I want to refer to the feelings of sadness and the relating insights I wrote about on the 21st this instance. Though that reported, identified and assimilated sadness was effective, a significant feeling of sadness remained, so I searched further for other causes.
Doing so, I recalled sensing my Dad’s sadness on the first days of WW2, May 10 and 11, when the Nazi Germans bombed Rotterdam’s inner city. I was almost four years of age pretending to shoot down some over flying aircraft using a broomstick, with my sister Els doing the same.
This recall triggered the memory of a story my Dad told me on his last visit in 1990 …
This recall triggered the memory of a story my Dad told me on his last visit in 1990, about me as an infant. At that time (Winter 1937) he had to leave me behind in the hospital when I was about six months old. I was not keeping in my food and the doctors figured that isolation from any possible distraction would keep me from regurgitating it. Relating this event he said that as he left me behind I looked at him as if saying ‘How can you do such a thing?’
Recalling this story yesterday made me realise that this very early separation from my parents must have left me with an unconscious experience of sadness. One that was not even a memory for me at that age of six month. Identifying that event and my Dad’s relating it, made a connection for me that this could be possible the source of my present sense of sadness. This seemed to resolve for me the ‘cloud of unknowing’ that had been associated with it.
It was to me yesterday, as if this hovering and recurring feeling of unidentified sadness now had found a resting place as it were, a place of assimilation I could call it. I’ll live with this for some time to see if this ‘mooring place’ is indeed the ‘home-harbour’ of this haunting sadness awareness.
Yesterday I combined all these various insights and discoveries to compose a connecting narrative for myself.
As a closing observation I want to note that the experience of this sadness has let me on a search to find its origin and thus had the functionality of connecting me with my very early childhood. This let to a subsequent awareness which relates to my ‘birth memory’ of ‘not wanting to go down that dark and deep’.
Recalling and examining this ‘birth memory’ resulted some days ago in the emerging awareness for me to ‘find reconciliation of religions, while maintaining their integrity’. This insight fits with my life long activities and interests in the fields of history, religion, psychology and the resulting understanding of our human situation.
Yesterday I combined all these various insights and discoveries to compose a connecting narrative for myself. First, the mentioned insight about ‘reconciliation of religions’ must necessarily be based on a common aspect of all religions.
This underlies the formation of religions, which have been guides to humans all over the planet for at least sixty thousand years.
This I can best formulate as our human need to order the world of our experience. Conscious beings that we are we possess an enormous facility to adapt to changing circumstances. However, we no longer can rely on instincts the way animals do to guide us in our daily behaviour and interaction.
Therefore, as conscious beings we construct a framework to order our experiences and we pass on what we so find in traditions. This underlies the formation of religions, which have been guides to humans all over the planet since at least sixty thousand years. These religious frameworks come in many shapes, sizes, colours and functionalities. Each is adapted to the particular situation in which the people concerned find themselves.
If we can accept this first premise and combine that with the findings of current science regarding human origins, then we have a basis on which to build a common framework that relates our human experience as a shared whole.
<10:03am~
