About a month ago, I wrote an article entitled “How To Avoid Whiplash in 2024 and 2025” (1), in which I mentioned that it was a precursor to an upcoming piece of writing. My intention then was to begin working on a series of articles that would utilize a different perspective, a different way of looking at and speaking about what is going on in our world and within ourselves. In this piece of writing you’re looking at now, I’ve moved away from the standard socio-political, current events centered approach. What I’ve also decided to do is to write this particular article in two parts, entitled “The World Is Pregnant Parts 1 and 2”.
An Immense Change Is Upon Us
It is my belief that our world is approaching a threshold, beyond which a marked change will be experienced at a felt level and acknowledged by the vast majority of humanity. In other words, soon there won’t be any way to seriously deny that this profound change is happening. In order to begin to really understand the underlying causes and the approximate trajectory of what is occurring now and what will soon occur, we’ll need to adopt a perspective that goes beyond superficialities. It will be necessary to do a deeper dive, so to speak. In order to do this we’ll begin our investigation as close as possible to our species’ beginnings.
96% of Human History
Approximately 10,000 years ago, a monumental cultural shift began within our human species. In the 200,000 plus years previous to this shift, we, humanity, functioned generally as an egalitarian society with no inherent institutionalized dominance of male over female, or vice versa. Throughout the vast majority of human history males handled almost all of the big-game hunting and females gathered plant foods and sometimes hunted smaller game.
In other words, 96 percent of the 233,000 years of human history, of our history, was centered around nonhierarchical, cooperative structures. This cultural form is also referred to as matriarchy which, unlike patriarchy, does not feature dominance either of the male or female.(2)
These historical facts make it clear that the commonly held belief that humans are inherently violent and competitive with one another by nature is baseless and unscientific. In fact, the anti-historical inference that our human species has any sort of fixed nature is entirely unsubstantiated.
Human Evolution
When people speak of evolution it’s usually in terms of a species’ adapting physicality in response to changes in that species’ environment. While the history of the physical evolution of humans bears resemblance to that of many other earthly creatures, our psychological evolution has been quite different from all other species that we currently know of. Unlike other species, humans have followed an evolutionary line that is marked by completely unpredictable cognitive jumps.(4)
These jumps, over time, have allowed humans to discover a “realm” that exists “outside” the otherwise fixed domain of nature. This “other” realm is called the Human Landscape.(5) This human landscape’s two primary characteristics are that it is social and historical. It’s a domain in which the human being’s manner of social behavior has the facility to reshape her world and her own nature.
The First Huge Leap
There are differing opinions as to exactly when the first huge psychological leap occurred within the mental landscape of our prehistoric ancestors. Many scientists feel it was somewhere around 2.6 million years ago that our predecessors began to develop the ability to utilize tools and to plan.(5) Whatever the exact period of years was when this took place, it was then that the temporal horizon of the human mind began to open.(6)
The Temporal Horizon of the Human Mind
Pretty much everything we do as humans involves the voluntary use of what is conceptually known as time. We take this for granted because the ubiquitous presence of time has been thought of as a “given” for thousands of years. From a historical longview though, this apparent “given” that we call time and/or the temporal realm, is a relatively new phenomenon.
It is this temporal horizon within the human mind that sets us apart from all other life forms we know of. Many have proclaimed the use of language to be the dividing line between the human landscape and the natural landscape. This is incorrect though, because we find long-practiced, advanced forms of language in several other species on Earth.(7)
It has been the utilization of time that has allowed for the unprecedented speed with which human beings have been able to transform their world via the creation and application of various forms of technology. Think about it, it has primarily been our ability to plan that has enabled our current human world to come into existence. No other species has developed the ability to knowingly plan ahead in a way that enables them to continually reshape their natural environment. The use of manmade tools, the capture and conservation of fire, agriculture, the formation of cities, your cellphone, etc.. None of these things would have come about if this evolutionary leap, if this ability to conceptualize and use time hadn’t occurred within the human mind.
The Magicians That Mistook Their Trick For Reality Itself
Earlier I spoke about the ubiquitousness of the concept we call time. It was also mentioned that this mental realm of time, which seems to be something that has always been an inherent part of hominid experience, is actually a relatively new phenomenon when we look at the entire line of our historic and prehistoric development.
It is our misunderstanding of the nature of time that underpins a whole host of other existential misunderstandings. In fact, it’s my belief that this core misunderstanding has been the unrecognized, underlying catalyst that has led our human species to where we are now, which is on the brink of self-destruction.
We humans have made the mistake of presupposing that time is the domain in which what we essentially are, exists. We have mistaken the concept (time), whose function (for us) should only ever have been that of a mental tool, for the substrate of reality itself.
We are like magicians who’ve somehow become ensnared in our own trick. We became so enamored with our new ability to conceive of and use time and the leverage it gave us over all other earthly species and over much of nature as a whole, that we forgot that there is a reality outside of the conceptual, mental realm of time.
I realize that this is not an easy idea to wrap one’s head around at first. This is because the notion that we don’t actually live in time flies in the face of the most basic tenets of our culture’s currently prevailing model of reality.
The Wisdom of the Ancients
In the New Testament, a reference is made to the consequences of being seduced by time, which is represented symbolically by the image of a snake. By eating from the tree of knowledge, by accessing the temporal horizon of the mind, one becomes ensnared in uncertainty and in the meaninglessness produced by the loss of connection with heaven (with space). Space is represented by the image of the tree, which is the stabilizing force within the garden. When we are completely absorbed within the chaotic realm of time there is perpetual uncertainty and suffering. One becomes lost in a domain of forgetfulness. When the seductiveness of temporal experience veils the memory of the sacred, the felt connection between heaven and earth, between space and time, between meaning and matter, is lost.
“So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.” – New Testament, Revelation 12:9
Unfortunately, over time, this myth has been mistakenly reduced to a childish dogmatic dictum illustrating humanity’s rejection of God and our alignment with the forces of evil. Looking more deeply into this metaphorical tale though, we find a keen observation about the spectrum of forces operating within the human psyche and the apparent separation we have projected between the infinite and the finite, between the sacred and the profane.
Our Life is Not Lived In Time
By conflating the concept of time with existence itself, we have, for thousands of years, straightjacketed ourselves into a belief system that places life in time and at an imagined temporal distance from our conception of death.
By confusing bodily death with the imagined end of what we essentially are, we have made an enemy of death. The supposition has been, “Now, what I essentially am, my body, is alive and later my body will not be alive. Therefore, in time, what I essentially am will cease to be when my body has stopped functioning. We have seen people’s bodies die and we have assumed that this has meant that the consciousness that appeared to inhabit those bodies also died. But this has been an entirely uncorroborated inference.
Notably, the great poets and sages have been speaking about the misunderstanding and misuse of time for centuries:
“Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of Love” – Rumi
“Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.” – Meister Eckhart
An Evolutionary Cul-De-Sac (The Fear of Death)
Tragically, we’ve even ended up using the gift of time to generate weapons in order to pray upon our fellow humans. This recent aberration within our species, this tendency toward violent conquest is ultimately the result of an unnoticed fear-based compensation. It’s a compensation for the terror produced by our confused conception of death, which is, in actuality, an unsubstantiated inference, an illusion.
Fundamentally, it is our fear of death, the fear of our impending nonexistence, that has generated a culture of violence, of possessiveness and of apparent meaninglessness. In truth we have not one stitch of evidence that life ends with death. Not one single iota of first hand proof. Think about this for a moment before you read on: No one has ever or could ever experience what we call death. Therefore, it is presumptuous and entirely unscientific to categorically assume that what we essentially are ends with death.
Here’s an alternative conception of reality to meditate on if you feel called to: What if it is the body that appears in awareness, in consciousness, and not the other way around. Again, this flies directly in the face of the currently reigning conceptual model of reality, which places matter as primary and consciousness as an emergent property of matter. In future articles we will look into this erroneous supposition more deeply.(8)
The Most Important Takeaway From This Article
Attempting to unpack and reframe these long ingrained concepts may feel mind-boggling to many folks at first. It might seem like it’s impossible to even imagine the idea that what we essentially are might not actually end with bodily death. Don’t sweat it. This is the case because, since we were very young children, we’ve known no other way of conceiving reality. Ultimately though, these are just mental habits. They are mind-knots that can be loosened and eventually undone. Undoing these knots in the mind can open a doorway to new possibilities, to ways of seeing and being that were previously overlooked or that seemed walled off to us.
All of this said, intellectually understanding what has been spoken of here about time is NOT the most important first takeaway from this piece of writing. The most important takeaway is to see that although our individual “worlds” are private, we are also one interconnected evolving species that has advanced as a direct result of our sociality and our common history. We share a human world, a “human landscape”.
At the most profound level of our Being, we are not separate. We are, each of us, a vital part of one human totality. The key takeaway here is to see that our human destiny is a shared one and that the way we treat each other is infinitely more important than things like our present individual social standing or our accumulated conceptual stockpile.
Next Week
Next week, in Part 2 of this article, we’ll go into details about what the next big evolutionary step for humankind might look like and how this step could help us overcome our current predicament as a species. We’ll see how the point of view outlined in this article can be used to help us reformulate our no longer functional habits of belief. We’ll also look at the possibility of human transformation from both a personal and a collective/social perspective.
CITATIONS:
1) https://www.pressenza.com/2024/06/how-to-avoid-whiplash-in-2024-and-2025/
2) https://www.history.ac.uk/node/8145
3) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10145355/
4) https://www.pressenza.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Silo-1999-Humanise-the-Earth.pdf
5) https://www.livescience.com/7968-human-evolution-origin-tool.html
6) https://www.pressenza.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Silo-1983-Regarding-what-is-human.pdf
7) https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092127/the-way-whales-communicate-is-closer-to-human-language-than-we-realized/
8) https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2010/03/primacy-of-experience.html