Maybe it’s because I grew up as a Protestant Christian and as a young man tried very hard to be faithful to those beliefs. Yes, dipped my toes in Christian fundamentalism and thereby learned what I now know from the Gospels and the Book of Revelation.
It has always fascinated me that John, the author of The Revelation, had such unhappy news about the end times. It must have been a nightmare for him to see what he reports, a vision of horrors he could not possibly relate to his own experiences. Imagine seeing flying machines and war on the scale now familiar to us. He did very well to describe what he saw at all. I think I’d have been insanely depressed and end my own life rather than write a book about it.
So, I believe that people from all periods of history are “touched” by other realities, other times. I do not deny even the power of telepathic communication among some, nor the skill of a fortune-teller. They may not always get it right, that is, the reality which they have seen is not always the reality which comes to pass. Nevertheless, it happens. I’ve seen it happen, and it is an intangible which fascinates, confuses, and convinces me that there is more to the cosmos than the tangible things we tend to measure.
I’m old enough to see enough decades of man’s life to consider where we’ve been, where we are, and maybe where we are going. Although my elders have said many times, “this world is going to hell in a hand basket!”, I can see how that may be true, although I once believed that my elders were just resistant to change and didn’t understand the present.
If we consider the time of man on this earth and how man has prospered as a life-form, we see that things have changed rapidly around him without any fundamental changes in his instincts. The instincts that ensured his success against the environment, against his enemies (first predators, then other men) are now at work in him to destroy the gains he made.
How did we often avoid starving to death? We learned to gather more than we need for the present. Store up for the future. Hoard, if possible, and steal if necessary. Greed is a daemon in our hard-wired behavior. Long recognized as a destructive force, greed has been countered with social rules to keep it contained. Everyone knows of examples where the rules are broken and greed runs rampant with disastrous results for individuals or nations.
There are many examples of instincts vs. rules developed to change/control/augment those instincts. Reproduction is another good example. It is my belief that since hard-wired instincts take a VERY long time to develop through natural selection. Organisms that use hard-wired or DNA-based behavior are very efficient, but are slow adapting. Ants and bees exhibit social behavior but is very specialized and is not modified by learning.
Humans and some other life forms have built-in DNA based behavior, but seem to have long ago left that method behind in favor of larger brains for experience-based control of behavior. It’s tough on us when the two conflict.