jimrigby.org

As has been well noted, our culture figured out how to get to the moon before we thought of putting wheels on our luggage. We tend to live life from the outside in, which can make our own depths and needs inscrutable. Most of us in this culture know more about our cars and computers than the inner workings of our own hearts. So while we master our outer world, we are mastered by inner forces we have dismissed to the realm of religion and superstition. While we objectively seek peace, the god Mars (or rather the irrational intuitions he symbolized) rises within us and suddenly we are at war against our best efforts. We seek social stability, but Dionysus sings to us through our mammalian glands and we chase pleasure to the point of putting our very planet in peril. We may bury the gods, but they were only names for energies that exist primordially within and between us. The realm of religion is an effort to put names to the most important energies of our lives as we experience them subjectively. We must be very careful as we objectify our knowledge of the external world, to remember the one inside us counts too. Truth, goodness and beauty do not exist as realities in the objective world. They are the result of sentience. They emerge through our human flesh. They exist only in the world we share together subjectively. We can master the whole world and still be mastered by the energies we have discounted as superstition.