Faith And Collective Trauma 3

All of the mythologies throughout our human history are united and woven together by certain ongoing themes and threads. Everything suggests that there was once a lost paradise, a time of innocence, purity and blessing that we somehow lost or were expelled from and that ever since we have yearned after that original golden age. It is rather hard to square this with the Darwinian norm. If we are to take seriously the fossil records, and I do take seriously the findings of paleontologists, then our hominid ancestors divided from the common ancestor that we share with the great apes, some five million years ago. Our earliest ancestors descended from trees, became hunters and meat-eaters and developed bigger brains. They lived in constant danger of being eaten by predators, and this is where I believe our collective human trauma has its earliest origins. We formed family groups, tribes and bands and began to war among ourselves. Eventually we reached our evolutionary apogee, and ancestors who would have looked and behaved very much like us (but I don't think they had smartphones or laptops) and in waves of migration, because of climate change and food scarcity, emerged out of Africa into the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Australia, and eventually the Americas. As cultures and languages, and skills of tool making developed we continued to evolve, always on the run from dangerous predators, natural disasters and from one another. We evolved a sense of suspicion and distrust. We also developed spirituality, a mystical sense and ultimately religion. All of those tribes and bands had shamans or seers who had a window onto the unseen, and received in dreams, vision and hallucinogenic drug-induced euphoria, messages from the gods, from dead ancestors, from the creator of who they were, where they were going, of what their next step or passage would be. Offerings, sacrifices and rites of devotion and adoration were made by the people. This went on generation after generation for tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. This appreciation and experience of the numinous is hard-wired into our brains and our collective unconscious is full of spiritual dynamics. We only became rational atheists in the last three hundred years or so, hardly a fly speck on the map of our evolution. We still carry all the baggage and neuro-wiring of our ancestral spirituality, no matter how much our academics and thinkers and scientists try to pooh-pooh this out of existence. It is not about to go away. is there such a thing as the spiritual, the numinous. Yes, otherwise how could we have possibly developed such a capacity? Aren't we really rational beings? No, not a single one of us. Rationalism is but a very convenient dance of denial. Science does nothing to disprove the spiritual reality because it cannot be objectively measured or quantified. Yet, this is so much a part of, so foundational to who and what we are as humans. We still long to get back in the garden, to refind our lost paradise, the Garden of Eden. There is no scientific evidence for a Garden of Eden, and it will never be found, not because it never existed, but because it existed as our primal human reality and no fossil beds in Africa nor anywhere else in the world are going to reveal its location.