Thanks, Jack Preston King, for a generous and constructive review of some ideas that support and invoke the individual’s spiritual quest. (That’s a long sentence meant really to say, “Great riff…” )

So: yes and yes to all of these notions. We are more than our material selves appear to be, and most of us are privileged/challenged/cursed by our yearning to explore and understand what’s there. And lest we think we are terminally unique, we discover those archetypes, created perhaps by the cumulative consciousness of countless souls who also searched the nature of the human.

I reflect, too, that linguistics and semiotics both undertake this challenge all the time: to look beneath the sign or the symbol or the phoneme and see where the meanings spread out, like underground rivers, in our individual souls.

We may never get an answer, but we go about our lives anyway. And share when we can.