What might we say if we were to soar over the great and tragic Story of humanity aboard Earth?
What scenes might we stop by to visit with our children?
What scenes would we try to shield their eyes from? Should we shield their eyes? If they see the horrors will they be traumatized? Or will the trauma help ensure that they only ever have to revisit those moments with their minds, and not with their Reality?
Perhaps we should go back the beginning, and start from there.
No, we must go Deeper. We must return to the Deepest Thing. We must go back to before the beginning.
It is there that we encounter the Mystery of the One Uncaused Cause. The domain of God.
The domain of Absolute Wisdom, Truth, and Love.
Then perhaps we will not travel alone, but allow the Spirit of Wisdom, Truth, and Love to guide us along the Golden Threads it has laid throughout all cultures, tribes, and peoples.
Perhaps we will allow it to illuminate for us, in addition to the brilliant diversity, what it has shown to all peoples, that we all share in common.
Perhaps we will allow it to illuminate for us how what we all share in common relates to our universe, and to what all Life and Consciousness shares in common.
And then perhaps we will see if we can build from all those Patterns a Pattern Language to Guide us forward on our Quest towards The Goal.
Perhaps we would be led to begin before the beginning...
and then progress to the beginning...
and get a sense of the cosmic scope of the universe in all its unsearchable glory.
Perhaps we would visit the earth in its earlier stages, and remain to hear the first rustling of Life.
Perhaps we would take a detour into our Current Best Understanding of the Science of Life, so that we could understand what was struggling to emerge and flourish.
We would visit the elementary fabric of Creation, and work our way up through the invisible and subatomic, all the up through the levels of co-operative superorganisms.
We would then revisit the Sixth Stanza, where human beings emerge.
We would perhaps stop to grapple with Psychology, Consciousness, and Perception, so that we could understand what it was in "us" that allowed "us" to Perceive and Think About all these things.
We would visit the origins of Religion, and its progression throughout Time.
We would visit ancient Egypt, and grapple with its giant mysteries still rising up out of the sands.
We would visit the 6th century BC in China to see Confucius and Lao Tzu.
We would spring forward to Mencius in the 3rd century BC.
We would float over to Ancient Greece, and visit Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
We would visit Socrates, Plato, Democritus, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Archimedes and Hippocrates.
We would visit the tribes of Israel, and observe their successive failed attempts to forge a Tribe Of Tribes that could persist in Right Relationship with the Creator. We would visit Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Moses, Solomon, and The Psalmist.
We would visit the Romans as they laid the foundation of a new social, political and religious order that lasted in various ways for millennia. We would visit Lucretius, Virgil, and Marcus Aurelius.
We would visit Jesus, and ponder the strange collision of religion, empire, and the Spirit of God.
We would visit the Bible as it was being canonized in the first centuries AD.
As we watched Rome descend towards Chaos and ruin, we would witness the birth of Europe.
We would visit Constantine and Charlemagne.
We would visit Mohammed, and advance to the new civilization springing up through Baghdad.
We would visit the House of Wisdom, as scholars from the around the world translated the entire known body of knowledge.
We would watch as the Turks invaded and set back the experiment.
We would witness emergent Christianity through the lenses of Dante, Chaucer, and Thomas Aquinas.
We would advance out of the Middle Ages into the Italian Renaissance, where Michelangelo, Boticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Angelo, Bruno, and Copernicus emerge.
We would visit Luther as he calls out the failings of the Catholic Church.
We would see the perpetual unholy alliances again as the split in religion provided cover for a split in politics, leading to the creation of many independent European states.
We would watch the reorganization prepare the soil for Renaissance simultaneously in the many new countries of Europe.
Francis Bacon
Isaac Newton
Voltaire
Immanuel Kant
Charles Darwin
Marcus Aurelius
Spinoza
Nietzsche
William Shakespeare
Montaigne
Lastly, we would stop to see what all this had to teach us about the Art And Science Of Living, about what we ought to Do in light of all we have come to know.
We would gather up our notes on all the things that could help us transform our Selves and our World, and thereby Progress towards our Goal.