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Original Instructions
Everything is designed to destroy your empathy because if you suddenly understood all the suffering and your interconnectedness you’d fall to your knees and weep in the streets…
— Kappa Kappa
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Every animal who walks, hops or crawls upon the face of the earth is born with a set of instructions written in its tissue. Birds are born, if not knowing what to sing, with a predisposition to join in when they hear the song of their species. Birds are born with a predisposition to build a nest, to fly in certain directions at certain times of the year. Seeds are also born with instructions, as are insects.
I do not believe that human beings, alone in all the world, are born without instructions, I do believe our consciousness is so complicated that we can easily lose our homing beacon. But through it all, we hear a deep “whisper” when we are in nature. We sometimes feel a sad nostalgia for something our senses cannot capture but which whispers to us when the wind blows through the trees or when waves crash to shore.
We are not truly outside nature at all, it just looks that way to our frightened and confused minds. One purpose of religion, whether or not we call it by that name, is to reconnect and to re-establish contact with our deeper roots. Whether or not we find the symbol “God” helpful in expressing it…
