Guest Blogger and long-time Council friend, Bob W. presents Part 34 of a series dealing with Alcoholism and Addiction from a Mystical, Mythological Perspective, reflecting Bob’s scholarly work as a Ph.D. in mythological studies.
In 1994, the movie Stargate premiered. It is the fictitious story about the discovery, in the Egyptian desert near Giza, of an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a portal, a wormhole, enabling super-fast travel to similar devices elsewhere in the Galaxy encompassing Earth, known as the Milky Way Galaxy. The device was the work of a very advanced, very ancient, pre-history culture facilitating instantaneous transportation to their settlements all over the Galaxy. There was much conflict in the galactic time periods of this culture so that, sometime in the pre-history eras of Egypt, the device was buried by early Earth inhabitants to prohibit these advanced races from traveling back to Earth. This movie spawned a TV series that, with sequels, totaled over 350 episodes spread over 15 years to 2011, all about the travel through this portal of a special U.S. Air Force unit exploring various life activity all over the Galaxy.
In our current societies, we experience space and time as very limited, infinitesimal elements of the whole of the Universe, which is, in reality, billions of years old (and still expanding) and millions of light years wide (each such light year being a distance of approx 6 trillion miles). Our Galaxy is in excess of 100,000 light years wide and contains over 100 million stars similar to our Sun; it is estimated that there are over one trillion similar galaxies in the Universe. These dimensions are staggering, almost beyond our ability to comprehend their scope.
However, just as the Cosmos might be impossibly large for us to comprehend, almost the same can be said about the makeup of our own bodies, the incredible, almost infinite minuteness of the components of our own being. We are each billions and billions of atoms, molecules and cells, all woven together in incredibly complex patterns of interconnectivity.
The players in the Stargate series travel all over the Galaxy to explore different forms of life. In reality much of the stories are artistic recreations of the many human stories of which we are all players, but the backdrop of these humongous dimensions of the Cosmos seem to enhance their wonder, at least to me.
This is why I find the series of Stargate so fascinating. Each of us in Sobriety, committed Sobriety, find ourselves living in immediate societies where we are, or can become, true agents of change. It may all seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but, for each of us in Recovery, our own individual struggles are as gigantic, maybe even galactic, as the mythos in which Stargate is created. That is no accident, in my mind. Each of our own Higher Powers, focused on each of us in our own individual journeys, while operating in this massive Cosmos, are effectively calling on each of us to bear witness to the wonder and potential of creation.