LIVING AN EPIC

I believe we each need an epic. I don’t mean this in the “Hollywood” sense, but in how we live and what we believe in. To me an epic is a sublime account of how the world was created and how humanity became to have a place within it. Many billions have a religious ethic and this satisfies a primal need – to confirm we are part of something greater than ourselves. The way to achieve “our” epic that unites us all is to create it from the best knowledge that science and history can give us.

For me, there are four questions to be answered:

Is the Universe valuable? (My answer – absolutely)

Is it sacred? (My answer – absolutely)

Is it holy? (My answer – most certainly)

Or is the “human agenda” all that matters? (My answer – a most definite NO)

Personally, I don’t think we (as a vast planet-wide group) are stupid enough to continue in a way that continues to destroy; I am hopeful that the “epic of evolution” will be another, better and stronger strategy inside our human culture to lead us away from our current very tight, human-centred materialism.

I look around and see that the (collective) “we” lack any external goal to our biological nature; will our global goals dissolve to the extent that societies regress to primitive self-indulgence? And our morality; currently instinctive, but failing to ask “which censors and motivators should be obeyed and which might be better if their influence was reduced or done away with completely?”

To quote Dr. Edward O. Wilson’s book ‘Human Nature’:

“we need to find ways to unite the sciences, and then to unite the sciences with the humanities”.

I am still searching for my personal epic, how about you?

Until next time (and hopefully finding the right path),

Peripatetic Scribe