Faith And Collective Trauma 13

There really isn't that much to us humans when you think about it. We originally lived in trees, having much smaller brains, and then we descended to the ground and learned to walk on our hind legs. This freed up our forepaws to turn into very able little hands. we learned how to make tools. We also learned how to make weapons which we used to kill animals for food and each other because even back then one million years ago we didn't seem to like each other much. We walked around everywhere and our brains grew. We got smarter. We began to look more human. We developed language, clothes, constructed shelters that eventually became crude looking homes. We left our ancestral Africa because we wanted to see the world, or maybe it was because of climate change and shrinking food supplies. Even then, our population was growing, and we liked each other even less, so tribal warfare made migration essential. We roamed, we hunted and gathered, formed settlements, domesticated animals and took up farming. Our homes became bigger and more sophisticated. We formed social orders and hierarchies and our spiritual beliefs and practices became complex religions as we learned how to write. We became adept at feeding ourselves and some became wealthy. We learned how to smelt metals and made better tools. We also made better weapons, and became even better at killing each other. We formed cities and went to war with each other and captured slaves and soon enslaved and oppressed entire nations of subject peoples as we formed empires and traded all manner of goods across land and sea. We co-opted religion, made it the state power, and conveniently forgot all the uncomfortable parts about love, peace and humility while demanding others, thanks to our powerful and tyrannical priesthoods to submit to gods we didn't even know. Only in our art could we portray the real beauty of the faith and mysticism that ever escaped our experience. Now we are more powerful and more numerous than ever. Our discoveries of science have made us masters of the planet and our Mother Earth languishes from our industrial abuse. There are nearly seven billion of us infesting her sacred skin, like a mass infection of scabies or lice, and we are making this planet unliveable while imagining and planning to travel to other planets and other stars where we can spread our disease and destruction. We have come so very far from those small brained monkeys that swung from trees. Or have we? For all our arrogance and intellectual hubris, how different are we really, from half-brained hominids fleeing from sabre-tooth cats and bears almost as big as elephants? We still love and long for nature, for simplicity. We want to reconnect with nature, without accepting that we have always been part of nature. We still have the instincts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors while pondering the mysteries of the universe and of our own existence. We still hate each other, we still enslave other humans, even if they get paid a miserable wage for their efforts. And some of us are those being enslaved. Really, I think we're all slaves and only when we really learn how to serve one another while protecting our Mother Earth and loving the Creator who gave us all existence and life, are we going to find our way through and out of this mess we have made.