=1 "Pagan notes"
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Pagan notes
If you can't worship a waterfall, a tree, a stone or a spring as your ancestors did, and if you can't see that these things are god, that means that you have not yet taken the first step across the threshold of the sanctuary.
The first thing people ask when they see a strange animal is, “What is it? What's its name?” And when you tell them, “It's a petaurus breviceps,” they are happy. Of course it's pure magic, the feeling of power over a thing you get when you know its name. And then there is also the illusion that when you know the name of something you know it also.
Ordinary names of ordinary things – animals, mountains, stars – at least help you to find information about them in a library. But if you have a metaword like liberty, or soul, or man, like life, eternity, joy, peace – don't go to a library. Don't even look in a dictionary. You will lose your way among the isms, for isms are to knowledge what an undersea reef or an invisible shoal is to navigation.
The only way to know the meaning of anything is to sit under a tree and become it.
Are gods and angels real?
Do we go to paradise when we die?
Is rebirth the rule?
What gives truth to these hypotheses is not their scientific exactness, but rather their emotional content, their beauty of conception. There is always a truth in beauty, yet beauty and truth are not absolutes. There are always higher and greater beauties, and truths beyond. Both are reproductions in our mind of some reality, and what the ultimate truth is we will perhaps never know so long as we have only a human brain.
But of one thing we can be sure: the universe, its so-called simple things as well as its galaxies, will always be more beautiful than the distorted reproductions in our mind. And it will always be more beautiful tomorrow than it seems to us today. But also more complex, more difficult to understand. This is why all our truths, both physical and metaphysical, always lag so far behind reality. Not only are they less beautiful, but no dream or fairy tale will ever be adequate to describe the Real.