Civilization and Beyond
A Metaconscious Mosaic Outline
Questions about "the gods" are fundamental cosmological questions which have been asked, presumably, for at least as long as our species has borne the label, Homo. They have been "answered" in endless varieties of ways, and still provide no less fertile ground than they ever have for speculation and discussion of absorbing interest.
For me, questions about the nature and possible "motivations" of the gods invoke the wonder of existence itself – a topic I have grappled with many times in my writings over the course of the past several years.1 The question of existence, and its origin, may well have been the "original question" in the first inquiring human mind.
Existence seems to me to bear two simultaneous, and not entirely reconcilable properties: existence is at once a) undeniable, and b) inexplicable. This is so not only of the entire grandeur of "Life, the Universe, and Everything,"2 it is no less so for anything at all, even a speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam, or a single hydrogen atom, or an electron, or a neutrino, or a quark (whatever the heck any of these "things" may actually be). Whatever they (we) are, they, and you, and I, exist; and this, for me, is a jaw-dropping, incomprehensible wonder. How this is so, I cannot begin to imagine; yet it undeniably is, or I, for one, would not be here to write these words, or you, for another, to read them.
Accordingly, I treat all so-called "explanations" for the existence of anything as mythology.3 This is not to cast any such "explanations" in a doubtful light. It is simply necessary that any so-called "explanation" of the inherently inexplicable can be nothing other than a myth. Clearly there is nothing "wrong" with this, for it cannot be avoided. It simply seems to me an essential point of intellectual honesty to state clearly and frankly that when we begin to consider anything related to existence (which pretty much includes anything at all), we unavoidably enter the realm of mythology.
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* Source: The Gods & the Law of Life.
1. See, for example, Dear Friends, 2/15/04. See also my December, 1997 essay, "A 'Christmas Message' on Existence, Fear and Death," about an insight I had had Christmas morning the year before. For a somewhat different slant on a parallel theme, see my January, 1998 essay, "The Ego and the Self," and my August 1997 essay, "Knowledge," among many others. More recently, see "Creation Myths," 11/5/00; "Waves of Change", 7/15/03; and my Illustrated Essay, Sharing the Commonwealth. There are others, yet I imagine you may gain some food for thought, if you wish, from these.
2. Douglas Adams wrote a very entertaining novel of that title, as part of his "increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy," and I often resort to the expression in various contexts: Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, Ballantine Books, New York, 1982.
3. See "Creation Myths," 11/5/00, also mentioned in footnote 1. Also, it is possible to "explain" the existence of many things in non-mythological terms, as for instance, "This watch is the workmanship of a particular Swiss Watchmaker," or "I am the child of my parents." "Explanations" of this kind, however, are invariably only partial, for they do not address the existence of the Watchmaker, or "my parents," or "my parents' parents." Therefore they do not really explain anything, they only describe a selected portion of an infinite and ultimately impenetrably mysterious process – which can only be approached with mythology.
Civilization and Beyond copyright 2004, 2005 by J. Harmon Grahn. Copying and redistribution, in whole or in part, are permitted in any medium provided this notice is included.