One of the things that has fascinated me as I have thought about the human journey is how dramatically the world has changed simply because we have become better at getting from one place to another and at sharing what we discover. For most of human history, people lived in relatively small worlds. Geography mattered. A person might know their family, their village, perhaps neighboring communities, but the rest of the world was largely unknown. There were oceans, mountains, deserts, forests, and enormous distances separating one group of people from another. Those physical boundaries also became boundaries of thought. What you knew was largely what your community knew. What you believed was largely what your community believed. The stories of your people became the story of reality.
People moved, of course. Migration has been part of the human story from the beginning. People followed food, water, animals, changing climates, and opportunities for survival. As they moved, they carried more than their belongings. They carried their memories, stories, languages, customs, technologies, and beliefs. Eventually those migrating streams of humanity began to intersect with one another. And when they did, ideas were exchanged that would slowly change the way human beings understood the world. They discovered that other people had different answers to the same questions.
Exploration accelerated that process. As people traveled farther, worlds that had existed independently of one another began to meet. Trade routes became much more than routes for moving goods. Along with spices, metals, textiles, and other commodities traveled ideas. Religions encountered other religions. Philosophies encountered other philosophies. Technologies moved from one culture to another. Stories were exchanged, adapted, and sometimes absorbed. What had seemed like an absolute understanding of reality suddenly became one understanding among many.
That has always been a little unsettling for human beings. It is one thing to believe that your understanding of the world is true when you have never encountered anything different. It is quite another to discover that people on the other side of the world have developed an entirely different explanation for God, creation, morality, death, the purpose of life, and what it means to be human. Once those worlds begin to meet, comparison becomes unavoidable. And comparison has a way of loosening the grip of certainty.
Then transportation began to change everything. The world that had once taken months to cross could eventually be crossed in weeks, then days, then hours. Ships became faster. Railroads connected regions. Automobiles changed personal mobility. Airplanes essentially collapsed enormous distances. Every technological advance shortened the physical space between human beings.
But something else happened at the same time. As the distance between people became smaller, the distance between ideas became smaller too.
The printing press was one of the great turning points. Before it, information was largely dependent upon human memory, oral tradition, handwritten manuscripts, and the institutions that controlled access to them. Suddenly ideas could be reproduced and distributed on a scale that had never been possible. A person could encounter an idea from someone they had never met, living in a place they had never seen, and perhaps writing hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
That changed the intellectual landscape. Authority was no longer quite as secure. A person could read something that challenged what they had been taught. Another interpretation could sit beside the inherited interpretation. A different history could challenge the official history. A different translation could cause someone to question the meaning of a familiar religious text. Knowledge began escaping the boundaries that had previously contained it.
And we have continued down that road ever since.
Radio allowed voices to travel enormous distances. Television allowed people to see events happening somewhere else. Satellites allowed us to look back at the earth from space. Then came the internet, and the whole thing exploded.
We have now reached a point where distance has almost ceased to matter in the movement of information. Something can happen on the other side of the planet and be in my hand seconds later. A photograph can be taken and transmitted instantly. A video can be watched by millions of people before the people involved in the event have even had time to understand what happened. A thought that once might have remained inside someone’s head, or perhaps within a small community, can now circle the globe.
We have, in effect, created a kind of global nervous system.
And like any nervous system, it carries both useful information and a lot of noise.
That is where things become complicated.
The same technology that allows us to see things we could never have seen before also allows us to manipulate what we see. The same communication systems that can connect people can divide them. The same camera that can document reality can be used to create a false reality. Information can be edited, selectively presented, taken out of context, exaggerated, distorted, or simply invented.
And now we have reached the uncomfortable place where having more information does not necessarily mean knowing more.
Sometimes it means knowing less about what to trust.
I think this is one of the great problems of our time. We have access to an almost unimaginable amount of information, yet we are experiencing a growing crisis of trust. Who do I believe? Which institution is telling me the truth? Which expert is actually an expert? Which news report is accurate? Is the photograph real? Is the video real? Is the person telling me this actually telling me what they know, or what they want me to believe?
That uncertainty creates something very powerful in human beings: fear.
And fear has a tendency to make us want control.
When I am uncertain, I want something solid to stand on. When I am afraid, I want someone to tell me what is happening. I want an explanation. I want an enemy. I want someone responsible. I want to know what I can do to make the uncertainty go away.
That is where misinformation becomes particularly powerful. A lie does not have to be believable because it is true. Sometimes it only has to provide enough certainty to satisfy the fear.
If I cannot trust the institution, I may trust my tribe. If I cannot trust the media, I may trust the person who confirms what I already suspect. If I cannot trust the government, I may believe the alternative explanation that gives me a sense that I finally understand what is really happening.
And there is the irony. The technology that has given us access to more perspectives than any generation in history can also allow us to surround ourselves with people who think exactly as we do.
We can choose our information now.
And that means we can choose our reality.
At least we can choose the information from which our version of reality is constructed.
That brings me back to something I have been thinking about for a long time. We all receive information and experiences throughout our lives. We take what we have been taught, what has happened to us, what we have observed, what people have told us, what our culture considers normal, what our religion teaches, what our family believes, and what we have personally experienced, and somehow we assemble all of that into a picture of reality.
That picture becomes the operating system through which we interpret everything else.
The interesting thing is that we usually don’t realize we are doing it.
We think we are simply seeing reality.
But we are seeing reality through everything that has already been assembled within us.
And now the world is giving us more information than our ancestors could ever have imagined. Archaeology is giving us new information about ancient civilizations. Science continues to change our understanding of matter, time, space, consciousness, and the universe. Comparative religion allows us to place religious traditions alongside one another and see both their differences and their similarities. Linguistics allows us to examine how words and ideas changed as they moved from one language and culture into another. Psychology and neuroscience are giving us new ways of understanding how the human mind constructs its experience of the world.
All of these things are tributaries flowing into the same river.
And the river is changing.
The beliefs we inherited were formed in particular historical, cultural, linguistic, and informational environments. That doesn’t automatically make them wrong. But it does mean they were constructed within a context. And when the context changes, our understanding can change with it.
This is particularly important when we begin examining religion.
Much of what I inherited as religious truth came to me as though it had simply dropped out of heaven in its finished form. But when I began looking backward, I discovered something much more interesting. Ideas have histories. Words have histories. Interpretations have histories. Doctrines have histories. The way we understand a biblical passage today may be the result of centuries of translation, interpretation, philosophy, institutional decisions, and cultural assumptions.
That doesn’t necessarily destroy the spiritual experience behind the tradition.
In fact, it may do the opposite.
It may force us to separate the experience from the explanations we have constructed around the experience.
And that distinction has become increasingly important to me.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that we are losing our faith. Perhaps we are discovering that some of the things we called faith were actually inherited explanations that we had never examined.
That can be frightening.
It can also be liberating.
Because once I realize that my understanding of reality has been assembled from information and experience, I can begin asking a different question. Instead of defending everything I have inherited, I can become curious about it. Where did this idea come from? What did the original word mean? What assumptions were operating when this interpretation developed? What happened between the original experience and the doctrine I eventually inherited?
That is where this whole journey of remembering begins to make sense to me.
Remembering is not simply going backward.
It isn’t trying to recover some imaginary perfect past.
It is becoming willing to examine what has been assembled within me and to discover what is actually true beneath the layers of interpretation, fear, conditioning, expectation, and inherited belief.
The world has been shrinking for thousands of years. Every migration, every trade route, every ship, every railroad, every airplane, every book, every broadcast, every computer, and every smartphone has reduced another barrier between human beings.
With every barrier removed, we have been forced into greater contact with information that challenges what we previously believed.
That’s not a problem.
Think of it as part of our development.
Humanity is being pushed into a larger understanding of reality because the old, isolated worlds in which our beliefs were formed can no longer contain us.
We are discovering that the world is far larger than the stories we were given about it.
While this is happening, we are also discovering that we are far larger than the stories we were given about ourselves.
That is where all of these tributaries finally converge for me.
The shrinking of the physical world has produced an expansion of human awareness. The expansion of information has challenged inherited certainty. The collapse of certainty has produced fear. Fear has produced a desire for control. Control has created new forms of manipulation. And beneath all of it is a human being trying to answer the oldest question of all:
What is actually real?
That question is not the threat we have sometimes been taught to believe it is.
It is the beginning of remembering.
Which is another interesting thought for understanding.
Maybe a future discussion.
Thoughts For Thinkers 