"Because it is so unbelievable, the truth often escapes being known." -Heraclitus  

We all carry biases. It seems to be a human condition. One of the most common is the need for things to be proven before we accept them. It’s a belief bias. Until we know it's true, we often reject ideas. Maybe that's why there is such an obsession with science nowadays. After all if it's “science” and we believe it -we don't risk being wrong. If we believe something without it being scientifically proven, there's always the possibility we might be wrong. So, us humans go through life holding onto beliefs we think are the truth and rejecting things that might go against the accepted story.

Let me use a little geeky analogy…. Radio waves. For most of the existence of humans on earth radio waves were unknown. We didn't see them we couldn't feel them our senses had no awareness of them. It's only been in the last 130 years or so that we've used radio waves. Now we use them every day. Right now -listening to this podcast- you’re using radio waves of some sort. Cell phones, wi-fi, Bluetooth, every time you turn on your car radio.... we’re using radio waves. Microwave ovens use radio waves. 

But you know - when scientists started talking about radio waves in the late 1800s, people thought the idea of invisible streams in the air around us sounded crazy. 

Even now, most of us can't explain how radio waves work. But that doesn't mean they aren't there. – and There's so much more unseen and unknown than the things that are seen and are known. That's why it's vital we always keep our minds open to the possibilities. When we do we are open to new learning.

Albert Einstein nailed it when he wrote, “What we don't know is much more than what we know.”

So, we’re searchers -us people. We’re curious … always digging. And each layer deeper in our quest, there’s always the potential for new discoveries. 

And sometimes -We discover -maybe by complete chance- that what we thought was the truth was wrong all along. When this happens, we often take a giant leap forward in our understanding. 

In today's episode we're going to look at something amazing. Something that had gone unseen for thousands and thousands of years... – and That (when it was finally seen) changed our understanding of our own history.

Today we're going to move down the historical timeline of our understanding of the Soul… just a little bit closer to now. But still a very long time ago. We're going to look at a discovery that changed the way we think, and massively changed what we thought we knew about our history. And the best part – The Soul is at center stage. 

So let me take you to a place called Gobekli Tepe…

Göbekli Tepe

Around 13,000 years ago in what is now Southern Turkey, a large group of workers labored to build structures. Stone carvers, whose names we’ll never know spent years carving pictographs into a group of massive standing stones. These monolithic rocks would become pillars of the structure. This was thousands of years before we learned to create metal for tools. And sweat ran heavy, as their calloused hands chipped away at these stones in the hot sun.  They used crude instruments of flint and hammers of stone. On the surfaces of the rocks, they chipped images as messages, depicting their understanding of their place in the world. Among the carvings was a pictograph that would be deciphered twelve millennia later. Today it’s the earliest known reference to what we call “the Soul.” 

When Gobekli Tepe was discovered in the 1960s. It was a rocky hill with some strange features and stones sticking out of the surface. The archaeologist who found it thought it was an ancient burial ground, which are common in the area. Political forces and other factors slowed the excavation. But work to study the site took off again in 1994 when a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt realized there was much more beneath the massive hill.  As he moved the rock from around the larger stones, he became to see the stones were just the tip of massive rocks weighing tons. His team continued digging -and what he found changed our understanding of history -and questioned our understanding of the human relationship to the Soul. 

Schmidt soon realized the site was an ancient temple. Carbon dating of debris found in the soil, revealed that the site was more than 13,000 years old. That meant that this archaeological find is the oldest temple ever discovered. 

Exactly how old? Göbekli Tepe is more than 6000 years older than Stonehenge, and more than 5000 years older than mankind’s first known civilization in Mesopotamia. The site is of the Neolithic period, which means the structure was created before the invention of pottery. It’s truly ancient. 

On the massive monolithic stone they uncovered, were the oldest pictographs ever discovered. This represented the oldest visual reference to language ever found and deciphered. On what was later named 'The Vulture Stone' was depicted a scene the site director described as a sky burial in which the Soul -symbolized as a head- is figuratively carried up to the sky world. This image is the first known written reference to the human Soul. 

More modern carvings have been found in the same area before Gobekli Tepe was unearthed. Similar images to this one have been seen before but in much later carvings. The meaning has been accepted for a long time, so they immediately recognized the Soul reference in it…  but no one knew the concept dated back so far.

Let’s pause a moment to look again at an important detail. At the time the temple at Göbekli Tepe was built, Saber Tooth Tigers and Wooly Mammoth were still present on Earth. In this ancient time – these primitive people were already aware of the Soul. 

 Today we associate the Soul with religious concepts. The Christian church has long claimed to be the protector of the Soul. Other religions make similar claims. Yet the human understanding of the presence of the Soul predates today’s religions by as much as ten thousand years. To understand how long ago that was, let’s look at a few religions we’re familiar with. 

These stones were carved at least 10,000 years before the establishment of the Islamic religion and at least 9,600 years before the birth of Jesus. They were carved more than 6000 years before the birth of Buddha and 4000 years before Judaism. The idea of the human relationship to the Soul is more ancient than the oldest known cities and predates any written language by thousands of years. More than 13,000 years ago, the belief in the Soul was so strong that prehistoric people went to extraordinary lengths to carve a story about it into stone. 

As time moved on and more detailed written languages emerged it became clear that the existence of the Human Soul was a well-known and a well-accepted truth among cultures all over the world -long before religions claimed to be the lone protector of the Soul. 

It seems the further back we go into time, we see that the moment people are able to write down thoughts, they're eager to talk about this thing we all feel inside. It's not a new idea. It's not something that grew out of religion. It's been there all along and religions have attached themselves to it, not the other way around. Thousands of gods and religions have come and gone since Gobekli Tepe was built – and the Soul remains. 

Though our core desire to be spiritual is sometimes encouraged by religions. It seems it’s driven by the Soul. 

We all understand there is more to us than the body. We all have a deep knowing that there is a divine spark – a spirit inside, and as we connect to if, we become more peaceful and more in touch with our joy. 

Prayer and Meditation have been used for thousands of years by different religions to quiet the mind and open the heart. And many religions believe that the sensation we sometimes achieve in these practices come from the touch of god. But is seems they’re almost right. What we’re feeling seems to be our personal god… the god inside – The Soul. 

(Place Meditation Here)

Take a moment today to sit quietly with yourself. Close your eyes and listen to your breath. As you listen to your breaths, feel the air on your skin. Do this for a minute or more. And be open to the sensation of the soul-spirit that surrounds you. 

It’s YOU – visiting you.