We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
Buddha

The overreaching theme of human existence and thought is the attempt of humanity to place itself in time—to mark and control the perception of existence through attempts to fix an unchanging point in a dynamic and constantly changing universe—between absolute past and absolute future.

These attempts to control the material world of existence are all based in human imagination. Buildings, music, scholarship, art, food--all technology—attempt to fix and explain our existence at a specific point in time by personalizing the world through the application of imagination—to mark our being here through a creative and interpretive process—whether through graffiti or gnocchi, Egyptian pyramids or Mayan calendars—space travel or religious rites.

We arrive in this temporal plane amidst effluvia and confusion and we leave it pretty much the same way. We can’t say where we come from and we don’t where we’re going and all the time in between these two points we struggle with ourselves and each other over what we don’t know, exercising our human imaginations in the infinite void of time and space. We can only know for sure that we will one day die—that is, we will again change, in accordance with the dynamism of the universe.

We need to relax and truly smell the flowers and seek to understand rather than harbor a futile lust to know. Static knowledge is only imagined power—dynamic understanding that builds upon itself and continues to enlighten through constant change. It is communication—dialogue that makes this possible. St. John said “In the beginning was the word”, the Buddhists acknowledge the eternal OM-Jews embrace Hillel’s vision of the interpretation of God’s dream. The Greek Church incorporated Sophos or Wisdom into their understanding of the Christian godhead. Zen acknowledges the Tao without acknowledging the Tao. All point to a singular universal vibration of which we are all a part—an energy at once singular to each but shared by all.

Camus once observed that historians were the Sisyphus’ of humanity, constantly rolling the rock of history up the hill of human forgetfulness. I would disagree—historians are the moderators of a continuing human dialogue about where they have been, how they feel about it and what should be done in the future. The facts are important, accuracy is important but more important still is the constant re assessment and reinterpretation of those facts in light of our world at any given point in time with the understanding that nothing can be absolutely known any more that anything can be absolutely controlled. We must revel in the shared fact that we can truly know nothing--but we can attempt to understand. Such cosmic uncertainty should inspire only faith and evoke only mutual compassion rather than conflict in the rational animal.