In The Beginning...

Deep down in our bones, we all know the truth.  Each of us, every man, woman, and child on the Earth, are products of the Laws of the Universe, so functioning according to those laws must be built into each of us at our most basic level.  The overarching problem of modern man is to enable that elemental pre-conscious awareness of how things are to rise into consciousness so that our logical, analytical mind can use it just as our primitive, animalistic mind does on an unconscious level. 

The Hopi have a conception of Original Instructions, the instructions that God gave all forms of life at the beginning of the World.  These Instructions are the laws governing each creature’s place in the Web of Life that must be obeyed if a being is to flourish.  All beings continue to operate according to their Original Instructions except Man.  We have forgotten those Instructions or have been led away from them.  The basic purpose of this blog is to point people to a path that will lead them back to their Original Instructions.

This blog is offered in the hope that it will help to promote a general widening of the reader’s conception of the Universe, both what it is and what it can be.  We believe this is best approached by seeking an understanding of those ancient, primitive truths that humanity knew before “Modern Civilization” took us away from Nature and from our own true nature.  The ideas we will present in the coming days are a statement of a philosophy and, more than that, a way of being and acting and relating to the world.  While readers will likely not agree with every idea, the conceptual framework that will be presented, when taken as a whole, is self-supporting and coherent as a worldview.  It is in fact the worldview of every group of people that still live close to the Earth according to their original instructions, the original worldview of all of Humanity.

It is somewhat ironic that this blog, entitled "The Thinking Person’s Guide to the Universe”, would have as one of its most important ideas that in order to truly grasp the basic, raw reality of the universe, one must in fact stop thinking.  Being in the moment, perceiving the universe as it actually is, not as we think it to be, is an important spiritual tradition in many cultures.  And it is one that is becoming more and more alien to the culture we find ourselves in today, a culture of noise, communication, music, shouting, a culture that does not recognize the value of pure, simple silence. 

But, before one can be open to this new way of thinking, the mind must first be prepared, prepared to relinquish its control over every waking minute of our lives, prepared to go to sleep when we need it to.  We do that by first using our mind to introduce a new conceptual framework, one that makes sense to our logical selves, one that admits that our thinking can sometimes get in the way of our perceptions of the world, of what it real and true.  Once we have made that leap of the mind, then we can, through trial and practice, turn it off when we need to just be and just perceive rather than to think.  And in those moments we open ourselves up to our real spiritual nature and the true nature of the world we live in.