I was walking past an elementary school several years ago, just as school was letting out for the day. This school used student crossing guards, and there was a female guard who was distinctively more physically mature than the girls around her. It was an interesting and memorable juxtaposition. Immediately, I sensed a depth of spiritual potential in the more developed girl than there was in the others, and the insight came with such clarity that I took it quite seriously. A girl's heart is fascinating...I was constantly lovesick as a child...but a woman's heart can be spectacular. Sure, the hormones come, and suddenly she might become the center of the universe for a lot of guys, but this surprising glimpse into spiritual potential seemed to hint possibly at the nature of the Spirit itself. Why sexual maturity? Why not always? The practical answer might be that a sexually mature young woman needs better decision making skills than her younger self, and the Spirit can certainly help her there. One might even conclude that this is enough. Maybe it is not, however. It would seem, based on this experience, that the higher level of Spirit is not available until adolescence: might it be doing more than just helping the young person? Could there be a parallel process emergent in the soul during human puberty and adolescence, an analogous ripening which may, in fact, reveal that the nature of the soul's relationship with humans is a symbiotic one? In this relationship, the soul through the Spirit gives us guidance and insight leading to our fulfillment, while we in turn help to ripen the soul. Adolescence is the dawn of the procreative energies, so perhaps the Spirit itself can be considered as being procreative. What is it generating, then, besides socially responsible and effective humans? This is one of the mysteries of existence, but I would bet that it has much to do with helping to develop the universe itself, revealing finally that the Spirit needs us as fundamentally as we might need the Spirit.
u/Cultural_Rip187
Isaac Asimov once asserted that if it hadn’t been for the presence of the moon, human civilization would never have developed as quickly as it did. Early humans, he argued, were fascinated by the moon, and were stimulated to decipher the mystery of its existence. What were the phases of the moon, and why were they there? How far away is the moon? Nothing else in the heavens seemed quite so intriguing, for impressive as the sun was it was perceived as unchanging, the stars never changed except that they progressed with the seasons, and the planets moved but quite slowly. People learned that they could predict the seasons by counting the lunar cycles, and the passage of time could be catalogued in this way. The moon, therefore, seems to have catalyzed the early development of humanity: intellectually, culturally, and creatively. The Christian tradition of Easter is still celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon of spring. Without the inspiration of the moon feeding our fascination through its dynamic presence in the sky, we surely may have developed more slowly.
There is a documentary video of Apollo 15, and in a portion of this video the astronauts on the moon are riding a lunar rover, toward one destination or another. They are passing a landscape which is dappled with hills, in combination with the characteristic texture of the surface, the lunar dust among craters, with shadows being formed by the sun upon the undulating surface of the hills, when one of the astronauts passionately exclaims that this is the most beautiful thing that he has ever seen! The exuberance in his voice is validation enough regarding the authenticity of his statement, and one is left to wonder how such a thing could be possible. Here is a barren landscape, desolate in the deepest sense of the word, devoid of dynamic energies promising any fruitful future changes, and yet here is the most beautiful thing a mature human being has ever seen. Such is the mystery of beauty. The images of Neptune’s moon Triton collected by one of the Voyager spacecraft during its flyby are themselves replete with an inexplicable and subtle beauty. Here is a landscape whose temperature is hundreds of degrees below zero, where water ice has the hardness of steel because of the cold, and where a human would die almost instantly if exposed to these conditions, and yet it can be perceived by our sense of sight as beautiful.
Beauty seems to be the inevitable result of natural forces at work over extended periods of time, as if beauty were implicit in the natural laws which govern the universe, including ourselves. The examples of beauty just mentioned require light in order to be perceived by us, yet other kinds of beauty do not. We might recognize a certain piece of music as beautiful, or even a smell…an idea or a hope. We evolved from beauty, to become capable of recognizing beauty, that we might embellish and enshrine the beauty of the present and future through the living of our lives. Here is the poetry of our existence.