5: Zeitgeist

Seeing Horus the day after I talked about him, then seeing Zeitgeist drive by

ZEITGEIST. THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. THE DOMINANT SET OF IDEALS AND BELIEFS that motivate the actions of the members of a society in a particular period in time.¹

It seems like we are in a unique period of time where millions of people are questioning their beliefs about God or promoting a wide range of spiritual concepts.

So, is there something different about this period of time or have people been asking these questions forever?

Is the internet creating an opportunity for something unique to happen in our lifetime that hasn’t been able to happen before?

And what does it mean if that’s true?

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On August 10, 2016 I was participating in a conversation about God on the Religion channel of Disqus² and a group member replied to one of my comments with some information that piqued my curiosity.

He said that he had spent years arguing with atheists, “hell bent on proving them wrong,” but the stories they were sharing, especially about “one of the gods of Egypt, Horus, and the similarities to Jesus and his story” compelled him to start to “question things.” He said he began to “study religions and their origins” and “found that most religions derive from sun worship.” He also recommended watching the movie, Zeitgeist.

I vaguely remembered hearing the name, Horus, but I didn’t know anything about him, so I did a quick Google search, and the next morning I watched a few minutes of the movie.

It was interesting enough that I wanted to explore it more, but I had to put it off for a while. My youngest daughter, Amber, and I still had tons of things to do to prepare for her freshman year in college.

We had attended Orientation the week before, so Amber was registered for her fall classes, but she had been rushed, and she wasn’t happy with one of her choices. She wanted to make a change, but needed to make sure she could make it from building to building during the ten-minute breaks.

Later that afternoon, we drove to the campus and timed the walking distances. We covered the stretch from her first class in the morning to the new class in seven minutes. Then we headed to the class that followed in Bagley Hall.

When we opened the door, there were two murals on the back wall. One was the life-size images was Horus. I said to Amber, “Oh, my God. His name came up yesterday in a conversation I had on Disqus.”

That evening I posted a photo of the mural on Facebook in a couple of places, including in the Facebook Synchronicity group, with a note that I would be sharing more about it soon.

I realized, though, that the photo looked like something I could find on the Internet, so I added a comment that I would be going back to the campus in a couple of weeks and I would get a shot that would clearly show that I had seen it in a building.

The next day in the Facebook Synchronicity group, one of the members mentioned a couple of unusual things she noticed. One revolved around the fact that my post appeared in her time zone on August 12 at 1:23 a.m.

She said, “I look forward to that which you will later add to this. I could not help but notice some visual similarities between your post and the one right below it....at least my eye sees it that way because of the discs and I have two similar objects in my home. The numbers, your posting at 1:23 and the 4 & 5 [in the mosaic], tell me there is more to come.”

I have learned over time that there might be or there might not be. There was a lot to it already.

So I went back to the craziness of the end-of-summer demands, which included driving Amber to work and getting her through driver’s ed. With my work schedule I was able to take Amber to work in the morning and pick her up at noon. Sometimes I also took her to driver’s ed before I left. Then, on my days off, I accompanied her while she drove around to acquire the hours she needed for the course.

Since we had lived north of Seattle for many years, we had been going to the less congested Mount Vernon area to practice, and a little over a week after I’d seen the Horus mosaic, in order to give Amber the opportunity to drive on the freeway, we headed north again.

The last time we had been in the area, she’d missed seeing one of her friends so she told me she wanted to visit another one. As we made a turn on one of the narrow, forested roads, the sun burst through a clearing turning the film on the windshield milky white, blinding us for a few seconds. When we got to her friend’s house I cleaned the windshield because I was worried about encountering the same problem on the way home.

Since we had more to do that evening, we didn’t stay long.

We merged back onto the freeway and, as we headed through the south end of Mount Vernon, I noticed the huge, white mass of a sailboat on a trailer passing us in the left lane. It was a bit unnerving, so I kept watching it, and as it passed, I just about choked.

It was Zeitgeist.

I started scrambling around trying to find my phone, crying, “I want to get a picture of it!” But by the time I got my camera turned on, the driver was so far ahead of us all I was getting was a blur. It was only Amber’s second time driving on the freeway so I told her that it was okay, that the fact that she and I had seen it had been enough.

Then, as we approached the hill on the south side of the Skagit farmlands, I could see the trailer swaying. The driver pulling the boat started to slow down so Amber and I started talking about trying to get the shot. The distance began to close up, and we talked continually as we approached about whether or not Amber felt like she could get close enough. Amber was finally able to position our front fender directly to the side of the rear corner of the sailboat and hold it long enough that I was able to get a shot that was clearly legible.

I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I was taking the picture through a windshield that had been cleaned only a few minutes before.

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Zeitgeist. For some reason, it showed up within a very short time after the only conversation I’d ever had about it. Horus did, too.

A number of other remarkable things occurred as well, such as the timing of the post for one Facebook Synchronicity group member which allowed her to see the number sequence—1, 2, 3, 4, 5—and the fact that she also noticed that the post just below mine had elements that were similar to the Horus mosaic. She didn’t just notice my post and find it interesting, she was involved.

Many of the events I’ve experienced have involved other people, but when they started to occur in 1998, I was afraid to talk about them. I was raised in the Christian church which led me to believe that Christians had the only correct information about the nature of the Creator/God, and if I didn’t accept it fully I couldn’t be part of their community and, ultimately, God’s community.

Technology is changing important aspects of that dynamic. The ability to mass produce books five hundred years ago created the first huge shift. People gained the ability to find out about human nature, different cultures, and new ideas in relative privacy, but reading books is time consuming. Through the internet most people can now find information and talk to others about their questions or concerns, often within a matter of minutes, without the immediate fear of losing close, personal relationships. And while some of those relationships may deteriorate anyway because of changes that can occur when people are exposed to new information, by that time, new connections have often been developed that are actually more supportive.

I believe the spirit of this age is about connections.

The internet is a tool that is used for global connections. Synchronicity is the awareness of connections that are enabling us to see that there is more going on in the world than what we see on the surface. I believe the Creator/God is using both of them to lead humanity in positive, new directions.

Next Chapter

6: Say it Anyway | Winds of Change

1. “Zeitgeist.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 8 Dec. 2016.

2. The title of the Disqus discussion was “The God Hole.”