We experience another type of Naturalistic Spirituality on a cognitive level, questioning how we humans fit into the bigger picture. Long before developing the tools and instruments enabling us to observe and comprehend the immense universe we occupy, humans began contemplating the nature of our existence and its relationship to the world around us.
As their imaginative capacity increased it would have dawned on our ancient ancestors that relative to our human experience there was an immensity of space and time. Reconciling our relatively brief mortal existence against the vast scale of space and time is daunting, yet a fundamental part of being human.
Compared to fleeting moments in which a human goes from infancy to senescence, the natural world must have seemed eternal. Becoming increasingly aware of the enormity of space and time early humans began to wonder about what the “big picture” looked like and how they fit in to it.
Evidence that our Paleolithic ancestors were imagining an afterlife existence was found in the ritual burial of a dead child who had been carefully placed in a shallow grave in a cave in Kenya 78,000[1] years ago. There is also ancient cave art depicting astronomical events such as the contemporaneous positions of stars and the passing of comets suggesting that humans may have been star gazing for at least the past 30,000 years[2]. Humans have had brains and bodies comparable to our own for nearly 300,000 years and for a large portion of that time they probably were pondering such questions as: How do we fit into this vast universe? and Where did the universe come from?
Some of these cosmological or spiritual questions, might have answers, while others may not. To understand this, consider the question “Where did the universe come from?”
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03457-8 https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/kenya-cave-human-burial/
[2] Palaeolithic Timekeepers Looking At The Golden Gate Of The Eclihttps://www.businessinsider.com/ancient-cave-drawings-are-constellations-of-stars-2018-12ptic; The Lunar Cycle And The Pleiades In The Cave Of La-TETe-Du-Lion (Ardéche, France) – 21,000 BP