When you
were a kid did you wonder what happened to the miracles?
If you went
to Sunday School as I did and heard Bible stories about pillars of fire, people
turning into salt, Jesus raising people from the dead and turning water into
wine, you might have wondered, as I did, that if they could do it then, why not
now? Not that I wanted people turned into salt, but you get the idea.
The events
around me were physical, a nuts and bolts life, not ethereal, or even mystical.
Yet even in those days there was the concept of a guru sitting on the mountain,
where people trudged up steep cliffs to ask him about the meaning of life.
And then
there was the Wizard behind the curtain who tricked us by pulling leavers, and appearing in smoke. The Wizard,
however, honored the gift we had exhibited, a heart, a brain and some courage, and he taught us that he didn't have the magic, we did.
And from the mountain the guru told us “Don’t worry, be happy.”
One must
rise above the rank and file to accept that the idea that perhaps, maybe, not
worrying and being happy just might be a good idea.
We had to
advance to the place where we knew we were good people, we have a heart, a
brain, and some courage, and we have a right to be happy.
We’ve come a
long way baby.
But we’re
not the first civilization on this planet to obtain heights of grandeur—there
have been others. We would know that if we had not been knocked back to the Stone
Age by a series of cataclysmic events.
About a week
ago I heard Graham Hancock at Powell’s Book store in Portland speak to a packed
house. He has written the book Magicians of the Gods, and he not only
proposes that much of the archaeology taught is wrong but he supports it with
evidence. That mankind is not 5,000 years old, more like 350,000, that there
were advanced civilizations long before we crawled out of the mud thinking we
came from monkeys.
He spoke of
an archaeological find in Turkey called Gobekli
Tepe, where carved pillars stand vertical in the ground similar to the buried
warriors found in China. These pillars are carved with reliefs, and writings
yet to be deciphered, and there are five more layers of columns beneath
those—they have ground X-rayed to find them. This incredible find was deliberately
filled in with light weight soil and sand, and entirely covered with a mound of
earth.
They
preserved their story.
What story
will it tell?
Popol
Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiche Maya says this about the
“Forefathers.”
They
were endowed with intelligence; they saw and instantly they could see far, they
succeeded in seeing, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world.
When they looked, instantly they saw all around them, and they contemplated in
turn the arch of heaven and the round face of the earth. The things hidden in
the distance they saw all without first having to move; at once they saw the
world, and so, too, from where they were, they saw it. Great was their wisdom,
their sight reached to the forests, the lakes, the seas, the mountains and the
valleys.”
Would that we would be spoken of in that manner…
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. “ - Hamlet Shakespeare