Drawing from the source of time and space, events, and meaning-making. This website is a personal database of information regarding worldviews, philosophies, and mythologies from different cultures around the world, across time.
Beneath, you see a timeline of the formation of earth and life. Wikipedia says: “The geologic time scale is a way of representing deep time based on events that have occurred throughout Earth’s history, a time span of about 4.54 billion years.”
How wonderful!
The term “deep time” already allows my imagination to travel to undiscovered and surreal places. I enter a spaceship that allows me to experience this deep time, what is 100 years compared to this geological timeline? It swallows me, never to be seen again. And that amazes me. Those 100 years are my total world, yet they disappear as quickly as a single breath.
For now, scientists propose that Homo sapiens arose roughly 300,000 years ago. Again, a timeframe that is hard to grasp. Three million years ago, something that looked like us, walked in Africa. Can you imagine? I struggle to. What can happen in 3 million years… if already so much can happen in my personal life.
Much of our short-term human energy has been dedicated to trying to reconstruct this history, resulting in a source of beauty and insight. To make it more imaginable, scientists mark 40 thousand years ago as the moment when humans began to behave like humans today. Most scholars agree that modern human behavior can be characterized by abstract thinking, planning depth, symbolic behavior (e.g., art, ornamentation), music, and dance.
But still, 40 thousand years is a lot to comprehend. To reconstruct this time, cave paintings and engraved designs in stone, bone, and other hard materials that can survive for thousands of years are found and interpreted.
People now do something fascinating. They try to understand the meaning of those items, creating beautiful stories and understandings. It is a magical world where all kinds of interpretations arise.
This power we have to give meaning to things and events in life is both a curse and a blessing. A curse because it means there are no firm answers to questions, creating a space of uncertainty. A blessing because in that uncertainty, there is an infinite amount of space in which we can create, experience, and explore. It also means that you can time travel in a way because you can have multiple interpretations and storylines on a single thing or event.
For example, an egg. It is; breakfast, the beginning of the universe, a way to cleanse yourself from negative energies, chicken abuse, subject in the causality dilemma; what came first, the chicken or the egg? and also a meditation method; the meditation begins to explore the way in which one’s inward being connects with the outward world.
The stories that come to you or are given importance shape your world, give you understanding, and show you how to see the world, thus impacting how you experience things. And here it becomes really interesting because it influences the way you experience life.
Traveling to other cultures gives a clear understanding of this influence of meaning on how you look at life and experience it.
The stories we tell each other and ourselves, what we think is important and the collective cultural constructions we make of what is truth and what is nonsense influence our awareness on the domains of life. Your attitude towards that what is unknown shapes your understanding of it.
My interests lie in the philosophies and worldviews people live in and make sense of this life. Firstly, to try to understand life for myself, but secondly because I see the immense richness it gives when you are confronted with the nothingness, greatness, and creativity of humankind.