Jewish, Christian and Muslim creation stories all tell of a place called Eden, where mankind once existed in a state of endless harmony with God. According to their respective scriptures, human beings “fell” from this state by partaking of the “knowledge of good and evil,” and have ever since sought to find their way “back to the garden.”
This concept of a lost union is not unique to these “Western” faiths. “Eastern” religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism envision a spiritual unity that followers strive to attain. Taoism expresses a universal oneness that we in our busy lives often simply ignore. And tribal religions across the globe encourage people to recognize an inter-connected, eternal aspect to each individual life.
Outside religion, philosophers seek “absolute truth,” while physicists struggle to discover ultimate reality in the “Unified Field Theory,” and mathematicians and computer programmers move ever closer to expressing “infinity” numerically.
Everyone, it seems, is seeking deeper understanding about existence. We crave answers to the Big Questions of life:
How did the universe come into being?
What is my relationship to the rest of the universe?
Why must I die?
The “disciplines” of science, philosophy, and religion are simply languages that enable us to ponder and express such profound questions. Within each discipline-as-language there are many vocabularies and dialects; for example, religion encompasses innumerable different faiths, sects, and denominations, each one uniquely pointing its way to the truth we seek.
These paths to enlightenment are the “Signposts to Eden” – each one written in its own language, using its own vocabulary, and speaking its own dialect. This does not mean that certain signposts are true and others false. It does not mean that one path is evil and another good. No human can comprehend every language s/he encounters, and any signpost that might be indecipherable to me might speak very clearly to you.
But should we only follow the signpost that speaks most readily to our own hearts and minds? Can’t we learn to read other “signposts”? This web site explores a variety of signposts, walking a little distance down their paths, to see how they might lead to absolute truth, to arrive at ultimate reality, to touch God.
