Talisman to Totemism to Theism to Transtheism - An Augur's Rise to Transcendence - with a video
This reflection is for the birds. And that is a good thing.
[FYI - it is a bit deep, but it is very accessible to your mind. Believe in yourself. You can understand it. It is about you. “You” rock. :) ]
Whether you were:
an ancient Roman watching the flight of birds (an augur partaking in augurism — interpreting the flight of birds in order to predict/foresee the future)
a Polynesian following the flight of birds to the Hawaiian islands — Why? Birds over water fly toward land and birds on land fly to water
an ancient Egyptian priest of Horus — the falcon whose right eye (as seen on the the first coin of the US) was the sun — this is also the/an origin of the “all seeing eye of God” as is seen in the Egyptian pyramid on the US dollar
a central Asian falconer — an ancient human and animal hunting team in history — falcons being the fastest animal in the world and able to see and retrieve animals across thousands of acres with little effort
a Northwest American tribe totem carver who puts birds first and most often in your symbols of wood
or a modern country like the US with its bald eagle or with a double-headed eagle like Germany and Russia (going all the way back to the Mycenaean Greeks of the Trojan War via the Byzantine Empire)
Birds have guided our lives, our souls, and our civilizations across time and space.
With a mental conscience or “state of mind,” we become aware that other people have their own state of mind via the “theory of mind” — an idea of modern psychology. After that we are able to project an idea of consciousness into non-animate objects.
If a bird has a mind and spirit, so also might a rock. Animism is born. One of the earliest and more primitive of religious thinking systems, animism allows us to bring trees into our human communities as in the original Avatar movie. Trees as part of a living “consciousness system” can be found in Genesis 3 and Revelation 22.
Some objects bring us good luck, like a luck rabbits foot, as is seen in a talisman. Nearly everyone projects or stitches superstition into objects. As meaning making machines, we remember life experiences and stories and then attach those experiences and stories to objects that help us remember them — sort of like tangible photographs of/for our lives. If we have the object, we still have a remembrance portal to the memory itself. They remind us to remember a memory. In a roundabout way, the horcuxes of Harry Potter were talismans of Voldemort - Tom Riddle. These are like objects that have a “mind of their own.”
The lion-man, horse head, and waterbird of Germany being the oldest art carvings of the world (30,000ish BCE) are like early totems. Were they merely representational art or did they project their spirits to us for encouragement and meaning as latter totem poles and totem spirits will do?
Some object of the natural world became great “people” and powers that pre-dated, guided, and punished/rewarded us. These sun gods and nature controllers struck hammers to create thunder and pulled the sun across the sky on a chariot. Theism comes from the Greek word “theos” and means god. Deity comes to us all the way from the Proto-Indo-European root [are there trees snaking into this sentence?] “-dyeu” which means “to shine” as in a sun god. It is also connected to “theos” — theism/deism — too.
Transtheism is somewhat fixes the problem, “if religions deal with the supernatural, how do we have so many Eastern religions without a supernatural — are they religions or not? Paul Tillich says they are transtheistic, neither theistic or non-theisitic. They are beyond “god” or they are transcendent to a beyond.
As Ken Wilbur would so aptly suggest with his phrase “transcend and include,” systems do not shed their lower ideas as they emerge into higher states. Carl Jung’s archetypes (processes of nature) live in all of us and we are those archetypes. Everyone is on Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” and is one of the hero with a thousand faces. Everyone has lucky talismans that we use in conjunction with our totem objects and totem spirits as mascots of our lives to connect to that which we believe is bigger and beyond ourselves — be it gods, a God, or the all that is the Universe.
Your DNA has for the most part determined/limited your height, but reading, thinking, living, and learning teach us that when it comes to the growth of your intellectual height “not even the sky is the limit.”
Happy travels and transcendence …and remember to take your friend-rock …and be sure to name it you lucky bird. :)