WHAT IS NOT

Lion Man, Germany

Sekhmet, Egypt

We Homo Sapiens are the only animals on the planet that have the ability to envision something that is not seen or has not yet been created.  Imagination is considered to be the ability to think of what is not. 

In the introduction of her book on The Lost Art of Scripture, Karen Armstrong introduces Lion Man.  He is a small ivory figurine that was found in a southern German cave just before World War II.  The cave did not appear to have been lived in and may have been used only for rituals, given that the figurine was found in a remote chamber and had the body of a man but the head of a cave lion.  He is considered to be 40,000 years old and may be the earliest evidence of human religious activity.

Armstrong notes that “The imagination has been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion…neurologists tell us that in fact we have no direct contact with the world we inhabit.  We have only perspectives that come to us through the intricate circuits of our nervous system…We are surrounded by a reality that transcends—or ‘goes beyond’ or conceptual grasp.”

That insight prompted me to validate something I had learned years ago that less than one percent of all light that passes through our eyes can be processed by us.  Our eyes are miraculous, containing 100 million cells called rods and cones inside the retina, but the cones can only see a very narrow band of wavelengths on the light spectrum.

And I was also reminded of the Egyptian pyramid wall art that most of us have observed over the years which is still being recovered in the vast desert sands.  In that culture over 4,000 years ago gods and goddesses were represented as all of the fundamental necessities required for sustaining life.  The goddess Sekhmet, daughter of Ra, was believed to lead and protect the pharaohs during war.  She is depicted with a lioness head and is known for her fierce character. 

Hybrid creatures depicted on cave walls and in other art forms over the millennia “seems to reflect a sense of the underlying unity of animal, human and divine”, as Armstrong observes, “and shows that from the very beginning men and women were deliberately cultivating a perception of existence that differed from the empirical and had an instinctive appetite for a more enhanced sense of being, sometimes called the Sacred.”  We occasionally have these inspired moments of joyful euphoria in music, dance, poetry, nature, love, and religion—especially when we experience something beyond our experience—something heretofore that is not.