Every thousand years we learn a vast amount about ourselves and the world around us, yet there always remains a vast amount more. It is as if we and our world will always be a mystery to us. But we can trust ourselves and the world based on what we now know about our species. We have more gifts than we knew and our gifts are enough for our needs. Our psychology has evolved around a gratitude for life and for each other that makes life and each other and ourselves feel sacred. This sense of the sacred in the core of our evolved psychology gives us the guidance and courage we need, and we get enormous comfort from the echo of the sacred in each other. Trusting Ourselves looks at death, hate, and responsibility and shows they give us gratitude, soul and each other, and are part of our gifts, instead of curses. The difficult parts of life are shown to be the challenges we need to discover our gifts and to earn a sense of a well lived life. While we are called to use our gifts, we are able to refuse our gifts and earn the taste of ashes. Trusting Ourselves shows that most of life is living in relation to each other, and is a continual flow of difficult choices without easy answers, because we are as complex and ambiguous as the universe from which we evolved. The guidance we get from inside is a vague encouragement to be a gift to each other, leaving us to learn from experience how to apply this as a practical matter. Religion and philosophy give us the benefit of the experiential wisdom of our forebears, but there is no escaping the need for courage. We regularly have to make important decisions about others without being sure, while knowing we will judge our own choices and our lives. Adam and Eve was written three thousand years ago, and billions of moments of experience of ourselves and of the world around us have occurred since. We can see now that what were seen as curses are part of our gifts. We can see that the creative goodness we sense at work in us and in the universe may or may not be in the world outside our psychology, but is in our psychology and so is as real as could be for us, since we live from our psychology. We only use religion and philosophy to help us live. Our psychology is our foundation, and the core of our psychology is a sense of the sacred that leaves us humble and grateful and filled with fear and wonder, and very much needing the comfort of each other. This overwhelming experience we all share is the foundation we need for the world civilization now forming. Even though it cannot be captured in words, it can be the acknowledged standard for our laws and our expectations of each other.
About the Author: Denis Murray, Sr. is a philosopher interested in hope and hate. Educated at Georgetown, he practiced law for 20 years and then turned to philosophy. He has studied religion, psychology and science, looking for a new foundation for our world civilization. Now in his 70's, he has begun to publish in recent years. He says we have evolved to be a gift to each other, stronger than hate. He is continuing to write, publish and present.