Less than a decade old, I’m listening to a reverend speak reverently of the Masters of Ancient Mysteries.
The end of my second decade, I am a college boy, devouring the myths of a hundred cultures.
A father later in life, I try to distill decades of experience into stories for my children and their peers.
Through it all, I am a voice in the back of my head, an old man whispering the secrets of a lifetime to my younger selves. Ouroboros.
A Small Introduction
So…
Hello.
It’s good to meet you.
I’m sitting here in the heat of spring and I have to say, it’s absolutely beautiful outside.
The California sun is warm and shining; the Wind, an old friend of mine, is whipping the landscape into a delicate and artistic frenzy. Sky’s so blue it’s a reflection of the ocean stretching out from the shore.
I’m thinking about Initiations.
I’m thinking that in a world where we’ve got scientists by the barrel-full, a global civilization (theoretically) based on rationality (well… at least that’s how it’s supposed to work!) and a dedicated super collider primed to discover a “god-particle”, everybody’s still arguing over what’s real. Isn’t that strange?
An engineer will give you one set of specs for making the world work, a quantum physicist another. Still, even as they differ, they’ll agree on one point: reality works, pretty good. Good enough so that the rest of us can form conclusions on how to live our life with at least a little certainty that tomorrow the sun will rise and a fire will require a spark rather than spontaneously arising from some future action.
All said, that’s good enough for some folks, good enough for a lifetime, good enough for rational cultures to spring up, thrive for a time and then pass on.
Then there are some folks who need a touch more: a Mystery they can pray to, a sacred space they can hide all of their hopes and fears in, a ritual to share that feeling that out there, somewhere, something greater watches over them all. Like the followers of science, the worship of the Mystery is good enough for these folk, good enough for art to flourish and spring out into the world, overwhelming people with awe and emotion for just a time before moving on.
But…
There are also the others.
We are the people who aren’t content with the rational and aren’t only looking for a Mystery.
We’re the dreamers, the seekers, the explorers who want to get their hands into the gears and pull things apart. The ones who want to open our eyes and our minds and gaze lovingly over the plans for this universe. We want to bathe in the beauty and analyze the geometry of its shape. To find out what color palette was used and where it is on the spectrograph. We want to know, to quote Albert Einstein, “the mind of God.”
Everything else? It’s just details.
More to come…
Yours in Seeking
Bill Thomas