V. The Caves
Joseph Campbell said, “The two, the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found—are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.
What a fiery quest to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known. A self-mirrored mystery confronts us and confounds us and informs us with its outside and its inside—a mystery identical with the mystery of the manifest world.
Consider the Chauvet Cave where the exquisite horses' heads are expressed in such textured dimensionality and the gorgeous, masculine lines of the bison expressed in their magnificent stances that seem to be in mid-step and the distinctive red ochre handprints and hand stencils, a signature of individuality, pressed against the cave surface.
Where did this impetus arrive? This drive to create, this impetus to expand beyond the encasement of skin and etch a memory, preserve a moment, capture beauty, articulate a practical illustration vital to survival. And when did the enlightening aesthetic of the good weave itself into the fabric of the human heart, a consciousness of the good, a striving for, the achieving of the good? And where came the neural synapses to connect the dots, recognize the true, architect a way of living together, a birthing of conscience, of discovering what seem to be natural laws endemic to humanness hidden in the bones and viscera of the body and eventually articulated onto papyrus and stone and paper and now silicon, the true.
As Teri said in her magnificent Mystery of God message, "Out of these holy bones…the longings for the transcendent, arising as if soundings from a beloving embedded in sacral caverns so deep. That like the light of the stars that will arrive and be visible to us only in tonight’s sky, that like the song, the prayer, that arises in us today—left the lips of the Holy and Generative Spirit eons ago with the cry that let loose the many colored mysterious creation of universes imaginable and even those wholly unimaginable, wholly other." Such beauty and life in what we can see in these clay-like, fleshy outcroppings of individuals and such beauty and life hidden in the truth that we are formed from the dust of stars and collectively circulate the song, the prayer that was let loose so many eons ago.