I’ve been reading, lately, that our innate spirituality is deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. According to the religious scholar John Teehan (actually I don’t know if he’s religious or not but he sure knows a lot about the origins of religion) a sense of the supernatural developed very early on in our evolutionary past.
The early pre-historic survivors of a very dangerous world were those who maintained a constant alertness. They thrived because they kept a watchful eye on the beings around them. They were, more than likely, overly conscientious which led to them over-interpreting under-determined phenomena. In other words, rustling in the bushes and other things they weren’t quite sure about were attributed to intelligent being, like dangerous animals or hostile others. These overly-cautious folks, though, were the survivors because they were ready when danger appeared.
Over the millennia, the watchfulness gene was passed along. Even when no danger was present our surviving ancestors sensed intelligent life where clear knowledge wasn’t available: the mountain top, beyond the clouds, in the dense forest. This sense of an ever-present but invisible intelligence developed into an animistic sense of spirit beings and then eventually evolved to the conception of gods.
I guess what this all means is that the human mind is designed to naturally and automatically interpret the world in terms of intelligent agents: beings acting with intention.
So, anyway, with all this in mind, I’ve been thinking of revisiting the vortices in Sedona, you know, let my primal mind take hold and embrace the spiritual power, maybe even pass through a portal into another realm. Like Kierkegaard said in another context: embrace the absurd and leap into faith.
