We have always needed to answer the basic human questions: “Who are we? What are we in the middle of? What does all this mean and where are we going?”

These fundamental questions don’t go away because they are more or less unanswerable. We live in the midst of a vast mystery. To really dive into these questions fully is to encounter that mystery head-on.

Shamans and storytellers and priests and holy men have offered answers to these questions, and these answers have formed the bedrock of their culture’s self-definition. Once we know who we are and what we in the middle of and what the point of it all is then we have some direction, we have some overarching principles to guide all our activities.

In the modern world we are still living with the shattered remnants of the previous, ancient answers our culture had to these questions, as well as the very ill-fitting ones that scientific reductionism replaced them with over the last few hundred years.

We have been floundering ever since. The new scientific answers reduce our existence to something empty and lifeless, in a cold universe with little or no meaning. I find it shocking that all the beauty and meaning in life got squeezed out by turning to science to answer these fundamental questions.

The truth is that science is just one way of looking at our universe. It can build bridges and crack atoms, so it has kudos. But can it really look the fundamental mystery of our existence in the eye and have anything helpful to say?

Well, science has been attempting to do just that in the last century and the results have been quite intriguing. The deeper the enquiry into the very smallest (or very largest) aspects of our material universe, the more the answer that emerges is mysterious, unfathomable, escaping capture by our reasoning mind.

Which is just as it should be. The answers to these fundamental questions need to come from a whole-being surrender to the unknown. The shamans of our distant past, who forged our earliest answers, knew that the mysteries must be treated with the utmost respect. It is not so much that we deduce and reason what is out there, but rather that we listen and learn, and even then must doubt our conclusions. The mystery is bigger than our minds can tell. So we need to engage it in ways that are open-ended, like poetry, song or story.

The picture of the universe that our current, cutting-edge science paints is almost poetic, and echoes what shamans and mystics have said for ages: that we are all ONE. We have fallen asleep to the true reality of our existence, which is far vaster than our minds can imagine.

We urgently need to engage in these fundamental questions afresh now. It is a tragedy that the scientific-reductionist answers were accepted as an adequate response. And yet, now that we can see where they are leading us, we need to find new ones.

I honestly don’t know how that will happen. But I notice that whenever I watch a movie, I’m hoping that the message of love, unity and mystery will be there. It almost never is. But I believe that one day it will be widespread, and the sooner the better.

Here’s my own offering, a story that I told on the theme of Reunion, about a Queen who remembers all the many levels of interconnection that her way of living has obscured – her deep connection to nature, to humanity, to life itself. This audio story is accompanied by music and songs created with my wife Sundara which draw the listener deeper in to their own remembering of interconnection.

We need this remembering now, to let the truth of who we are inform the culture we create; to bring about the kind of world in which our unity with all life is expressed and made manifest in everything we do.

With love,

Leo.

Invitation to Surrender
If you live in Devon, I’m hosting a very special event at Jellyfish Arts Hub in Buckfastleigh: Invitation to Surrender, featuring stories, songs and sharing about how life’s challenges can invite us into a deeper trust. More details here.

Intuitive Storytelling Training in Devon
Also in Devon, my in person training in Intuitive Storytelling still has spaces available and runs on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th October. For more information and to book online, see this page.