Is Anyone Really Ever Lost?

If we think about this concept of "lost tribes" or "lost people" it assumes that they were actually part of something and then somehow went astray. Look at some of the definitions of the word lost:

no longer possessed or retained
having gone astray or missed the way
not used to good purpose, as opportunities, time, or labor; wasted
failed to win
destroyed or ruined
preoccupied; rapt
distracted; distraught; desperate; hopeless

None of those definitions apply, do they? Tribes who have just tended to their own business and did not seek to intermingle themselves in the business of others are not really lost. They were just busy doing the things that would ensure their own survival. Nothing bad about that. Just because they do not speak the same language or use the same money as other people in the same geographical region does not mean that there is something wrong with them.

You can only be lost if there is an assumption that you should have been somewhere else. Or you were owned by someone else. Or that you were in a contest with someone else and they won.

In fact maybe you are less lost if you are in a rapt state tuned into other realities, not hopeless or distraught as one definition indicates. After all, if they were hopeless or hopelessly out of touch with reality, how could they have survived all these years?

Similarly, there are those of us who live right here, amongst everyone else, who are tuned into a different level of reality. Does that mean that we are lost? Or simply that our attention, and what feeds us so that we thrive comes from a different place than others.