Athena and Heracles, by Douris. 480 – 470 BC.
Peering into the mountain
The universality of spirits
Spirits
For tens of thousands of years
Peering into the cave
It’s all there
All there is
It has been that way
Again and again
For thousands of decades
With new incarnations
Every now and then
Here and there
What makes us so sure
Ours in the only one?
What makes us so sure
Ours isn’t just one more mask?
Why would we think that our
Small corner of the world
Of time
Even the universe
Is the first the last
The only point in time
Aligned with the Great Spirit?
Why would we imagine
Nothing was on target
Before us?
– by Douglas Pinson
The above is a work in progress. A jotting. Musing in search of. I’ve been thinking a lot about our collective narcissism. Our collective parochial views. Our insistence upon believing ours is some unique time and place, in so many ways. But, especially, the idea that even though human beings have been on this earth for hundreds of thousands of years … with evolutionary ancestors going back billions .… that suddenly, just two thousand years ago, we finally got it right and found the one true god. And where was this god found? In a tiny desert land under Roman occupation. Palestine. One very, very small part of the world.
So much time before that era. So much time after it. So much space on the globe surrounding it. Thousands of different cultures, billions of different human beings, billions of years going back to our foundational DNA. And, suddenly, we got it right just two thousand years ago?
Each wave of religious belief, in every culture, in every part of the globe, throughout time … they thought they touched the divine. Adepts in each of those cultures … they thought they locked into the Great Spirit. They all can’t be right. Or can they?
Again, the words are necessary: Diversity and Multiplicity. The mere fact of the multiplicity of views and witnesses to the divine tell me that no one religion has it right. They all do. As pieces of the cosmic puzzle. And yet, there is still so much to learn, to discover. So much remaining. Even with all of that time and multiplicity, we still haven’t uncovered the All. Humans never will. We can only seek it and make approximations .…
A truism but true: the journey is everything.
