Human are interesting creatures. We all experience individual needs and a profound sense of isolation and separateness while being supremely concerned about maintaining shared values and even opinions about what is important art, believable religion, and moral politics.

Even those who bear fear-based contempt for those they think are different seem obsessed with condemning the “other” based on traits they most dislike about their own self-identified group.

I was reminded of how influenced people are by group think when trying to get a glimpse of DaVinci’s “Mona Lisa”. This was as close as we got.

Yet one of his other masterworks, John the Baptist, was sitting alone in the adjacent room.

Some folks like Dan Brown believe the gesture of John was to point towards the cross and suggest that no one actually died there. Hence the reference “how dark the con of man” alleged to be a saying of this secret society.

Dan Brown depicted Leonardo as a member of a Priory of Sion that taught Jesus had a wife and children and that the holy grail was actually the royal blood line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the “Sangreal”.
Whatever the facts, trying to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower, which took three tries, three months in advance (as they sell out in a minute on the internet) at first reminded me that we are “sheeple” because I was frustrated waiting 90 minutes to get to the top. For what?

How about for this stunning view of the 1st through 8th arrondissements of Paris?  The group was right. It was worth the struggle, crowds, and waiting.

At present, very few believe as I do: that adaptogens can hold the secret to negligible senescence.  But I drink a toast to the day when everyone just accepts this as simple fact. 
Group think is powerful and it cuts all ways.  We just have to get the right people on board for all to enjoy the view that I’m seeing.   It’s all a matter of perspective.  And who am I to ‘force my perspective upon you?  I may consider myself a ‘telomere colossus’ bestriding the narrow world but for now, I look like a tourist take a novelty pic.

I really doubt that beneath my finger Tom Hanks’ Richard Langdon would have unearthed the bones of Mary Magdalene. But there are millions of sacred humans who pass beneath it every year who could find the key to immortality sought in the mythical grail.