اليكم الان Between the First Voice and the Silence of the Universe والان إلى التفاصيل من المصدر موقع يمنات الأخباري
yemenat
Yemenat
Fares Al-Aliy
Yemeni poet and writer
Did the growth of human knowledge bring us closer to understanding existence, or did it take us further away from our first sense of its sacredness and mystery?
I write to you today from that fragile, open space where thought stands at the edge of awareness and nothingness. For a long time, I have found myself gathering scattered pieces of knowledge: reading at length in books on history and religion, reflecting on revealed and human-made texts and their accounts of the moment of creation, and returning to stories of wonders and mythical creatures that were long dismissed as legends. Then archaeological discoveries and excavations began to reveal evidence of enormous creatures and ancient remains from distant ages, creatures and structures that once existed on this earth. Even the worlds of international cinema, including The Lord of the Rings film series, have added to these questions and opened up new ways of thinking about the depths of this knowledge.
These were not just things I read about to pass the time. As they accumulated, they began to form a world of meanings and symbols in my mind: a visual and intellectual language through which I engage with myths, epics, fantasy worlds, and supernatural beings that exist somewhere between darkness and light.
Over time, I began to sense a hidden thread connecting the stories of jinn, rebellious beings, and demons in religious texts with the primordial schism depicted in modern myths and epics. In these stories, beings of light and power emerge from a single origin, then follow different paths because of choice, envy, and the desire for dominion. Some choose to remain with the light, while others, driven by envy, rebel and make darkness their identity and their way of being.
Out of this maze of knowledge, and from the way cinema, mythology, the writings of the ancients, sacred texts, and modern science overlap and come into conflict—science that now offers new explanations for many things once considered mysterious or beyond human understanding—I began to feel the need to bring these scattered pieces together in one essay. My aim was not simply to arrange them into a connected account, but also to explore the idea of creation and the distance between human beings and the greater power that brought them into existence.
Cinema, Mythology, and Archaeology
When we look at major film epics and the worlds they create, such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and the television series The Rings of Power, we begin to see a map taking shape from these fragments. We are not simply watching stories for entertainment; we are seeing some of the great questions of existence played out through images and drama.
The Valar, the Maiar, and the forces of darkness all come from the same cosmic origin, yet differ in their nature, attitudes, and moral choices. Their stories bring to mind accounts in the revealed religions of the primordial beings and those who were once close to God but later broke their covenant, caught up in questions of power, freedom, and rebellion.
What is truly surprising is that many of these mythical ideas may not have appeared out of nowhere. When archaeological excavations uncover the remains of enormous creatures and long-vanished life forms, or when traces of cities and civilizations buried by time come to light, we find ourselves asking new questions about the relationship between human memory, myth, and natural history. This does not mean that such discoveries necessarily prove the old stories true. Rather, they invite us to consider how those stories took shape, and whether some of their images may have come from things early humans actually witnessed in nature and the world around them.
Myths were not always deliberate lies. They may have been among the first languages through which human beings tried to understand the vastness and mystery of the universe, long before scientific methods emerged to examine natural phenomena and unravel their secrets. Early humans did not simply make up stories for no reason—if we can put it that way. They turned their wonder and fear in the face of nature into narratives that gave the unknown a shape and a meaning, and transformed the awe of existence into worlds their minds and spirits could grasp.
Seen this way, myth is not simply the opposite of science. It can also be understood as an early stage in humanity’s attempts to understand the world, even if its tools and methods were very different from those of modern knowledge.
From Direct Experience to the Veil of Science: Where Did the Distance Come From?
In the earliest days of existence, as described in sacred texts, the relationship between the Creator and His creation was direct. Adam received God’s words, and his connection with heaven was alive and close, without the barriers of knowledge and interpretation that now shape the way modern people relate to the unseen world. Today, the human mind often struggles to understand some of its manifestations, including the miracles God granted to Jesus, peace be upon him, and the extraordinary events that go beyond the limits of ordinary material explanation.
But as life developed and human understanding expanded, people began to uncover the secrets of nature and learn to harness them through science and knowledge. A profound change took place in the way they related to existence.
As human civilization advanced and scientific methods enabled people to unravel more of the secrets of matter and the universe, they seemed to move gradually away from that direct understanding of the unseen world. The distance grew wider between what they could grasp through their senses and what they hoped to understand beyond those limits.
Modern science, with its instruments and its mathematical and physical laws, has lifted much of the fog that once surrounded natural phenomena. At the same time, however, it has changed the way human beings look at the unknown. Beings once thought to take an active part in everyday human life—gods, cosmic creatures, jinn, and rebellious beings—are now often understood as psychological symbols, cultural metaphors, or expressions of the collective unconscious.
There is a paradox here worth thinking about. Humanity has gained an enormous amount of knowledge, but perhaps lost something of the closeness people once felt to existence itself: the sense that the world is not simply lifeless matter, but a space filled with mysteries, meanings, and a presence.
Perhaps the question is not whether science has done away with the unseen, but how it has changed our relationship with it, and how it has reshaped the distance between human beings and what lies beyond their understanding.
The Struggle Between Light and Darkness Within Us
Today, as we look again at these scattered ideas, we begin to see that the question is no longer about a distant past or faraway mythical worlds. It is also about what happens within human beings themselves.
Why, then, does the story of the fall and the split between light and darkness keep appearing in every age?
Why do human beings, or other beings, turn away from the light and enter the loneliness of darkness when envy blinds them, or when the desire to draw closer to the Absolute drives them beyond their limits?
Is the heart of this struggle the desire for power? Is it a refusal to accept limits? Or does it begin at the moment when freedom, which gives us the ability to choose, turns into a desire to rebel against the very source from which we came?
These questions may not have final answers, but they open a window onto human nature and the struggles that take place within us.
This essay is not an attempt to offer ready-made answers. It is an ongoing effort to piece together a broken mirror: to understand how our ideas about different beings and their roles have changed; how light and darkness have shifted from cosmic images into moral and existential choices; and why human beings, despite all their scientific progress, still search within themselves for the ancient myth—not necessarily to bring its past back, but to recover something of its magic and its power to give existence meaning.
Humanity Between the Ashes of Earth and the Light of the Stars
Perhaps this is the fate of modern humanity: to live in the beautiful exile of its own knowledge. We can see things our ancestors could never have seen, yet we remain unable to touch the unknown they once felt so close to.
We thought that science, by setting myths aside and uncovering the chemistry of nature, would give us complete peace of mind. Instead, it has confronted us with even bigger questions, sometimes leaving us alone with the isolation of pure reason, searching in the darkness of our knowledge for something of the closeness found in those first conversations between Adam and heaven.
When the remains of ancient creatures are uncovered beneath layers of earth, or when echoes of old myths and epics return to us through fragments, discoveries, and memories, perhaps what we are really searching for is our origin: that moment when human beings were not simply creatures who calculated and analysed, but beings who shared in the wonder of existence and felt themselves to be part of the mystery of creation.
The struggle between light and darkness, between falling and rising, did not end in ancient records. Nor was it settled in the imaginary worlds created by stories and narratives, such as the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a struggle that is renewed every day within us, in our decisions, fears, and desires, and in the way we choose our place in the world.
Whenever human beings bring something new out of nothing, or reshape what has been destroyed, they take part in a form of human creation. This may mean rebuilding a city from its ashes, shaping a story, or creating a work of art in a symbolic language that speaks to the soul.
We do not write myths to escape reality. Through them, we try to recover the meaning that the harshness of reality and the monotony of material explanations may take away from us. We write them because something within us longs for our origin, and for that first voice that human memory has never stopped searching for.
Perhaps, in the end, we simply want to say to the greater power that brought us into being and left us to contemplate the silence of the universe:
“We are here… We still remember the first voice, and with love and imagination, we continue to resist the cloud of darkness.”
yemenat
between the first voice and the silence of the universe
المزيد من التفاصيل - اضغط هنا
موقع يمنات الأخباري between the first voice and the silence of the universe
كانت هذه تفاصيل Between the First Voice and the Silence of the Universe نرجوا بأن نكون قد وفقنا بإعطائك التفاصيل والمعلومات الكامله .
وننوه بأن الموضوع الأصلي قد تم نشرة ومتواجد على موقع يمنات الأخباري و قام فريق العمل في برسبي نيوز بالتاكد منه او ربما تم التعديل علية او قد يكون تم نقله بالكامل اوالاقتباس ويمكنك قراءة الموضوع من مصدره الاساسي.