Something that keeps me up at night (in a good way)

🔥

Hi Everyone 👋

I've been sitting with something....A follow-on from my post yesterday...'What the old wisdom seems to agree on'

All these religions we look to for answers....Christianity, Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Zen. Beautiful traditions. Millions of lives shaped by them. Mine included.

But here's the thing that gets me.

Not one of those original gods, deities, or awakened ones ever wrote a single word down. Not one.

Moses got tablets, sure, but who wrote that story down? People.

Later. The words of Jesus? Not written by him. Disciples, decades after.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, recited, but the Quran was compiled after he died, by human hands making human decisions.

The Buddha's teachings? Passed down orally for hundreds of years before anyone scratched them onto palm leaves.

Lao Tzu? Maybe one person, maybe many. No one really knows.

And the Vedas? "Heard" by ancient sages. Written down so much later.

So here I am, a Buddhist and Taoist leaning person in 2026, reading words that someone told me came from something beyond human. But the ink was held by a man. With a stomach. With moods. With a mother who annoyed him probably.

That doesn't make the words untrue.

For me, it makes them more incredible.

Because if ordinary, hungry, tired, scared, ego-driven humans managed to pass down something that still makes people kinder, still stops someone from hitting their child, still makes a stranger feed a stranger...then maybe the divine isn't in the perfection of the text.

Maybe the divine is in the passing down.

The fact that you and I are here, thousands of years later, arguing about compassion instead of just being cruel. That's not because the words are magic. It's because enough flawed people chose to remember them. To copy them by candlelight. To argue about them. To kill over them, sadly, but also to cry over them. To sit in monasteries and caves and basements and just try to live them.

So when I read the Bible or the Dhammapada or Rumi or the Tao Te Ching now, I don't ask "Did God write this?"

I ask "What did the person who finally wrote this down care about so much that they risked their life to keep it?"

And the answer is almost always the same.... That we be kind. That we remember we're connected. That we stop hurting each other long enough to notice the light.

That's not a flaw in the scriptures. That's the whole point.

Anyway...... Just thinking out loud 🤔. Would love to hear what you think, not about whether God wrote anything. But about why regular humans have carried these words across centuries when we could have just given up and been selfish.

With Love ❤️

Always

Mark

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Something that keeps me up at night (in a good way)