by Tina Loflin

Created on: November 09, 2008

Life is suffused with questions, with worries, with doubts. In just about every aspect of society, from the moment we are aware of ourselves as individuals, questions emerge, as to who we are and how we figure in the scheme of things, both in everyday life and in the total picture. Do our lives have meaning? Do we have a special connection with the world, or is it all random moments experienced and lived in the now, without any true meaning?

Such questions are the basis of a continual search that inevitably each person faces in the course of life. From questions on the ethics involving daily living to wondering as to whether there is more meaning to life than the everyday-is there something more? Is there some sort of plan or design for living beings, sentient or not? Is there more 'out there?'

From earliset times to now, such questions have suffused the psyche of humans. These have led to awareness. and continued seeking for reasons for how life works, how we as humans ought to live, and interact with those around us. For many, answers seem to spring out of a feeling that there is more than meets the eye at first glance, that there is a pattern to life, a force figuring throughout all aspects of existence.

Such an awareness might have started out very basically, like a sense of awe at the stars, perhaps, or the terrible vagaries of weather and how it affects a person's life-good weather aided the hunter, the farmer, the mother nurturing her young ones. Bad weather would and could destroy villages, foment conflicts about water, and other ills. These events and observations maight well impel the thought that Someone was in charge of all this, and that Someone must needs be appeased, courted, honored-so that there might hopefully be a minimum of tragedies, and a maximum of benefits to the individual and the community,

As society became more complex, this awareness of an Other wa built on. Stories could have evolved, and rituals as well, starting from simple appeasements like sharing part of the catch or harvest with that Other, to more sophisticated rituals, to a liturgy, a cohesive set of precepts, ideas, legends, even taboos.

This is still going on today, as modern cultures clash with simpler tribal groups. The questions continue, and they are imbedded in most people's cosnciousness-to use one of Jung's ideas, a group mind/ memory(?) . Every culture , from native tribes having little influence with the modern world, to the sophisticated, jet-flying average Joe or Jill, has some conceptions about the Other-even to negating the concept, declaring oneself atheistic-but first he or she would have had to consider the concept of a supreme being/ beings, and the attendant rituals, beliefs, and stories about the supreme being/beings.

Society, whether simple or complex, must perforce come to grapple with such thoughts. These beliefs and concepts are layered in everyday life, even the calendar-whichever one used(the Hebrew calendar for Judaism, the one for Islam, the one for Buddhism, and others)-affect daily business on a subtle level, and accepted. For such to not be the case would need a wrenching of the concept of how one measures a year, and from where does the dating begin, from what event? For Christians, it's Christmas, the Year 1-and everything follows after, whether or not a person is actually Christian or not. For other societies, the Day 1 is an entirely different thing, and the months are arranged differently as well.

So we humans have leavened our everyday lives, and religion-even if a person does not practice any faith, he or she will live by the general consensus, because those who believed have set things in motion so that elements of religion will suffuse daily life.

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