AMNESIA

Simba and the Lion King

Years ago I had a picture of Simba and the Lion King I picked up at the Disney Store. It had an inscription as well that meant a lot to me which said "Remember who you are!" This, apparently some fatherly advise being passed on to Simba, the "once and future king". Richard N. Bolles in his perennial classic What Color Is Your Parachute puts it thus. "All can see that our life here on Earth is a very physical life. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we long to be held, and to hold. We inherit a physical body, with very physical appetites, we walk on the physical earth, and we acquire physical possessions. It is the most alluring of temptations, in our amnesia, to come up with just a Physical interpretation of this life: to think that the Universe is merely interested in the survival of the species. Given this interpretation, the story of our individual life could be simply told: we are born, grow up, procreate, and die.
But we are ever recalled to do what we came here to do: that without rejecting the joy of the Physicalness of this life, such as the love of the blue sky and the green grass, we are to reach out beyond all this to recall and recover a Spiritual interpretation of our life. Beyond the physical and within the physicalness of this life, to detect a Spirit and a Person from beyond this Earth who is with us and in us--the very real and loving and awesome Presence of the great Creator from whom we came--and the One to whom we once again shall go."