You knew you had lost your certainty about a God-ruled universe and, because of that, your certainty about the nature of God himself. But you felt you had a method, a consensus-building process through which you could discover the nature of everything around you, including God, and including the true purpose of mankinds existence on the planet. So you sent these explorers out to find the true nature of your situation and to report back. He paused and looked at me. The Manuscript, he said, says that at this point we began the preoccupation from which we are awakening now. We sent these explorers out to bring back a complete explanation of our existence, but because of the complexity of the universe they werent able to return right away. What was the preoccupation? Put yourself in that time period again, he said. When the scientific method couldnt bring back a new picture of God and of mankinds purpose on the planet, the lack of certainty and meaning affected Western culture deeply. We needed something else to do until our questions were answered. Eventually we arrived at what seemed to be a very logical solution. We looked at each other and said: Well, since our explorers have not yet returned with our true spiritual situation, why not settle into this new world of ours while we are waiting? We are certainly learning enough to manipulate this new world for our own benefit, so why not work in the meantime to raise our standard of living, our sense of security in the world? He looked at me and grinned. And thats what we did. Four centuries ago! We shook off our feeling of being lost by taking matters into our own hands, by focusing on conquering the Earth and using its resources to better our situation, and only now, as we approach the end of the millennium can we see what happened. Our focus gradually became a preoccupation. We totally lost ourselves in creating a secular security, an economic security, to replace the spiritual one we had lost. The question of why we were alive, of what was actually going on here spiritually, was slowly pushed aside and repressed altogether. He looked at me intensely, then said, Working to establish a more comfortable style of survival has grown to feel complete in and of itself as a reason to live, and weve gradually, methodically, forgotten our original question... Weve forgotten that we still dont know what were surviving for.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 14:11:55 +0000
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