Universe likes gracefulness in you, because it is itself a graceful Universe. That’s why gratitude is more attractive than egocentric selfhisness.
For the past 5000 years of human history we have believed in one God. The idea isn’t older than that. Yet human kind is 200.000 years old – approximately.
This means that if human kind was only 100 years old, we would have believed in One God for roughly 2 years. As far as records show.
There are hints of older monotheism than that. For example in North America there were many tribes – or nations – who believed in “one great spirit” above all others.
When “the book of the Hopi” is examined it is clear that Hopi religion had many ideas related to Monotheism (One God, One Faith) and even the name of God sounds remarkably close to the Hebrew version.
How old is the Hopi mythology?
There are also hieroglyphs in the Pyramids of Egypt giving hints of Monotheistic periods in the Nile valley and there are many areas in tribal communities around the world which seem to have a notion of “One God” in their mythologoies as well but most of them believe also in spiritual entities.
If all these ideas were to be examined we’d glympse the idea of “One God Creator” at least 15 milleniums old or even older. We have no clear idea where this phenomenal idea first was born or how. Except if we believe the tales all over human culture, spread around the world, that spiritual humanity began with one family.
The story of Adam and Eve – and related or equivalent stories – is not exclusive to Hebrew culture. On the contrary there is a multitude of related ideas, so it would be tempting to take this myth one step further.
Let us imagine that modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) were not the originators of the imaginative transference.
Imaginative transference is when you take one reality – sometimes a complicated one – and transfer it to a simplified representation, using the tools of imagination to recreate a story.
Before we get into this let us consider the Neanderthals. They existed until 30 milleniums ago and 4% of their DNA is identical to ours. Then another 95% is similar to ours and the 1% which is off is theirs.
This means that Neanderthals and our ancestors, Homo Sapiens, could have made children if they wanted to but we don’t know if said children would have been fertile. But if they didn’t then why do we have 4% of Neanderthal genes 30 milleniums since they disappeared. Even if we did mix, then this long time suggests that 30 milleniums ago we might have had 6%.
No, I’m not saying that Neanderthals were our ancestors. We are Homo Sapiens Sapiens and Homo Sapiens were our ancestors. But before Homo Sapiens there was teh Cromagnon mand and he could walk upright and use language, and he was the ancestor of Homo Sapiens. We don’t know which primate was the ancestor of the Neanderthal.
Complicated? Not if you’ve been to school and paid attention.
Neanderthals existed for approximately 200 milleniums and we, the Homo Sapiens Sapiens have just reached that age ourselves. They had language and they used tools. They also buried their dead and placed things in the graves, not so unlike us. It seems that they had a belief in afterlife – just like us – and it is likely that they had spiritual awareness, just like our ancestors.
From many other points, if we have the courage to observe our history and history of peoples related to ours, we can see that something happened in the past to create the notion of One Supreme Deity.
All cultures, even our own of the educated 21st century, have various ideas about spiritual entities. Even within the established monotheistic religions there are notions of devils, angels, saints, natural spirits, and our loved ones who are deceased.
It seems to be engraved within our psyche to consider the unknown and to diversify it. But the clearly defined notion of One Supreme God above and beyond the complexities of life and the Universe seems to be fairly new and in many ways unrefined.
It is interesting to note that all the monotheistic religions try to define God in simple terms in the beginning and then the complexities creep in around that over simplified myth.
The more I glimpse into this history, the more I see that one simple truth is elusive and we are in a pursuit for something which is so simple and powerful – or clean – that we need to refine our thinking and awareness in order to catch it. Our minds overcomplicate God as a rule of thumb. Like the saying goes “you think too much.”
Let us go back to the imaginative transference;
Let us imagine that close to the nexus of the Neanderthals, that the idea of One God was theirs. Let’s imagine that they knew that their end of time was at hand and the idea of Adam an Eve is just a simplified version of how they communicated with our culture to transfer their idea to us to keep it alive and make it plant a seed for something to come far ahead in the future.
Would this be far fetched? Without the fall from grace, how would the Great Transformation creep in?