I’m listening to a synthesis of Indian and western music this morning and wondering if the future will unfold with a new age of enlightenment and cross-cultural fertilization.  Thinking back to George Harrison in the ’60’s I remember the time when Brian Jones, George, or Ravi Shankar playing the sitar was a novelty.

We listen now to music that’s been informed by a broad range of culture, religion and history.  World music has become a part of popular culture. 

At the same time ancient religious hatred threatens to obliterate the human race.  You can go to a website and watch a  beheading in “the name of god, the merciful”.  Are we running out of time?

I think of the universe, “the planets in their courses and this fragile Earth, our island home”, the stars and the galaxies, as some 19th century pocket watch winding down to the end.

Are the peoples of Asia, the Americas, and Africa just bit players in the ongoing family drama of the middle eastern and Abrahamic religions?  Are our stories and lives some sort of subtext and shadow of Jerusalem and Mecca

There are artists and thinkers, both young and old in which people have formed new tribes and new ways of thinking, new hybrids of expression and spirituality.  But participation in these communities depends on affluence and education. 

Will the west give up its prerogatives of of power and affluence and bend its technology and resources to positive ends such as education and the elimination of hunger and disease?  

If not we will be trapped in the cycles of ancient religious hatred and our eschatology will become self-fulfilling prophecy.