As I have continued to reflect on the inevitability of transcendence in our experience, yesterday mentioning it in relation to the Cult of the Supreme Being in the French Revolution, I thought of an experience my brother had many years ago.
     At one point during his time attending university in Santa Barbara, California, my brother learned of a group of people who believed in what I will call "triangular" energy. They believed that by attaching a sort of a triangle onto their heads they could access special energy from the universe.  Being an engineering student and ever the skeptic, Bob one afternoon dropped in on one of the group's gatherings.
     The fervor of the group's adherents was no joke.  There they were, standing around and chatting with various polygon shapes on the top of the heads.  He couldn't believe what he was seeing. 

     Looking back on this and thinking also of the Western culture's more recent obsession with using crystals as a means to communicate with or receive input from the transcendent/divine/universe, I realize once more how much people wish to believe that a truth bigger than them exists.  And that they should and can know it.
     Whatever our epistemological starting point, we rarely wish to stop there.  We almost always want to think there's something more.  For some of us, it's more of the same; for most of us, however, it's something qualitatively different, something that somehow gives a larger meaning to the present, regular, and mundane.
     And it's difficult to believe that this something is found in polygons or crystals.  If God is there--and I believe he is--we ought to be able to find him with rationality and reason. After all, we're reasonable people.  And he's a reasonable God.
     Just ask Jesus.