mayan cosmology.

Reason rejoices and the heart beams when one discovers that the Mayan teachings are not arbitrary beliefs of another people of this nature, but teachings that connect with the great truths that all the solid spiritual traditions professed and also with a humble and powerful example of the scientific achievements that they achieved in the short time they were among us (Classic period: 250 AD to 900 AD).

The ancient Olmec civilization, which preceded the Mayan, believed that the center of the universe was the polar star, around which all the other stars seem to rotate; but the Mayans recognized a new cosmic center, which is preserved in the doctrine of the world eras in the Mayan myth of creation.

The Milky Way crosses over the ecliptic (the zodiacal path followed by the sun, the moon and the planets) in two places: one in Sagittarius and the other in Gemini. According to Mayan symbolism, these crossing places coincide with the center of our Milky Way galaxy, the galactic center.

It is clear that the identification of the center of our universe was an essential contribution of the Mayans. The final degrees of the constellation Sagittarius points to the center of the galaxy, and the ancient Egyptian cross, the Ankh, describes the key of life to the initiates in the mysteries of the pyramids. Somewhat later than the middle ages, with the contribution of the tree of life with its ten Sephiroth, from the Jewish gnosis, one comes to the understanding through the Kaballah that this galactic center reveals Da’at, the silent light, and Isis, mother of the galactic universe.

Seven Macaw, Quetzalcoatl, One Hunahpo and the current astrophysics

The Maya considered three major principles, equal in importance and associated with three deities: Seven Macaw (Ursa Major, the polar center), Quetzalcoatl (the Pleiades, the zenith) and Uno Hunahpu (the sun on the December solstice, the galactic center).

The galactic center emerges as the greater cosmic center, the center that contains the highest possible considerations and the most global perspective. In the same way that the heliocentric model introduced by Copernicus in the sixteenth century supposes a superior way of representing the cosmos in comparison with the previous geocentric model. The Mayans reached a cosmological understanding that surpassed other previous and less complete perspectives.

How does the December solstice deity (One Hunahpu) relate to the galactic center? The alignment of the year 2012 of our era showed the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes. As it rotates, the Earth “swings” slowly on its axis, changing our orientation towards the great stellar fields, including the Milky Way. The phenomenon also affects the solstices, so that the position of the sun on the December solstice has been changing slowly over millennia. In fact, the sun at the December solstice aligns with the Mayan cross and the galactic center only once every 26,000 years, the duration of the entire precession cycle. So that now, during the current few years, it aligns with this galactic center of the Milky Way.

John Major Jenkins discovered in 1994 that the sacred Ball Game and the myth of the Mayan creation show the galactic alignment. And so, he discovered that their first calendar originated in Izapa, an archaeological settlement with a rich source of sculptures, prophecies and spiritual teachings.

Jenkins proposes that we should consider an alignment as an eclipse, since an alignment shares the basic alchemical meaning of the “transcendence of opposites” with the eclipses.

Union in polarity

In the Mayan metaphysics, this union has a deeper meaning, a meaning that goes beyond the union of masculine and feminine, and other opposing pairs. It involves the non-dual relationship between infinite and finite, between eternity and time; the union of the superior with the inferior.

The alignment represents affiliation rather than polarity. Thus there is a union between the creative center and the created particle.

The particle with its star center shares an affiliation with its origin. They impart it as if the higher and lower nature come together to reunite in the eclipses, in the myth of Quetzalcoatl del Sol uniting with Venus.

Our higher nature does not destroy our lower nature, but it encompasses it, contains it and vivifies it until we return to it with a complete understanding of its affiliation, its project and its goal.

We do not evolve to these states, since they reside in the root, in the essence of our being; rather, we unveil them (remember Isis without a veil), abandoning the limitations that prevented us from recognizing the reality of his immanent presence.

These principles of sacred Mayan science do not differ in any way from the hermetic teachings of Egypt, the Taoists of China, the Gnostics of Christianity, those described in the tree of life of the Sephiroth and those proposed by the Rosicrucians in the alchemical wedding of Christian Rosycross, or of Theosophy.

They are spiritual sciences that do not stop talking about the union of the center of the heart with the center of the universe.