We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot
In the Age of Exploration, Europeans began to venture beyond their long-held geographical and social confines to wander in and observe the territory beyond. They beheld spectacular new and colorful species of flora and fauna. They discovered new lands – including the first recorded sightings of the continent of Australia. And they encountered new cultures whose languages, belief systems and ways of life were nothing like their own.
These revelations toppled deep-rooted paradigms, cultivating the framework for the coming Age of Enlightenment and the scientific revolution.
Discovery begets truth. Begets transformation.
And discovery begins with exploration.
The impulse to explore has largely been stunted in our time by the erroneous assumption nothing remains to explore. We’ve mapped the earth. We have GPS systems to tell us exactly where we are at any given time. We’ve been to the moon. We’ve sent probes to Mars and even beyond the edge of our solar system. Our telescopes now give us glimpses of the furthest shores of the Universe. Microscopes have deconstructed the atom and beyond.
We have relinquished real exploration to the experts, and we wait for them to sift through the discoveries and highlight what might be meaningful to us in our morning papers and Sunday sermons. And in so doing, we have lost the experience of discovery, settling for filtered reports from the frontiers’ edges.
This lack of experiential exploration has left us yearning for something more. Something that the information and technology revolutions have failed to give us.
The call to explore whispers still, beckoning you to begin a new age of exploration – one that takes you on a captivating journey that leads beyond everything you think is true and into the truth itself. A journey that leads to discoveries that topple deep-rooted paradigms and cultivate a framework that can lead to total fulfillment that transforms your life into one of meaning, beauty, love, joy, peace – into everything you long for and everything you hope to be.
A journey that leads to the center of you. And what you find there – who you find there – is the greatest discovery of all.
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I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested with information than wonder. Fred Rogers
We have unwittingly exchanged the active experience of being alive in the present for living in a dank library filled with atomized facts that we read not with just our eyes, but with our whole physical bodies. We willingly plug ourselves into a matrix of technology and information that, given the right combination, can summon fleeting fulfillment of our selfish desires: popularity, prosperity, pleasure, and power.
These four pillars serve as the supports that bear the table of lifeless and soul-less reductionism where we spend our lives attempting to put together the one-million piece puzzle from the box of pieces that, even if accomplished, would result only in a flattened and ghoulishly carved representation of the real world that awaits us in plain sight – if only we would just turn around, leave the puzzle behind, and embark on a journey of adventure, purpose, and meaning.
We live in blueprints rather than homes. We exchange the territory for the map and the symphony for the sheet music, both of which can be neatly tucked into our day planners. We have abandoned the rapture of a starry night for a lifeless book where the front cover has faded under the white-washed sky of light pollution, the back cover boasts of the data contained within, and the pages between them offer not stories, but columns and charts, distances and densities, enormity and expansion.
We have stripped sacred symbols of their resonance and reduced them to tokens and trinkets to buy, sell, or appropriate for monetary gain. Two-handed scrolls enchant no longer, now lost to mindless single-handed scrolling. Pythagoras marveled at meaning in mathematics, envisioning the number one as the symbol for unity and ten for perfection. He found astonishing connections between music and ratio. But now hear the name Pythagoras and all we can muster is a-squared plus b-squared = c-squared as a formula to conquer algebra tests and solve occasional problems. Mathematics are now mere means to ends.
We have wandered from wonder, only to wonder why we wander.
Today, we delve deeply into the hope that this wretched wasteland in which we wander is not our home – the hope that we may yet wake up and rise up and return to reverence, recapturing rapture and seizing the sublime.
Welcome back to wonder.
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Twitter: @AwestruckPod
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