My coinage for "God, the Universe and . . . Shit" has the in-built option for using any other, more polite word for which the "S" may stand, depending on the company in which I find myself.  Whether "Stuff", or "Something", GUS originates in over 30 years of philosophical maunderings, forth and back, 'twixt the deeply embedded Received Wisdom of my Presbyterian baptism and an undeniable longing inherent to a Divine Spirit I feel, within myself, for . . .

More

More than my Sunday school image of a kindly but stern Father enthroned in Heaven; more, certainly, than a demand for my worship from an also often-jealous and vengeful Yahweh; more than merely the "Feel-Goodism" the recent New Age had to offer; more than in any of the religions I have encountered - which I trust people have built up around the example and teachings of Gautama Buddha, Yeshua ben Yusef, or The Prophet Muhammad (his name be praised to Allah).

“GUS”, I have witnessed – and not least for its note of irreverence – is a label which a number of my soul-mates groove on. Among the many manifestations S/he may have emanated with Original Thought, such as our Universe for instance, any and all of the Thought, containing even greater aspects of that Her/im - Mother/Father God could not but help including healthy doses of some Hilarious Stuff in this emanation.

There's just no denying some Deeply Mysterious, sometimes Logically Perplexing, and often Heart-rending Wonders in this cosmos! (for just one example, look into the pro-creative requirements bestowed by Him/Her upon the Horsehair Worm, as I first discovered it, thanks to Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek")

With genuine respect, then, for any Sister or Brother who feels differently, on my path I seek to balance the pursuits of my Spiritual Life with attention to my Intellectual Life, as well. And to any who may feel and/or think differently, I will devotedly support their GUS-given right to do so.

As of now, though, I still feel that I may for some time to come need to abide with a certain contentedness – expressed in part with that irreverently characterized Source of All, and to pray that I never forget how easily I can fall into some kind of Ego-trip leading to taking GUS way too fuckin' seriously!

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Still, consciousness is both boon and burden, isn't it? Isn't that why I just can't “make up my mind”? I mean, in that "maundering progress of my philosophy", of late, there has been something of a fugue, growing, as my observations and reflections upon GUS leap and skip around, forth and back, refusing (thus far) to become entirely united.

My dilemma may not then be entirely dissimilar to Master Zhuang Zhou's own (circa 200 BCE) conundrum: having apparently awakened from a human dream of being a butterfly, he was in the end left wondering whether he was, fundamentally, in fact the butterfly – and only now, once again, dreaming of being a human.

But like lots of folks (and maybe the odd butterfly) I'm regularly given to gazing, in rapt wonder, at a clear night's sky. In fact, I imagine, folks have been doing the very same thing for a long, long time. And even though we've got fancy orbiting telescopes now, and real-time, online plots of planetary movements, gazing heavenward in the 21st Century remains an experience which for many of us is at least as much an emotional thing than it is anything else. And, not wrongly so. What we do, though, or how we work with the emotions arising out of such experiences - that is the stuff of this blog!

The fugue grows in complexity when I admit my very human illusion of immediacy in experiencing a wonder like the star-strewn Terran sky.  Actually, though - trust me, I just googled it – even when only this evening streaming onto my retinal receptors, the photons of light from the nearest regions of our next-door-neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, take about 2 million years to reach Terra. In the metric of evolutionary theory, as counterpoint, those very photons have apparently been hurtling through space since Homo erectus arose in Africa!

Even if it wasn't any of our erectus ancestors, or -habilus, -africanus, et. al. - I also try to weave a further note into the fugue: by wondering about any of those folks who first gazed up into a clear night sky – and came away with such an experience of their wonder (and emotion) that they were lead to hope that up there in the sky might be found the answers for their deepest-held questions. Now, of course, I don't mean that those first, thoughtful star-gazers were pondering anything like the social justice implications of global trade regimes. I imagine it was a more local problem, like, why the hunts of late had been providing the clan with so little meat, perhaps. But still, the problem persisted, for them, and no less so for us.

And, just maybe, this star-gazer was that person in the clan to whom the rest looked for solace, advice, or healing. I thank “Earth's Children” Series author Jane Auel for an image of early human life I especially esteem: that it may well have been that particular clan member somehow physically or mentally different from the rest who was trusted to plumb the mysteries of their lives – their shaman.

It would take another couple score millennia before this role, in modern societies, morphed into formalized priesthoods.  Human imagination having nonetheless remained what I think it is, when a reliable answer, and especially one which is emotionally comfortable can't be found, well then one must simply be made up!

Even we modern people still want an outside, independent authority to bolster a decision we've already settled on, as the most emotionally satisfying, first of all. Don't we?

My path is determinedly characterized by being honest with myself, about that - for a beginning of a human cosmology fitting for the 21st century.