Copernicus and the Childish mind

For most of human history, we believed that our Earth was the center of the universe. We believed that the sun, moon, and stars revolved around us. Even the gods that created them focused their attentions on our behavior. As humanity’s knowledge about the world increased, it became apparent that things were not as they had seemed. We as individuals also begin with the assumption that we and our family are the center of the universe, and that our parents, like gods, create us, control us, see us, and see through us. These notions, too, eventually come into conflict with reality and must be examined.

With the growth of self-awareness and language, we humans began to impose order on the world we saw. Much of our understanding about the true nature of the universe and our Earth’s place in it grew out of our observations of how the heavenly bodies moved through the night sky. As we began to observe and record the movements of those bodies, it became apparent that some starry objects—which we now know to be the planets—appeared to stop, loop, and at times even reverse their course.  The great Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician, Ptolemy, contrived convoluted diagrams of epicycles and eccentricities to make intelligible the strange paths of these luminous objects. The heavenly bodies had to move in circles upon circles upon spirals upon loops if the Earth was indeed the center of it all. Despite the cumbersome twists and turns, the diagrams generally offered surprisingly accurate predictions of where in the heavens the stars and luminous bodies would be at any specific time. Thus, as is often the case in our own psychological lives, if this and that are adjusted, something else propped up, the other twisted to the right, another moved to the left, it can all be made to fit . . . at least for a while.

Nicolaus Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, was not the first to suspect that the Earth revolved around the sun. Some insightful ancient Greek and Islamic astronomers had surmised as much. However, Copernicus provided the most complete and compelling argument, and his book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, popularized the theory. He wrote, “The apparent retrograde and direct motion of the planets arises not from their motion, but from the Earth’s. The motion of the Earth alone, therefore, suffices to explain so many apparent inequalities in the heavens.” Thus, all of the theretofore wild and inexplicable motions of the heavenly bodies could be explained by a simpler mechanism. However, his theory generated considerable criticism, not only from religious perspectives—how could the Earth that God created and took special interest in not be the center of the universe—but out of what was considered to be an attack against everyday experience and common sense.  After all, one can look around and see for one’s self that the Earth remains solid and still while the heavens move above us! We as individuals also look out into the world and see it as we expect to see it, and then find comfort in that confirmation. As Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani wrote in the Talmud, nearly 2000 years ago, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

The consensus is that we become aware of ourselves as entities in the world around the age of 3 or 4. However, we largely come into being through reflection in, and recognition by, others. In his book, Saying Goodbye: A memoir for Two Fathers, M.R. Montgomery poignantly noted, “If you are very small, you actually understand that there is no point in jumping into the swimming pool unless they see you do it. The child crying, ‘Watch me, watch me,’ is not begging for attention; he is pleading for existence itself.” Our parents and their surrogates make us real. We then project our experience of them onto the world to make and keep them—and thus ourselves—real.

The world we construct to maintain our self-centered universe, and the inventions we use to prop it up when the reality of the world differs from our flawed understanding of it, become just as convoluted as pre-Copernican models of the universe.  We twist ourselves up in beliefs of who we are, what we must do, what we must not do, what is good, what is shameful, what others think of us, and what other people are like. These beliefs can seem to hold true for a while—just as Ptolemy’s labyrinthine diagrams often gave accurate predictions—and thus they provide us a sense of security and continuity.

Although we progress through stages of life, sometimes even into our older years, we continue to see ourselves as “our same old selves” travelling through existence on a trajectory unconsciously set in childhood.  We resist growing and changing, and—consciously or unconsciously—we also refuse to see those that populated and still populate the world we created as children as ever having grown or changed. The parent we fear offending still wears the face of the young mother or father. The critical teacher, priest or rabbi remain as they were when we were little.  It is as if we have kept ourselves and those who helped give us our psychological existence in a diorama at a Natural History Museum, living with blind, unquestioned certainty that this is how things are, always were, and always will be.

Some of us learn early, some late, some never, that our contrived, Ptolemaic beliefs about ourselves and our place in the universe of people and things are outdated, unfounded, and sources of conflict and suffering. Sometimes, circumstances force us to confront our false, childish, ego-centric illusions. Other times, spiritual practice, psychotherapy, psychedelic experiences, or philosophical investigations lead us to the same realizations. Most of us, sooner or later, become faced with the fact that we are not the center of the universe, and that our understanding of the world is illusory.  We can turn from that fact or embrace it. Indeed, while it is often said that, “Things aren’t what they used to be,” it is more correct to understand that, “Things never were what they used to be.” Though giving up our childish and often unconscious notions of being the center of the universe is difficult and painful, it is the only way to free ourselves.