Why All the Bullshit?

Why all of the bullshit? We seem to unavoidably create imaginary realms and then claim that we have lost contact with them: Mount Olympus, the Elysian Fields, Heaven, Plato’s land of absolutes, the spiritual realm, etc.

I was reading a post on Medium that included the following:

“All human beings are descendants of tribal people who were spiritually alive, intimately in love with the natural world, children of Mother Earth. When we were tribal people, we knew who we were, we knew where we were, and we knew our purpose. This sacred perception of reality remains alive and well in our genetic memory. We carry it inside of us, usually in a dusty box in the mind’s attic, but it is accessible.” – John Trudell

and

I think it is unfortunately true that we have lost touch with the sacred dimension in ourselves, in nature and the cosmos, and I agree that that one fact empties life of its meaning as well as its mysterious beauty (emphasis mine).

How Mr. Trudell knew this about us when we were “tribal” I shall set aside for now, but human experience explains much of this. As a primitive people, having little knowledge of the world around us, we experienced death of people close to us. So, an understanding of death came to us. It fit right in with the deaths of plants and animals all around us and made the point that we were part of the totality of existence. (“We are one with nature, Grasshopper.”) Then we experienced the loss of a loved one and receive visitations from that loved one over and over, in our dreams. That we construct our own dreams from memory and imagination was not knowledge available at the time, so it appeared that our loved one was still alive, but when we woke in the morning or abruptly at night, they were not there with us, so they must be somewhere else. Our vivid dreams gave us the impression that those we knew were dead were still alive and since they were not here, our wishful thinking had us believing they were elsewhere. If memory serves, at one point the Celts believed that when we died, we went to another realm, and lived there much as we lived here, and when we died there, we were transported back here (lather, rinse, repeat).

In that same post, the author goes on to say “Underneath the cluttered surface of our minds lies another dimension, one that animals and nature live in without struggle.” Apparently this person is so divorced from nature as to not know that struggle is an integral part of all animal’s lives. In my last home in California, it was very quiet where we lived (out in the boondocks, as it were) and occasionally, as we were falling asleep we could hear what sounded like screams, which were the initial cries of rabbits being eaten alive by coyotes and foxes. All predators eat their prey, often before their prey has died. This hardly describes a “another dimension, one that animals and nature live in without struggle.”

Is this just a case of the world not being as we like it so we invent another, much like C.S. Lewis’s “Boxen” a land inhabited and ruled by animals? If one found relationships with humans difficult, one could retreat to a place where humans were not in charge?

I understand this being the response of a child in that I experienced this myself. But do we not put away childish things when we become adults?

Apparently not.