Chapter 1 : Caveman

IN THIS FIRST CHAPTER I wish to discuss what life was like before civilization began and proceed to look at how civilization began. The reason for doing this is in order to ascertain what mankind has lost by abandoning its previous manner of existence in order to settle land and farm, and to find out the gains accrued by this new settler life-style (which as we will see was not an actual choice).

Mankind has lived 99.8% of its existence as hunter-gatherers, following the great herds across the planet. It is only for the last 5,000 years that we have settled and become ‘civilized’ as we know it, but the process of civilization, as we know it, took around 5,000 years to become an actual ‘technique’ of how to exist through a division of labour, and with enough skills to grow the food to sustain it.

In these first few chapters then I wish to take us through a time period that begins 20,000 years ago and takes us to the beginning of civilization as we know it, in Babylonia at around 3,500 B.C. This is still a mere blip in the history of mankind, but nevertheless a blip that is three times longer than that of which the rest of part one of this book is about, namely, the subsequent 5,000 years of civilization that will take us from Babylonia in 3,500 B.C., up to the present day.

The question that runs through all of these 7,500 years and that we will be discussing is: How happy, secure and empowered are the people’s that we will be learning about? How much disease, violence, pollution, oppression, hypocrisy, lying, cheating, stealing, injustice, suicides, murders, wars, etc, etcetera, i.e. the anti-happy stuff of life, do the peoples throughout these years suffer in comparison to those civilizations that will begin the settler lifestyle? How much work did they have to endure over their leisure time, and how rich was this leisure time, once attained?
If we understand the history of mankind we will understand our place within it, and how our everyday actions promote certain aspects of ‘civilized’ life and demote others. If we understand the history of mankind we will understand how our place within it, and how the everyday actions of those who came before us, promoted certain aspects of civilization and demoted others. If we understand the history of mankind then we will understand, what the future will bring unless we change our present, due to this understanding, because we will have seen it happen so many times before, despite the opinions of those who, at the time, said it wouldn’t happen so, for whatever reasons they posited, when they do not include these deeper truths, and therefore their folly can to not be repeated again. If we understand all of this, then perhaps we can understand what to change and what to maintain, what to destroy and what to create, what to listen to and what to disregard.

For this chapter then we need to know what did man gain and what did he lose by becoming civilized? It is only be knowing what no longer is, what we have come to lose, that we may judge, what we have come to gain. For most of us, this pre-civilization that we are about to look at, where we will meet our cave-man ancestor at the beginning of this journey, consists of a few stark ideas about perhaps, cave-dwelling, the discovery of fire, flint knapping, hunting mammoth and wearing their skins and the mystery of cave-painting. But all of these tells us is the words to a tiny mental picture where a human being (a cave-man) exists, and his logistical requirements for survival, it does not tell us of why he existed. What was the story in the cave-mans head, that he told himself about his world, his place within it and his purpose? What did he think the sun, the moon, the stars, the Earth, were in relation to that story, and from this story, how did he choose to act, who did he choose to be?

This may seem an extremely difficult question to answer because not much survives from 12,000 years ago, but as you will see, there is easily enough information from which to glean the answers that will be put forward. Not by me, but by themselves globally and by modern academicians today, that is to say through all the space and time of which this book covers, whose views we will see co-align completely, but that are in fact much richer in the story of the cave-man, than that of the scientist. A big claim I know, so lets get on with criticising what you have just read by reading what it is that you must criticise.

The Physical World of Pre-civilized Man

The 10,000 years that we are about to discuss physically were not some time of static weather conditions, that give us an easy over-view of pre-civilized man- the caveman, but as with today, an ever changing weather-scape that produced an ever changing land-scape.

In fact where we begin this story is at 10,000 B.C., mankind is just coming out of the Last Glacial Maximum, that has lasted for around 23,000 years, and saw most of the world covered in ice, and consequently an extremely hard way of life.
However upon the retreat of this ice, due to the warming of the Earth, the period after 10,000 B.C. was, as we shall see, one that has been described both by the scientists who have studied the archaeological evidence, and by the people who lived at that time, as a Garden of Eden! That is, the Garden of Eden that the Torah, Bible and Qur’an tell us all about, where people allegorically ‘walked’ with God in the world. Let us hear this in scientific terms first, as that is how the human mind in the western world has been trained to think, before we turn the mind towards an alternate way of saying the same thing, through the stories of the people that actually lived it. How did life change for these post-glacial humans, as the weather-scape altered the landscape into a ‘Garden of Eden’ :

“Over the next four and a half thousand years, both the plants and the people in this region will become much thicker on the ground. What had been barren desert to the west of Azraq will be covered by grasses, shrubs and flowers by 14,500 BC. Trees will spread on to what had been the open steppe.
As western Asia became warmer and wetter, its plants and animals became more abundant. Direct evidence for such environmental change comes from the Hula core which, from around 15,000 BC, shows a marked increase in thick woodland with oak, pistachio, almond and pear. This period of increasing warmth and wetness culminates at 12,500 BC- the late-glacial interstadial.

These changes in vegetation lead to a vast increase in the availability to plant-foods on the steppe. Plants with edible roots that had been rare are now abundant- wild turnips, crocuses and grape hyacinths. The wild grasses are flourishing, enjoying not only the more clement conditions but also an increase in seasonality- cooler, wetter winters, and hotter, drier summers. We must envisage vast stands of wild wheat, barley and rye appearing across the steppe, surrounded by a scatter of trees. In effect, there was a massive increase in the availability of wild plant foods for the hunter-gatherers throughout the whole of the Fertile Crescent.

Human population increased in this warmer and wetter world; with improved nutrition women could bear more children, and more of these survived infancy to reproduce themselves eventually. They dispersed into the new woodlands and steppe; they began to hunt in the uplands that had previously been too cold and dry.” (Mithen:2003:27-8)

“Around 12,000 years ago (i.e. 10,000 B.C.) hunting feasts occurred ever more rarely or not at all for a simple reason- the herds were vanishing. The era between 35,000 and 12,000 years ago had been an “Ice Age”: daytime temperatures in the Mediterranean regions of Europe and western Asia averaged about 60°F (16°C) in the summer and about 30°F (-1°C) in the winter. Accordingly, herds of cold-loving game species such as reindeer, elk, wild boar, European bison, and various kinds of mountain goats roamed the hills and valleys. But as the last glaciers receded northwards such species retreated with them. Some humans may have moved north with the game, but others stayed behind, creating an extremely different sort of world in comparatively short order.

Specifically, within about 3,000 to 4,000 years after the end of the Ice Age humans in western Asia had accomplished one of the most momentous revolutions ever accomplished by any humans: a switch from subsistence by means of food-gathering to subsistence by means of food-producing. For roughly two million years humanlike species and humans had gained their sustenance by foraging, or by combined foraging and hunting. These modes of existence meant that such peoples could never stay very long in one place because they continually ate their way through local supplies of plant food, and, if they were hunters, they were forced to follow the movements of herds. But “suddenly” (that is, in terms of the comparative time spans involved) substantial numbers of human began to domesticate animals and raise crops, thereby settling down. As soon as this shift was accomplished villages were founded, trade developed, and populations in areas of sedentary habitation started increasing by leaps and bounds. Then, when villages began evolving into cities, civilization was born. “The rest is history” in a very literal sense, for human history- as opposed to prehistory- really began with the birth of civilization and written records.

To say that some humans became food producers all of a sudden is of course justifiable only in terms of the broadest chronological picture. Seen from the perspective of modern historical change, wherein technological revolutions transpire in a few decades or years, the change in western Asia from food-gathering to food production was an extremely gradual one. Not only did the transition take place over the course of some 3,000 to 4,000 years (c.10,000 to c.7000/6000 B.C.), but it was so gradual that the peoples involved hardly knew themselves what was happening. It is essential to add that had they known what was happening they almost certainly would not have approved of the basic switch from gathering to raising food because Ice-Age hunting and gathering allowed its practitioners to live in health and comparative leisure (it has been estimated that hunter-gatherers worked for only about three hours a day), whereas early food-producing yielded poorer average diets (much less variety) and entailed much harder work. Yet the progression toward food production had its step-by-step logic which did not allow individual humans much choice.
The story of how humans became food producers is roughly as follows. … Around 10,000 B.C. most of the larger game herds had left western Asia. Yet people in coastal areas were not starving; on the contrary, they were surrounded by plenty because the melting glaciers had raised water levels and thereby had introduced he quantities of fish, shellfish, and water fowl in newly created bays and swamps. Excavations near Mount Carmel and at the site of Jericho in modern-day Israel- locations not far from the Mediterranean Sea- prove that wildlife and vegetation in that area between about 10,000 and 9,000 B.C. were so lush that people could sustain themselves in permanent settlements in an unprecedented fashion, easily catching fish and fowl, and picking fruits off trees as if they were in the Garden of Eden. But the plenty of Mount Carmel and Jericho had its costs in terms of population trends. Modern nomadic hunting peoples have low birthrates, and the same is presumed to have been true of prehistoric peoples. The given in this regard is that a woman can trek with one baby in her arms but hardly with two; hence nature finds ways to limit nomadic births for each woman to one every three of four years….Once people became sedentary in Eden-like environments, however, their reproductive rates began to increase, until, over the course of centuries, there were too many people for the lush coastal terrains.

Accordingly, paleoanthropologists posit that around 9,000 B.C. excess populations in western Asia started migrating inland to territories where wildlife and plant foods were less plentiful, and where they were forced to return to the nomadic ways of hunter-gatherers. What is certain is that between 9,000 and 8,000 B.C. some humans in Iran had taken the first known step toward food production by domesticating animals- in this case, sheep and goats. This would have been no more than the equivalent of taking out a small insurance policy. People seeking to avoid overreliance on one particular food source, and starvation if that source failed, captured live animals and gradually bred them so that they had meat on the hoof, available whenever the need arose. Owning a few sheep or goats did not inhibit the people who first domesticated them from continuing in their nomadic way of life (it is easier to travel with trained goats than with babies). But it did make them accustomed to the notion of actively manipulating their environments.

Producing plant food came next. After the glaciers had receded, wild wheat and wild barley had begun to grow in scattered hilly parts of inland western Asia. Accustomed to gathering all sorts of seeds, hunter-gatherers between about 9,000 and 8,000 B.C. gladly drew on the wheat and barley because when these plants were ripe, gatherers could reap large amounts of seeds from them within as little as three weeks and then move on to other pursuits. Archaeological discoveries reveal that the peoples in question developed flint sickles to accelerate their harvesting, mortars for grinding their harvested grain into flour, and- most significantly for future developments- lined storage pits for preserving their grain or flour. In other words, these peoples had not only begun to pay special attention to harvesting wild grain, but they were saving their harvests for use over time. Again, people were manipulating their environments instead of merely adjusting to them.
Still nomads, the same people most likely would have been content to gather their grain and other foods forever. But since grain could be stored particularly well, some groups of grain gatherers may have come gradually to rely on it more and more. In such cases they would have been adversely affected by a poor growing year or by gradual depletion caused by excessive harvesting. Then, paying more attention to keeping their wild grain growing profusely, they would have noticed that the grain would grow better if rival plants (weeds) were removed, still better if the soil were scratched so that falling seeds could take root more easily, and still better if they themselves sprinkled some seeds into sparser patches of soil. The people who did these things were more influential discoverers and explorers in terms of the origins of our own modern existence than Columbus or Copernicus, yet from their point of view they were merely adjusting some of the details of their ongoing hunting and gathering way of life.
Imperceptibly, however, they became “hooked” and surrendered their nomadic ways for sedentary ones. Already having small herds as “insurance policies”, they must have decided at some point that it would be equally sensible to be able to count on having patches of planted grain awaiting them when they reached a given area on seasonal nomadic rounds. And then they would have learned that planting could be done better at a different time of year than harvesting, and then that their livestock might graze well on harvested stubble, and then that they might grow more than one crop a year in the same place. Meanwhile they would have become more and more accustomed to storing and would have seen less and less reason to move away from their fields and their stores. And so sedentary plant-food production, or agriculture, was invented.
The earliest archaeological evidence for fully sedentary agriculture comes from eastern Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and dates from roughly 7500 to roughly 7000 B.C. By 6,000 B.C. the entire western Asian region had adopted agriculture as the central mode of survival. Livestock-raising supplemented it, and by 6,000 B.C. the livestock raised included cattle and pigs as well as sheep and goats. Moreover, farming peoples continued to engage in some hunting and some gathering on the side…. Yet settled agriculture had not only become the dominant form of human existence in western Asia by 6,000 B.C., but soon after it conquered the world. Agriculture arose independently in at least three areas in China and one or two sites in America around 5,000 B.C. and fanned out in Far Eastern Asia and the Western Hemisphere from there. From western Asia it reached southeastern Europe (the Balkans) by about 5,000 B.C. and spread from there over the entire European continent by about 3,500 B.C. it had reached its natural European limits in Scandinavia. “Amber waves of grain” have played a central role in European- and by extension, North American- history ever since. [Lerner et al:1993:12-16]

“Meanwhile, the domestication of cattle and sheep had begun. By the Neolithic period (7000 to 5500 BC), farming had developed to the point where stock breeding and seed agriculture were established techniques of food production. The switch from hunting and gathering to food production seems to have occurred very slowly, however- it was not a revolutionary change that suddenly transformed local practices. Archaeological evidence from a Neolithic village in western Asia, for example, shows that the wild legumes that were the major food item in 7500 BC were gradually replaced by cultivated grains over a span of almost 2000 years (Flannery, 1969). Ester Boserup (1981) suggested that there was little incentive to switch to food production until population densities began to increase and/or wild food sources became scarce because hunting and gathering often provided adequate levels of subsistence with relatively low workloads. From this perspective, then, demographic conditions as well as technological innovations were a critical precondition for economic change.” (Knox et al:2003:120)
The Hunter-Gatherer
The Hunter-gatherer, or cave-man, as we shall refer to him, then, was a way of living that required three hours work a day, living in a world of plenty, naturally controlled in terms of population by the life-style of hunting and gathering, and therefore naturally controlling human consumption.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could speak to some hunter-gatherers who still existed and ask them what it is like living off the Earth and not from domesticated settled life where one must make everything ones-self and cease to rely on the bounty of Nature? Then we could ask them how they view the world, and how they treat each other, in comparison to civilized man.
Well fortunately there are groups of hunter-gatherers that existed up until civilization finally reached them a mere few hundred years ago. Namely, in 1492 when America was discovered, and 1770 when Australia was discovered.
These peoples, still continued a hunter-gatherer way of life that continued from the LGM up until that day, 12,000 years ago. Fortunately for us, many anthropologists of the time grabbed this opportunity to understand the mind set of these peoples so that today, whilst civilizations lens has made it difficult to perceive and hence to understand this way of life, we may however still obtain a factual understanding of it, and then use Hume’s technique of empathy (walking a mile in their shoes) to understand at least what we have lost.
Are we therefore right in thinking that hunter-gathering requires little labour, provides greater diversity of choice, and is better than choosing to adopt farming, and therefore, that farming was an accident resulting from a small insurance policy, which no hunter-gatherer in his right mind would choose?:

“The intensity of horticulture encountered by Harris was minimal compared with that observed by the first Europeans to visit New Guinea. Both in its lowlands and highlands vast areas of forests had been cleared and turned to garden plots for root crops. In complete contrast to the transient hunter-gatherer campsites of northern Australia, the first European explorers found densely populated villages ruled by powerful chiefs whose wealth was measured by the number of pigs they owned and who regularly waged war against each other. Hence the narrow Torres Strait divided two quite different worlds: Australian hunter-gatherers to the south and New Guinea farmers to the north.
Why hadn’t the Australian Aborigines adopted agriculture? Captain James Cook asked this question when he landed on Possession Island off Cape York in 1770 and reflected that ‘the Natives know nothing of cultivation’ and ‘when one considers the proximity of this country with New Guinea… which produces cocoa-nuts and many other fruits proper for the support of man it seems strange that they should not long ago have been transplanted here.’ To Cook, and many later anthropologists, the Aborigines appeared quite backward to have remained as hunter-gatherers when they could have adopted a lifestyle ‘proper for the support of man.’
From studies of the Aborigines, it became apparent that their devotion to hunting and gathering could not be explained by a lack of farming knowledge, as they were quite aware of how to cultivate plants. When those in Cape York gathered wild yams, for instance, they often ensured that parts of the tubers were left behind, or were even replanted to ensure a supply in the following year. Moreover, substantial trading contacts between the Aborigines and the Torres Strait islanders had brought the hunter-gatherers into direct contact with the farmers. So why had farming not spread from New Guinea to Australia, just as it had spread from Western Asia to Europe?
An answer was provided by Peter White from Sydney University in 1971: the Austrialian hunter-gatherers were ‘simply too well off to bother about agriculture’. By that date, views about farming had changed dramatically from those held by James Cook, and indeed by academics right up until the late 1960s. The view that farming was an inevitable step on the path to civilization, one that would be grasped at every opportunity, had been overthrown. Western academics who lived with hunter-gatherers in Australia and Africa decided that they had been among what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins declared to be the ‘original affluent society’.
Such hunter-gatherers were found to work for no more than a few hours each day, to be free from the physical ailments caused by back-breaking tillage and harvesting, and unencumbered by the social tensions and violence found in densely populated farming communities.” (Mithen:2003:338-9)

“At the LGM, Australia was a continent of hunter-gatherers, and it remained so until 1788, the year of the first European settlement. At least 250,000 Aborigines were living in this southern land mass, distributed between the tropical forests of the north and the edge of Antarctic waters in the south. Lifestyles were varied….
Predictably, the earliest accounts of the native Australians are often little more than dismissive racist tracts. Anthropologists, however, soon began to appreciate the complexity of Aboriginal society. At least two hundred distinct languages were recorded; extensive trade networks were document along which foodstuffs, axes, grinding slabs and ochre travelled; the mythological world of the Dreamtime, in which Ancestral Beings created the landscape and continued to intervene in human affairs, was partly revealed. What had appeared to be simple depictions of animals, people and signs were found to have complex meanings, often relating to the activities of Ancestral Beings….
Recognising the complexity of Aboriginal society was the first of two shifts in European views about the native Australians. The second was to appreciate that these people were not a timeless relic of an original human society, a people without history. Their societies were as much a product of history as those of the European colonists. The start of their history- the date at which Australia was first colonised- has gradually shifted back in time, from an initial guess of 10,000 BC, to 35,000 BC during the 1980s, to almost 60,000 years ago today.
John Lubbock has travelled to Australia to explore part of that history: the developments in Aboriginal society between 20,000 and 5000 BC, between the time of the LGM and the peak in the warm, wet conditions that arrived with the Holocene. Whereas it was the spurt of global warming at 9600 BC which had the greatest impact on people in Europe and western Asia, it was only towards the end of this period that the most fundamental changes occurred in Aboriginal societies. Moreover, while people in all other continents had adopted agriculture by 5000 BC, from either indigenous invention or the spread of ideas and people, all Australian Aborigines remained as hunter-gatherers- although with lifestyles quite different to those of their Pleistocene forebears.” (Mithen:2003:304-5)

What was it like then, living from the fruits of the Earth, without labour, disease, and violence? Obviously when we talk of the Garden of Eden, we think of a peaceful place where there is a connection with God, and for these people that is exactly how it seemed. That they were in communion with God’s plan and grace. Now this is a big thing to say, and so it must be proved.
To do this we must look at the ontology of this way of life. Ontology means, the study of being, of how we be in the world due to our perspective of the world as given by our nature. In other words we see colour whilst most mammals do not, and hence our world is seen differently, our notions of beauty, our art, our stories, our perceptions, are formed differently. To a dog the world is ontologically formed more by smell than the black and white world it sees, and it is through this sense that the world comes into being, primarily, and hence dictates how he will be-have- his behaviour. That is to say, before civilization, there was a natural way of being, that humans saw the world through, and consequently, created their psychology, their sociology, their technology, their morality, their laws, and their actions, around it, eventually resulting in settling, and then civilization itself. This is the be-ginning, therefore of our thrownness, called our ontology, our way of seeing the world, without cultural, lingual, or ritual forms placed upon it.
Today our western cultural Ontology is one of that promotes our ontological reason, for example, science, or man-made law, of ‘Human-beings’, or of ‘Human-rights’ first, over those of the Earth or of its creatures, or of its Creator. Modern man has made himself, in his ontological view, as ‘being’ above Nature, due to his understanding of its causes by the power of reason. This is a view of consciousness housed in a body that sees a tamed world however, and is not a truth but a story only. For example, if one sees a Godless world one can frame a view called ‘The survival of the fittest’ where each created-being fights each other in order to survive, but if one sees a God created world one can frame a view called ‘The embodiment of harmony’ where the spirit of God evolves through form in order to experience itself. Both of these views can cite the same facts about evolution, but one perspective is seen from a species’ eyes i.e. its ontological drive for survival, whilst the other is seen from Gods eye, i.e. its ontological drive to evolve its consciousness through form. One story can use the same facts in order to show that ontological perspective to be right and the other wrong, and neither needs the other in order to know how to behave in the world, but which one is ‘right’ is only ‘right’ in the mind of the perceiver, who will continue to perceive the world through that lens.
This is an unusual concept to grasp, let alone be able to take your world view, (which ever one of these it is closest to) and to see the perspective of its opposite using these same facts. But it is necessary for us to be able to do this in order to understand history, and hence our place in the world. The Western perspective is a baby in comparison to that of the hunter-gatherers. Reason struggles therefore to understand the Dreamtime of the Aborigines, but this we must do in order to understand how this dreamtime contains the seeds of civilization that will grow from it, rather than our usual reason which is to confirm our ill-informed opinion that reason is so much better than this ignorant ‘dreamtime’ of which we are ignorant. Only by truly understanding dreamtime can one make such a reasonable claim about reason’s comparative value, and yet it is only by letting go of reason that one can understand it itself. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
To help us move towards this dreamtime and to illustrate further this disparate ontological relationship of how we subsequently ‘be’ in the world, let me relay to you the story of the Magic Horse.
Ontology and Progress – What is it – The Magic Horse
The Magic Horse

“Once, ‘upon a time’, there was a realm in which the people were exceedingly prosperous. All kinds of discoveries had been made by them, in the growing of plants, in harvesting and preserving fruits, and in making objects for sale to other countries: and in many other practical arts.
Their ruler was unusually enlightened, and he encouraged new discoveries and activities, because he knew of their advantages for his people.
He had a son named Hoshyar, who was expert in using strange contrivances, and another- called Tambal- a dreamer, who seemed interested only in things which were of little value in the eyes of the citizens.
From time to time the king, who was named King Mumkin, circulated announcements to this effect:

‘Let all those who have notable devices and useful artefacts present them to the palace for examination, so that they may be appropriately rewarded.’

Now there were two men of that country- an ironsmith and a woodworker- who were great rivals in most things, and each delighted in making strange contraptions. When they heard this announcement one day, they agreed to compete for an award, so that their relative merits could be decided once and for all, by their sovereign, and publicly recognized.
Accordingly, the smith worked day and night on a mighty engine, employing a multitude of talented specialists, and surrounding his workshop with high walls so that his devices and methods should not become known.
At the same time the woodworker took his simple tools and went into a forest where, after long and solitary reflection, he prepared his own masterpiece.
News of the rivalry spread, and people thought that the smith must easily win, for his cunning works had been seen before, and while the woodworker’s products were generally admired, they were only of occasional and undramatic use.
When both were ready, the king received them in open court.
The smith produced an immense metallic fish which could, he said, swim under the water. It could carry large quantities of freight over the land. It could burrow into the earth; and it could even fly slowly through the air. At first the court found it hard to believe that there could be such a wonder made by man: but when the smith and his assistants demonstrated it, the king was overjoyed and declared the smith among the most honoured in the land, with a special rank and the title of ‘Benefactor of the Community’.
Prince Hoshyar was placed in charge of the making of the wondrous fishes, and the services of this new device became available to all mankind.
Everyone blessed the smith and Hoshyar, as well as the benign and sagacious monarch whom they loved so much….
The simple woodcarver came in to the throne-room, carrying a parcel, wrapped in coarse cloth. As the whole court craned forward to see what he had, he took off the covering to reveal- a wooden horse. It was well enough carved, and it had some intricate patterning chiselled into it, as well as being decorated with coloured paints but it was only… ‘A mere plaything!’ snapped the king.
‘But Father, said Prince Tambal, ‘let us ask the man what it is for…’
‘Very well’, said the king, ‘what is it for?’
‘Your majesty’, stammered the woodcarver, ‘it is a magic horse. It does not look impressive, but it has, as it were, its own inner senses. Unlike the fish, which has to be directed, this horse can interpret the desires of the rider, and carry him wherever he needs to go.’
‘Such a stupidity is fit only for Tambal,’ murmured the chief minister at the king’s elbow; ‘it cannot have any real advantage when measured against the wondrous fish.’
The woodcarver was preparing sadly to depart when Tambal said: ‘Father, let me have the wooden horse.’
‘All right’, said the king, ‘give it to him’. Take the woodcarver away and tie him on a tree somewhere, so that he will realise that our time is valuable. Let him contemplate the prosperity which the wondrous fish has brought us, and perhaps after some time we shall let him go free, to practise whatever he may have learned of real industriousness, through true reflection.’…
Tambal took the horse to his quarters, where he discovered that it had several knobs, cunningly concealed in the carved designs. When these were turned in a certain manner, the horse- together with anyone mounted on it- rose into the air and sped to whatever place was in the mind of the person who moved the knobs.
In this way, day after day, Tambal flew to places which he had never visited before. By this process he came to know a great many things. He took the horse everywhere with him.
One day he met Hoshyar, who said to him: ‘Carrying a wooden horse is a fit occupation for such as you. As for me, I am working for the good of all, towards my heart’s desire!’
Tambal thought: ‘I wish I knew what was the ‘good of all’. And I wish I could know what my hearts desire is.’
When he was next in his room he sat upon the horse and thought: ‘I would like to find my hearts desire’. At the same time he moved some of the knobs of the horse’s neck.
Swifter than light the horse rose into the air and carried the prince a thousand day’s ordinary journey away, to a far kingdom, ruled by a magician-king.
The king, whose name was Kahana, had a beautiful daughter called Precious Pearl, Durri-Karima. In order to protect her, he had imprisoned her in a circling palace, which wheeled in the sky, higher than any mortal could reach. As he was approaching the magic land, Tambal saw the glittering palace in the heavens, and alighted there.
The princess and the young horseman met and fell in love….
Within a matter of minutes the couple alighted the palace of King Mumkin. They related everything that had happened to them, and the king was almost overcome with delight at their safe return. He at once gave orders for the hapless woodcarver to be released, recompensed and applauded by the entire populace.
When the king was gathered to his fathers, Princess Precious Pearl and Prince Tambal succeeded him. Prince Hoshyar was quite pleased, too, because he was still entranced by the wondrous fish.
‘I am glad for your own sakes, if you are happy’, he used to say to them, ‘but, for my own part, nothing is more rewarding than concerning myself with the wondrous fish.’
And this history is the origin of a strange saying current among the people of that land, yet whose beginnings have now been forgotten. The saying is: ‘Those who want fish can achieve much through fish, and those who do not know their heart’s desire may first have to hear the story of the wooden horse.’” (Shah:1978:83-92)

The story of the Magic Horse is a story of Ontology and the subsequent Progress that can be obtained by the fish or the horse. The iron-monger takes Nature and turns it towards serving the Human-beings by bringing ‘things’ they want to them ‘our time is valuable’, to me; whilst the Carpenter takes Nature and turns it towards bringing the people towards Love of others as a higher magical-kingdom, as the highest thing. That is to say, the Earthly Fish-King likes material things, whilst the Heavenly Horse-King likes Love. For one prince the way of being is therefore to provide for his people’s desires by labouring with the fish and for the other prince it is to listen to his heart and be taken where that will take him. Not to conjure a desire that the fish can get him, but to listen to his true desire and be taken to it. For Mohamed to go to the Mountain and not for the Mountain to come to Mohamed. Progress then is a perspective that invokes a project, something pro-jected in front of us as a desire to be fulfilled and progressed towards. For the hunter-gatherer this project was not one of metal fish, but instead of magic horses. Living without man-made desires meant a labour free, natural, harmonious, abundant, world, that was consequently free of disease, free of his own desires, and free of his own reason. That is not to say that their was no reason for his existence, but simply that he was not the reason for his existence. A tautology couched in the western phrase par excellence, ‘I think therefore I am’.

Why did the hunter-gatherer choose the magic horse? Well there are two reasons. The first is simple- naturally simple. Namely, if my way of life requires me to wander around all the time, how much stuff would I actually want? I can’t carry it all around with me, every day, because that is actually a crippling way of life in regards to progressing to my goal of loving others. Indeed we saw this same truth with population control and therefore consumption control above. Therefore a magic-horse person requires others but not things in order to survive and progress.
The second reason is more complicated to understand from a western perspective today simply because it requires an experience that we have been denied from day one of our existence, due to our settled way of life. That is the experience of equality, fraternity, and liberty, that comes from a perspective of us all being creatures of God in His world, and not Human-beings- amongst other creatures- of a Nation-state- and its culture and tradition (whatever that may presently dictate to our subsequent behaviour).
Let us hear from some western people who have thought about this possibly longer than we have:

“Perhaps the most concise way of defining the modern world is to focus on that which distinguishes it from virtually all other world views. Speaking very generally, what sets the modern mind apart is its fundamental tendency to assert and experience a radical separation between subject and object, a distinct division between the human self and the encompassing world. This perspective can be contrasted with what has come to be called the primal world view, characteristic of traditional indigenous cultures. The primal mind does not maintain this decisive division, does not recognise it, whereas the modern mind not only maintains it but is essentially constituted on it.
The primal human being perceives the surrounding natural world as permeated with meaning, meaning whose significance is at once human and cosmic.” (Tarnas:2007:16)

“Primal experience takes place, as it were, within a world soul, an animas mundi, a living matrix of embodied meaning. The human psyche is embedded within a world psyche in which it complexly participates and by which it is continuously defined. The workings of that anima mundi, in all its flux and diversity, are articulated through a language that is mythic and numinous. Because the world is understood as speaking a symbolic language, direct communication of meaning and purpose from world to human can occur. The many particulars of the empirical world are all endowed with symbolic, archetypal significance, and that significance flows between inner and outer, between self and world. In this relatively undifferentiated state of consciousness, human beings perceive themselves as directly- emotionally, mystically, consequentially- participating in and communicating with the interior life of the natural world and cosmos. To be more precise, this participation mystique involves a complex sense of direct inner participation not only of human beings in the world but also of human beings in the divine powers, through ritual, and of divine powers in the world, by virtue of their imminent and transformative presence. The participation is multi-directional and multidimensional, pervasive and encompassing.
By contrast, the modern mind experiences a fundamental division between a subjective human self and an objective external world. Apart from the human being, the cosmos is seen as entirely impersonal and unconscious. Whatever beauty and value that human beings may perceive in the universe, that universe is in itself mere matter in motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by chance and necessity. It is altogether indifferent to human consciousness and values. The world outside the human being lacks conscious intelligence, it lacks interiority, and it lacks intrinsic meaning and purpose. For these are human realities, and the modern mind believes that to project what is human onto the non-human is a basic epistemological fallacy. The world is devoid of any meaning that does not derive ultimately from human consciousness. From the modern perspective, the primal person conflates and confuses inner and outer and thus lives in a state of continuous magical delusion, in an anthropomorphically distorted world, a world speciously filled with the human psyche’s own subjective meaning. For the modern mind, the only source of meaning in the universe is human consciousness.” (Tarnas:2007:17)

“In the long evolution from primal to modern consciousness, there has taken place a complexly intertwined and interpenetrating two-sided process: on the one hand, a gradual differentiation of the self from the world, of the human being from nature, of the individual from the encompassing matrix of being: on the other hand, a disenchantment of the world, producing a radical relocation of the ground of meaning and conscious intelligence from the world as a whole to the human self alone. What once pervaded the world as the anima mundi is now seen as the exclusive property of human consciousness. The human self has essentially absorbed all meaning and purpose into its own interior being, emptying the primal cosmos of what once constituted its essential nature.” (Tarnas:2007:22)

“For in the history of Western thought and culture, the community and larger whole from which the heroic self was separated was not simply the local tribal or familial matrix, but rather the entire community of being, the Earth, the cosmos itself. Different stages of such a separation, descent, and transformation have taken place in each great epoch of Western cultural history, in what in retrospect appears not unlike a vast evolutionary rite of passage played out on the stage of history and the cosmos, and now reaching an especially precarious moment of truth.” (Tarnas:2007:43)

To this western perspective we must apply the antidote of increasing our knowledge further in order to understand these hunter-gatherers. What is it like to feel, that is to say, to ontologically sense, a conscious connection with a greater consciousness- nature- and to be a part of all things, all space and time and to be loved by it? This nature as we will see is given a name by every ancient peoples, and it is the same name in essence of meaning, throughout space and time. At present the majority of people call it God, others call it Tao, or Buddha-mind, or Nature. We will look at it through the names, their meanings, their stories and the subsequent behaviour of the cave-man, the ‘Aborigines of time’ who first told these stories that be-gin the thrownness of the terms God, Tao, Buddha-mind and Nature.
The Reasonable Lack of Reason to Believe That God Exists
The first thing that must be addressed before we do so is to question the ill-informed and yet majority-biased-western-perspective-of-reason in regard to its ability, to dictate that there is no God, due to reason, and sciences subsequent findings, alone.
To many readers, the question of God has been answered in the negative due to reason, but unfortunately, unless you have read metaphysics, you will not be aware that there is absolutely no reason to hold such a view. In fact reason cannot answer the question of whether there is a God or not! It can only really land you on the fine line of the agnostic, who needs to consult the magic horse, before knowing what the project of their life may be.
The argument of reason has already been held in philosophy, and is famously completed by one person who wrote a book called, The Critique of Pure Reason. His name was Immanuel Kant. In this work Kant shows, quite clearly that science can never use reason to state what it claims about God’s existence or non-existence, and also that the religious can never use reason to state what they claim about God existing either.
This matter has also more recently been dealt with by Wittgenstein who stated in his Tractatus that logic (an area of reason in philosophy) could never know anything as true, and that therefore, ‘belief in the causal nexus is superstition’. Superstition, means a ‘super-state’ of consciousness, not of our everyday rational state. i.e. those states reached in prayer, meditation, epiphany, or certain drugs. Internal states, not external perspectives. It is the practice of all western-anthropologists and sociologists to use a method called ‘Epoche’ when studying cultures and religions. This term means, ‘the pocket’ referring to the practice of Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, who said that one should put ones-self away into your pocket when studying a religion or peoples so that bias is removed. This is the academic methodology of reason, that way of being, in order to understand what one is perceiving. This also means however that the self that the religious practice wants to change through its rituals, drugs, dances, and ultimately communion of that self with God can never experience that change and never know the truth of the ‘super-state’ that the ceremony, drug, dance, ritual, etc, was supposed to induce. It can never therefore understand what it is looking at because it has not made it a part of its self. It is like knowing the ingredients of a chocolate bar; its weight, colour, atomic structure, sell-by-date, origin, etc, etc but not knowing what it tastes like or what it does to your insides or how it makes you feel, or what desires it creates, or ideas it creates, or what projects it creates within-side you. In other words if belief God (the causal nexus) is a that you may witness in a super-state of consciousness, but deny yourself that unreasonable state, how can you reasonably posit any theory about the progress these rituals and beliefs claim to provide towards its goal? Those who partake claim it does, those that don’t claim it doesn’t. Those who claim it does ‘their way’, but no another, claim that their way is right and that they cannot try the other way as that is false worship. It is a tautology of ignorance, not reason, both for those in a religious path, and a scientific one.
Let us hear Kants words, spoken hundreds of years ago, and yet mostly unheard of in modern education or the media,whilst the lie of reason is mostly promulgated. Kant shows us that reason lies upon the fundamentally flawed ground of subject and object, a distinction that we saw above was not part of human experience for millennia. There was no us and nature, only Nature as God. We shall see this in more detail soon, but for now we are merely trying to establish that reason cannot contain the truth, but that truth can contain reason. For example, space and time, is used by Kant to show the subject object nature of a reasoned mind. It has already presumed that these two things are separate from it, and therefore perceives the world, quite reasonably, from these perspectives, and witnesses space and time passing in accord with this way of being. For those in dreamtime, space and time are not distinct. As the reality in a dream makes sense but does not conform to our rational, reasoned world. For the cave-man it is the dream that forms his reality not the objective world to which he is subject. Reason exists in dreams, which is why we run from monsters in them, but there is no reason for monsters as we don’t see them in the real world, however we all experience them in our inner world, and it is reasonable to say that ‘in dreamtime’ you saw a monster. When you interpret the dream and say that the monster was your financial landscape that it reasonable. When you interpret the world of dreamtime and say that the landscape is ‘Nature’ or ‘God’, is that not reasonable? Therefore what is the cause of everything in the world, is it Nature or is it, sciences story of nature? What is the primal cause of Nature? Can reason tell us? Can science ever actually know? This is the argument of cause and effect, known in the famous question, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” “What was the cause of the universe?” Answer. ‘Something’ disturbed the balance of the four forces that were completely balanced in an infinite point of infinite mass, that caused the Big Bang, that became the universe.” That is sciences answer at the moment. But what caused the four forces? And what caused that, and what caused that, etc, etcetera.
This is the famous atheist question, “Who made God?” turned back upon reason itself. There is no answer that we can now from a state of reason. Maybe there is a way of knowing from a super-state, but from a state of reason we are unable to transcend our subject-object world experience and hence to commune with something an able to be reasoned, or in other words, something, ‘unreasonable’:

“The judgement that every event has a cause is in Kant’s view a priori. [Meaning that]It does not depend on our experience. Rather in making it we, in his words, prescribe to experience. We say confidently that though we cannot anticipate what events we shall experience, we know that they will all be subject to the principle of causation: they will be determined in time by a rule. The judgement is also synthetic. The notion of causation is not derived by analysis from the notion of an event. The connection of these two ideas is affirmed in the judgement.
This then is Kant’s problem. Science involves our assumption of the objective validity of certain principles which underlie all our theorizing and experiment. How are we to find a complete list of such principles and how are we to show their objective validity? And what light will the examination by this validity of such principles throw on question of the possibility of reaching in metaphysics a priori principles which will hold of reality?
In the Preface Kant suggests what he calls his Copernican revolution. As Copernicus had explained the movements of the stars by suggesting that their apparent movements are partly due to the movement of the observer; so he proposes to explain the application of the mind’s a priori principles to objects by suggesting that ‘objects conform to the mind.’
This is Kant’s ‘critical idealism’. What does he mean by it?… If we analyse what we mean in any scientific judgement which claims to be true, we shall find that it states that under such and such circumstances we shall have such and such experiences. Earlier thinkers had held that by thought we got from how things appear to how things are: Kant holds that we get from how things appear to how they will appear. The task of thought is not to turn the mind away from what we perceive, but to help it to transcend some of the limitations of our perceptions, or, to speak more accurately, to set somewhat further back the limits of our perception: for thought never entirely transcends these limits. Our knowledge is always conditioned by the fact that we are finite minds living in a particular place and at a particular time; but thought can extend the range of our perceptions in space and time. But in our scientific judgements we are always making statements about our possible experience…Knowledge in Kant’s view is not a process in which perception gives place to thought: it always involves both thought and perception, but thought enables us with a wider range to anticipate from what we actually perceive to what we will or should perceive under all sorts of conditions.
Now, if this is so, it follows that we can only know in terms of our experiencing, and we can only know things in so far as they can be objects of our experience. If thinking only enables us to know, e.g., how things would look under the conditions of a possible experience, to ask what things are in themselves apart from their appearance, is to ask how they would look if they didn’t look, or what we should know them to be if we could know them apart from looking. But both these conditions are impossible.
The application of this position to space and time in the ‘Aesthetic’ is simple. If we reflect on the nature of our perception we can see that it involves a double formal element in space and time. All perception involves these forms, and as all thinking refers ultimately to perception, we never get outside the conditions of space and time. This does not mean that space and time are subjective in the sense of being illusions: they are elements in that apprehension of things which we call perception. But we cannot get outside the conditions of perception. If we ask what space and time are apart from perception, that is one form of asking how things would look if they didn’t look. And Kant thinks that philosophical puzzles about space and time arise from our considering them in that impossible way, and treating them as things in themselves. That is what Kant means by calling them transcendentally ideal. On the other hand they are empirically real, given elements in experience.” (Kant:1964:vxi-xvii)

“When Kant comes to consider the objectivity of a priori principles, such as causation, he is, as he explains, faced with a more difficult problem. With what right can we assume that all events we may experience will be subject to the rule of causal determination? The solution of the ‘Aesthetic’ seems barred. For if we think in terms of causation, we do not apparently perceive in terms of causation. Hume’s point indeed had been that we perceive succession and add to that perceived succession the notion of necessary connection; and that that addition has no validity. It was a psychological habit from which we could not escape and nothing more. Kant’s answer is to make a distinction between perceiving and perceiving something as an object. So far as mere perceiving is concerned, there is no difference between our successively perceiving things which exist simultaneously and our successively perceiving what has successively existed. Objective succession then is not just perceived. We only perceive it in so far as we have made a distinction between succession in apprehending and apprehension of succession, until, in Kant’s phrase, we have put time into the object. We do this normally without being aware of it. It is only when we make mistakes that we realize what is always happening, as e.g. when we are on a steamer leaving a pier, and we seem ‘to see the pier moving.’ But if we ask what this implies, we find that we have applied to what we perceive the principles of objective determination in space, and we have made a judgement. And one of these principles is the principle of causation. If, e.g., anything could cause anything, there would be no means of determining whether the fact that the pier is seen to occupy a smaller portion of our field of vision was due to the fact that it had moved or that we had moved. So in all our perception of objects we have decided that certain changes we perceive are due to changes in us and others are due to changes we perceive are due to changes in us and others are due to changes in the things. Therefore, the perception of objects already implies the principles of objective determination in space and time. But causation and the other a priori assumptions of science which Kant has discovered in his list of categories are simply the principles of objective determination in space and time. Scientific thinking is anticipation of objective experience, and the experiment and observation which check it, imply objective perception; imply an experience in which the distinction between subjective and objective has already been made, and the principles of objective determination in space and time have already been active. Thus we get a solution of the question as to how principles like causation can be valid of all experience which is on all fours with the solution given in the ‘Aesthetic’ of the similar question in regard to space and time. Causation is involved in both thinking and objective perception, and therefore it can be a principle implied in objective thinking without that involving that the nature of reality is to be an order of events causally determined in time. The validity of scientific principles has no relevance to the metaphysical status of these principles.
Kant has thus found a solution of his problem which preserves the integrity and independence of science without prejudice to the integrity of the principles of conduct. He has saved the objectivity of science by a limitation of the scope of science, by insisting that all that scientific thinking can do is to anticipate experience, and that therefore its principles have no application beyond the limits of experience…. This is Kant’s phenomenalism.” (Kant:1964:xviii-xix)

“For we come to the conclusion that our faculty of cognition is unable to transcend the limits of possible experience; and yet this is precisely the most essential object of this science. The estimate of our rational cognition a priori at which we arrive is that is has only to do with phenomena, and that things in themselves, while possessing a real existence, lie beyond its sphere.” (Kant:1964:13)

“Thus, pure reason, which at first seemed to promise us nothing less than the extension of our cognition beyond the limits of experience, is found, when thoroughly examined, to contain nothing but regulative principles, the virtue and function of which is to introduce into our cognition, a higher degree of unity than the understanding could of itself. These principles, by placing the goal of all our struggles at so great a distance, realize for us the most thorough connection between the different parts of our cognition, and the highest degree of systematic unity. But, on the other hand, if misunderstood and employed as constitutive principles of transcendent cognition, they become the parents of illusions and contradictions, while pretending to introduce us to new regions of knowledge.” (Kant:1964:404)

“Thus all human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas. Although it possesses in relation to all three elements, a priori sources of cognition, which seemed to transcend the limits of all experience, a thorough-going criticism demonstrates, that speculative reason can never, by the aid of these elements, pass the bounds of possible experience, and that the proper destination of this highest faculty of cognition is to employ all methods, and all the principles of these methods, for the purpose of penetrating into the innermost secrets of nature, by the aid of the principles of unity (among all kinds of which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there lied nought for us but the void inane.” (Kant:1964:404)

“Reason must be subject, in all its operations, to criticism, which must always be permitted to exercise its functions without restraint; otherwise its interests are imperilled, and its influence obnoxious to suspicion. There is nothing, however useful, however sacred it may be, that can claim exemption from the searching examination of this supreme tribunal, which has no respect of persons. The very existence of reason depends upon this freedom; for the voice of reason is not that of a dictatorial and despotic power, it is rather like the vote of the citizens of a free state, every member of which must have the privilege of giving free expression to his doubts, and possess even the right of veto.
But while reason can never decline to submit itself to the tribunal of criticism, it has not always cause to dread the judgement of this court. Pure reason, however, when engaged in the sphere of dogmatism, is not so thoroughly conscious of a strict observance of its highest laws, as to appear before a higher judicial reason with perfect confidence. On the contrary, it must renounce its magnificent dogmatical pretensions in philosophy.
Very different is the case, when it has to defend itself, not before a judge, but against an equal. …
By the polemic of pure reason I mean the defence of its propositions made by reason, in opposition to the dogmatical counter-propositions advanced by other parties. The question here is not whether its own statements may not also be false; it merely regards the fact that reason proves that the opposite cannot be established with demonstrative certainty, nor even asserted with a higher degree of probability. Reason does not hold her possessions upon sufferance; for, although she cannot show a perfectly satisfactory title to them, no one can prove that she is not the rightful possessor.” (Kant:1964:422-23)
“I cannot agree with the opinion of several admirable thinkers- Sulzer among the rest- that in spite of the weakness of the arguments hitherto in use, we may hope, one day, to see sufficient demonstrations of the two cardinal propositions of pure reason- the existence of a Supreme Being, and the immortality of the soul. I am certain, on the contrary, that this will never be the case. For on what ground can reason base such synthetical propositions, which do not relate to the objects of experience and their internal possibility?- But it is also demonstratively certain that no one will ever be able to maintain the contrary with the least show of probability. For, as he can attempt such a proof solely upon the basis of pure reason, he is bound to prove that a Supreme Being, and a thinking subject in the character of a pure intelligence, are impossible. But where will he find the knowledge which can enable him to enounce synthetical judgements in regard to things which transcend the region of experience? We may, therefore, rest assured that the opposite never will be demonstrated.” (Kant:1964:424)

“The true reason why indirect proofs are employed in different sciences is this. When the grounds upon which we seek to base a cognition are too various or too profound, we try whether or not we may not discover the truth of our cognition from its consequences. The modus ponens of reasoning from the truth of its inferences that can be drawn from it are known to be true; for in this case there can be only one possible ground for these inferences, and that is the true one. But this is a quite impracticable procedure, as it surpasses all our powers to discover all the possible inferences that can be drawn from a proposition. But this mode of reasoning is employed, under favour, when we wish to prove the truth of an hypothesis; in which case we admit the truth of the conclusion- which is supported by analogy- that, if all the inferences we have drawn and examined agree with the proposition assumed, all other possible inferences will also agree with it. But, in this way, an hypothesis can never be established as a demonstrated truth.” (Kant:1964:449)

In other words, reason cannot ever tell us if there is or isn’t a God, it is always polluted by the perspective from which we progress from. From the way we begin our story. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. In the beginning there were four perfectly balanced forces, infinitely dense and infinitely small and then something happened and the Big Bang started the creation of the Universe…..Quantum physics has also proved that reason makes no sense, and science plays, itself, ‘not with certainties, but with probabilities’, based upon observations of a universe of which it is now known our senses and our sensors can only see around 1% of, because the rest of the universe is made up of dark-matter and dark-energy, of which nothing can be proven about, measured, weighed or tested, let alone experienced, apart from the fact that these unsense-able ‘things’, (perhaps they could be called ‘monsters’ in real time, not dreamtime), are expanding the universe at a faster and faster rate. That is to say that these forces are increasing in power, in a scientifically hypothesised world, controlled by the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts a frozen universe depleted of energy with static mass in an infinite unchanging nothingness that will be the denote the infinite time in which the universe exists. This bit of time that we are living in is a blip of insignificance in comparison to this final state of this meaningless accident. In other words the cause is hypothetically known, the effect will be no further effect, and yet the 1% of the universe that we can see is picking up speed.
In other words science cannot show a primal cause, just as religion cannot, they both tell a story. One from the perspective of subject and object as the fundamental truth- science, the other from the perspective of a subject that can become a part of the object, a soul that can return to God, a reality that can be transcended to a reality, that can be called ‘God’, by its Nature as the fundamental truth.
Only experience can inform us of the truth of these fundamental truths upon which we act, and therefore cause and effect are imprisoned by these unchallenged fundamental truths. It is therefore unreasonable to reason that there is no God, without really partaking of the methodologies- experiments of transcending the subject-object tautology- in the rituals, meditation, prayers, dances, etc that mankind has imagined, not thought up, in order to experience his alternate reality.
People who take up God say that it filled a bit of them and made them happy.
People who eat a chocolate bar say that it filled a bit of them and made them happy.
People who don’t eat a chocolate bar, don’t say that they are filled or happy, they say they are empty and happy. That is because happiness is not in a chocolate bar or God, they are in your experience placed upon that object, depending on the state of your consciousness.
People on a diet eat a chocolate bar and feel filled and unhappy. Now ask a scientist, “What is a chocolate bar?” Answer. weights and measures and forces of objects.
People in a religion partake of rituals and feel filled and happy. Now ask a scientist, “what is a religion?” Answer. Weights and measures and forces of objects (people).”
What made the universe? Answer. Unmeasurable, infinitely massive objectless forces, in an infinite smallness unmeasurable in space and time, because space and time don’t yet exist. And what made those forces…..? In other words, cause and effect are not fundamental truths that frame our world, they are a fundament frame of thought by which we frame our perception of the world and hence experience. Truth has nothing to do with them, they are merely the ground of truth upon which we exist as subject-humans.

I cannot go further into this right now, but will do so in a further planned book, however the point of outlining the above here and now is simply to show reasonable scientific minded readers that there is a known limit to their reason, which cannot transcend its limit, i.e. say for sure whether there is a God or not.
For this reason, Kant termed there to be two types of reason. The first is practical reason- the iron fish, which the Western mind requires no further experience of as that is how we are trained to think; the second is transcendental reason- the magic horse.
However, the importance of this choice of perspective is one that is not much regaled in the world of science. Namely- Free-will and purpose. Free-will does not exist in science, it is an illusion of our chemical brains. The technology part subsequent to science tells us that there is nothing greater than the free-choice that the market place gives us to live how we want. That is ‘reasonably’ to say, how our animal chemistry requires its automatic functions to proceed in order to become empowered to achieve its purpose. Namely, to find the best mate and produce better babies, that is babies better at surviving and mating. That is our will (evolutionary determinism), and technology enables us to freely choose what we require in order to achieve this project. That however is also the extent of our free-will- to fulfil our purpose of living; to survive, in order to extend our individual genetic line with the best genes we can and then die, because we are now useless. This is practical reason and its limits to your free-will, without transcendental speculative reason, i.e. agnosticism, or atheism. In other words it is a simple response of an organism to pleasure and pain, dictated by the genetic nature of the organism. Whether human or bacterium, we are all reasonably doing the same thing, but no matter what sequence of genes is achieved in whatever organism, there is no higher purpose, than that. It is all a meaningless accident from a meaningless accident (the Big Bang), and everything you do is consequently meaningless apart from, to yourself individually due to the subsequent experience of pleasure and pain that comes from the accident of existence, i.e. the happiness of you as an organism.
When you see scientists regaling the beauty of the universe by showing the dust clouds and galaxies etc, etcetera, it would be pertinent to remind them that the only reason that it is beautiful is because fruit is red when it is ripe. Most mammals can only see in black and white, but monkeys reacquired the gene that reptiles and dinosaurs have which enables the red receptors of the eye to grow, giving us full colour vision. The reason that this became good for survival for the monkeys is because trees started to produce fruits in order to survive. Before the fruit was ripe, and the seeds were ready for release from them, the trees made the fruit taste sour, but when the seeds were ready then the fruit became sweet and changed from green to red, indicating ripeness. It is a great waste of energy to harvest unripe fruit and so the monkeys gained a great survival perk by gaining colour vision. Scientists also get to marvel at the beauty of the universe, but that is a meaningless accident. What matters is that they are still, quite reasonably, simply monkeys.

This does not therefore prove that is reasonable to believe in God, but it does point to a vital aspect of our lives in reality. That is that free-will creates a morality of action, not just a necessity of drives. To do something that is for others and not for oneself, for no ‘good’ reason.:

“The transcendental speculation of reason relates to three things: the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. The speculative interest which reason has in those questions is very small; and, for its sake alone, we should not undertake the labour of transcendental investigation- a labour full of toil and ceaseless struggle. We should be loth to undertake this labour because the discoveries we might make would not be of the smallest use in the sphere of concrete or physical investigation. We may find out that the will is free, but this knowledge only relates to the intelligible cause of our volition. As regards the phenomena or expressions of this will, that is, our actions, we are bound, in obedience to an inviolable maxim, without which reason cannot be employed in the sphere of experience, to explain these in the same way as we explain all the other phenomena of nature, that is to say, according to its unchangeable laws. We may have discovered the spirituality and immortality of the soul, but we cannot employ this knowledge to explain the phenomena of this life, nor the peculiar nature of the future, because our conception of an incorporeal nature is purely negative and does not add anything to our knowledge, and the only inferences to be drawn from it are purely fictitious. If, again, we prove the existence of a supreme intelligence, we should be able from it to make the conformity to aims existing in the arrangement of the world comprehensible; but we should not be justified in deducing from it any particular arrangement or disposition, or, inferring any, where it is not perceived. For it is a necessary rule of the speculative use of reason, that we must not overlook natural causes, or refuse to listen to the teaching of experience, for the sake of deducing what we know and perceive from something that transcends all our knowledge. In one word, these three propositions are, for the speculative reason, always transcendent, and cannot be employed as immanent principles in relation to the objects of experience; they are, consequently, of no use to us in this sphere, being but the valueless results of the severe but unprofitable efforts of reason.
If, then, the actual cognition of these three cardinal propositions is perfectly useless, while Reason uses her utmost endeavours to induce us to admit them, it is plain that their real value and importance relate to our practical, and not to our speculative interest.
I term all that is possible through free will, practical. But if the conditions of the exercise of free volition are empirical, reason can have only a regulative, and not a constitutive, influence upon it, and is serviceable merely for the introduction of unity into its empirical laws. In the moral philosophy of prudence, for example, the sole business of reason is to bring about a union of all the ends, which are aimed at by our inclinations, into one ultimate end- that of happiness, and to show the agreement which should exist among the means of attaining that end. In this sphere, accordingly, reason cannot present to us any other than pragmatical laws of free action, for our guidance towards the aims set up by the senses, and is incompetent to give us laws which are pure and determined completely a priori. On the other hand, pure practical laws, the ends of which have been given by reason entirely a priori, and which are not empirically conditioned, but are, on the contrary, absolutely imperative in their nature, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone belong to the sphere of the practical exercise of reason, and admit of a canon.
All the powers of reason, in the sphere of what may be termed pure philosophy, are, in fact, directed to the three above-mentioned problems alone. These again have a still higher end- the answer to the question, what we ought to do, if the will is free, if there is a God, and a future world. Now, as this problem relates to our conduct, in reference to the highest aim of humanity, it is evident that the ultimate intention of nature, in the constitution of our reason, has been directed to the moral alone….
I have to remark, in the first place, that at present I treat of the conception of freedom in the practical sense only, and set aside the corresponding transcendental conception, which cannot be employed as a ground of explanation in the phenomenal world, but is itself a problem for pure reason. A will is purely animal (arbitrium brutum) when it is determined by sensuous impulses or instincts only, that is, when it is determined in a pathological manner. A will, which can be determined independently of sensuous impulses, consequently by motives presented by reason alone, is called a free will (arbitrium liberum); and everything which is connected with this free will, either as principle or consequence, is termed practical. The existence of practical freedom can be proved from experience alone. For the human will is not determined by that alone which immediately affects the senses; on the contrary, we have the power, by calling up the notion of what is useful or hurtful in a more distant relation, of overcoming the immediate impressions on our sensuous faculty of desire. But these considerations of what is desirable in relation to our whole state, that is, is in the end good and useful, are based entirely upon reason. This faculty, accordingly, enounces laws, which are imperative or objective laws of freedom, and which tell us what ought to take place, thus distinguishing themselves from the laws of nature, which relate to that which does take place. The laws of freedom or of free will are hence termed practical laws.
Whether reason is not itself, in the actual delivery of these laws, determined in its turn by other influences, and whether the action which, in relation to sensuous impulses, we call free, may not, in relation to higher and more remote operative causes, really form a part of nature- these are the questions which do not here concern us. They are purely speculative questions; and all we have to do, in the practical sphere, is to inquire into the rule of conduct which reason has to present. Experience demonstrates to us the existence of practical freedom as one of the causes which exist in nature, that is, it shows the causal power of reason in the determination of the will. The idea of transcendental freedom, on the contrary, requires that reason- in relation to its causal power of commencing a series of phenomena- should be independent of all sensuous determining causes; and thus it seems to be in opposition to the law of nature and to all possible experience. It therefore remains a problem for the human mind. But this problem does not concern reason in its practical use; and we have, therefore, in a canon of pure reason, to do with only two questions, which relate to the practical interest of pure reason- Is there a God? And, Is there a future life? The question of transcendental freedom is purely speculative, and we may therefore set it entirely aside when we come to treat of practical reason.” (Kant:1964:453-56)

[note to above] “All practical conceptions relate to objects of pleasure and pain, and consequently- in an indirect manner, at least- to objects of feeling. But as feeling is not a faculty of representation, but lies out of the sphere of our powers of cognition, the elements of our judgements, in so far as they relate to pleasure or pain, that is, the elements of our practical judgements, do not belong to transcendental philosophy, which has to do with pure a priori cognitions alone.” (Kant:1964:455)

“The whole interest of reason, speculative as well as practical, is centred in the three following questions:

What can I Know?
What ought I to do?
What may I hope?

…So far, then, as knowledge is concerned, thus much, at least, is established, that, in regard to those two problems, it lies beyond our reach.
The second question is purely practical. As such it may not indeed fall within the province of pure reason, but still it is not transcendental, but moral, and consequently cannot in itself form the subject of our criticism.
The third question: If I act as I ought to do, what may I then hope?- is at once practical and theoretical, and- in its highest form- speculative question. For all hoping has happiness for its object, and stands in precisely the same relation to the practical and the law of morality, as knowing to the theoretical cognition of things and the law of nature. The former arrives finally at the conclusion that something is (which determines the ultimate end), because something ought to take place; the latter, that something is (which operates as the highest cause), because something does take place.
Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires; extensive, in regard to their multiplicity; intensive, in regard to their degree; and protensive, in regard to their duration. The practical law based on the motive of happiness, I term a pragmatical law (or prudential rule); but that law, assuming such to exist, which has no other motive than the worthiness of being happy, I term a moral or ethical law. The first tells us what we have to do, if we wish to become possessed of happiness; the second dictates how we ought to act, in order to deserve happiness. The first is based upon empirical principles; for it is only by experience that I can learn either what inclinations exist which desire satisfaction, or what are the natural means of satisfying them. The second takes no account of our desires or the means of satisfying them, and regards only the freedom of a rational being, and the necessary conditions under which alone this freedom can harmonize with the distribution of happiness according to principles. This second law may therefore rest upon mere ideas of pure reason, and may be cognized a priori.” (Kant:1964:457-58)

“It is, then, in its practical, but especially in its moral use, that the principles of pure reason possess objective reality.
I call the world a moral world, in so far as it may be in accordance with all the ethical laws- which, by virtue of the freedom of reasonable beings, it can be, and according to the necessary laws of morality it ought to be. But this world must be conceived only as an intelligible world, inasmuch as abstraction is therein made of all conditions (ends), and even of all impediments to morality (the weakness or pravity of human nature). So far, then, it is a mere idea- though still a practical idea- which may have, and ought to have, an influence on the world of sense, so as to bring it as far as possible into conformity with itself. The idea of a moral world has, therefore, objective reality, not as referring to an object of intelligible intuition- for of such an object we can form no conception whatever- but to the world of sense- conceived, however, as an object of pure reason in its practical use- and to a corpus mysticum of rational beings in it, in so far as the liberum arbitrium of the individual is placed, under and by virtue of moral laws, in complete systematic unity both with itself, and with the freedom of all others.
That is the answer to the first of the two questions of pure reason which relate to its practical interest: Do that which will render thee worthy of happiness. The second question is this: If I conduct myself so as not to be unworthy of happiness, may I hope thereby to obtain happiness? In order to arrive at the solution of this question, we must inquire whether the principles of pure reason, which prescribe a priori the law, necessity also connect this hope with it.
I say, then, that just as the moral principles are necessary according to reason in its practical use, so it is equally necessary according to reason in its theoretical use, to assume that every one has ground to hope for happiness in the measure in which he has made himself worthy of it in his conduct, and that therefore the system of morality is inseparably (though only in the idea of pure reason) connected with that of happiness.
Now in an intelligible, that is, in the moral world, in the conception of which we make abstraction of all the impediments to morality (sensuous desires), such a system of happiness, connected with and proportioned to morality, may be conceived as necessary, because freedom of volition- partly incited, and partly restrained by moral laws- would be itself the cause of general happiness; and thus rational beings, under the guidance of such principles, would be themselves the authors both of their own enduring welfare and that of others. But such a system of self-rewarding morality is only an idea, the carrying out of which depends upon the condition that every one acts as he ought; in other words, that all actions of reasonable beings be such as they would be if they sprang from a supreme wills. But since the moral law is binding on each individual in the use of his freedom of volition, even if others should not act in conformity with this law, neither the nature of things, nor the causality of actions and their relation to morality, determine how the consequences of these actions will be related to happiness; and the necessary connection of the hope of happiness with the unceasing endeavour to become worthy of happiness, cannot be cognized by reason, if we take nature alone for our guide. This connection can be hoped for only on the assumption that the cause of nature is a supreme reason, which governs according to moral laws.
I term the idea of an intelligence in which the morally most perfect will, united with supreme blessedness, is the cause of all happiness in the world, so far as happiness stands in strict relation to morality (as the worthiness of being happy), the Ideal of the Supreme good. It is only, then, in the ideal of the supreme original good, that pure reason can find the ground of the practically necessary connection of both elements of the highest derivative good, and accordingly of an intelligible, that is, moral world. Now since we are necessitated by reason to conceive ourselves as belonging to such a world, while the senses present to us nothing but a world of phenomena, we must assume the former as a consequence of our conduct in the world of sense (since the world of sense gives us no hint of it), and therefore as future in relation to us. Thus God and a future life are two hypotheses which, according to the principles of pure reason, are inseparable from the obligation which this reason imposes upon us.
Morality per se constitutes a system. But we can form no system of happiness, except in so far as it is dispensed in strict proportion to morality. But this is only possible in the intelligible world, under a wise author and ruler.” (Kant:1964:458-60)

“Leibnitz termed the world, when viewed in relation to the rational beings which it contains, and the moral relations in which they stand to each other, under the government of the Supreme Good, the kingdom of Grace, and distinguished it from the kingdom of Nature, in which these rational beings live, under moral laws, indeed, but expect no other consequences from their actions than such as follow according to the course of nature in the world of sense. To view ourselves, therefore, as in the kingdom of grace, in which all happiness awaits us, except in so far as we ourselves limit our participation in it by actions which render us unworthy of happiness, is a practically necessary idea of reason.
Practical laws, in so far as they are subjective grounds of actions, that is, subjective principles, are termed maxims. The judgements of morality, in its purity and ultimate results, are framed according to ideas; the observance of its laws, according to maxims.
The whole course of our life must be subject to moral maxims; but this is impossible, unless with the moral law, which is a mere idea, reason connects an efficient cause which ordains to all conduct which is in conformity with the moral law an issue either in this or in another life, which is in exact conformity with our highest aims. Thus, without a God and without a world, invisible to us now, but hoped for, the glorious idea of morality are, indeed, objects of appropriation and of admiration, but cannot be the springs of purpose and action. For they do not satisfy all the aims which are natural to every rational being, and which are determined a priori by pure reason, itself, and necessary.
Happiness alone is, in the view of reason, far from being the complete good. Reason does not approve of it (however much inclination may desire it), except as united with desert. On the other hand, morality alone, and with it, mere desert, is likewise far from being the complete good. To make it complete, he who conducts himself in a manner not unworthy of happiness, must be able to hope for the possession of happiness. Even reason, unbiased by private ends, or interested considerations, cannot judge otherwise, if it puts itself in the place of a being whose business it is to dispense all happiness to others. For in the practical idea both points are essentially combined, though in such a way that participation in happiness is rendered possible by the moral disposition by the prospect of happiness. For a disposition which should require the prospect of happiness as its necessary condition, would not be moral, and hence also would not be worthy of complete happiness- a happiness which, in the view of reason, recognizes no limitation but such as arises from our own immoral conduct.
Happiness, therefore, in exact proportion with the morality of rational beings (whereby they are made worthy of happiness), constitutes alone the supreme good of a world into which we absolutely must transport ourselves according to the commands of pure but practical reason….
But this systematic unity of ends in this world of intelligences- which, as mere nature, is only a world of sense, but as a system of freedom of volition may be termed an intelligible, that is, moral world (regnum gratiae)- leads inevitably also to the teleological unity of all things which constitute this great whole, according to universal natural laws- just as the unity of the former is according to universal and necessary moral laws- and unites the practical with the speculative reason. The world must be represented as having originated from an idea, if it is to harmonize with that use of reason without which we cannot even consider ourselves as worthy of reason- namely, the moral use, which rests entirely on the idea of the supreme good. Hence the investigation of nature receives a teleological direction, and becomes, in its widest extension, physico-theology.” (Kant:1964:458-63)

“so he shows in his distinction between right and wrong unless we assume the freedom of the will and the transcendency of moral purposes….
But we are still continually told that the success of mechanical principles in physics proves that freewill is a delusion, and that we can only be saved if we will mould our theory of conduct on the lines of the sciences, as there are still those who think that the integrity of moral conduct can only be defended by throwing doubts on the achievements of science. Most people care primarily for one side or the other, look at science with the eyes of a moralist or at morals with the eyes of a scientist.” (Kant:1964:xx)

What all of the above observations of Kant point us to is the idea of how to live in the world-What Ought I to do? That is if one believes in a God to the point where it is an actual experience, not a faith or belief of reason, then the moral actions of that individual will be much different to that of a scientist. A scientists definition of right would be that rape is your natural-right, that murder is your natural- right, for the individual. Just as in Nature, even though it is very rare, this is merely because of how many calories it uses up, how it depletes the social order of a group, which is merely there to enable the survival of the individual who carries the only thing of irrelevant importance- its genes.
Transcendental reason, on the other hand, says that if there is a God then there is a reason to have moral laws based upon the reasonable experience of seeing every-thing as His, and not mine, as subject to him and not object to me. That my existence should therefore be in respect to God and hence to all of his creatures and creation, even at the expense of my own happiness in the form of pleasure and pain, because of this practical reason and moral state of existence, that continues this experience. From this perspective then we obtain our morality, our ethics, and most practically, our Laws.
As you will see, that is the exact path of how we have obtained them.

Now that we have dealt, all but briefly, with the distance between our current western- mind-set and outlined its short-comings towards free-will and morality in creating a civil way of life, we can continue to expound upon the ontological perspective of the hunter-gatherer, who lived in a bountiful landscape, a Garden of Eden, for 12,000 years. What was their moral compass and how did it turn into civilization? What was it like to not see one-self as a subject-object, an individual amongst individuals possibly looked down upon by a distant God, but to feel that he walked beside you, that you came from his imagination and existed by this imagining in a dream-time of existence? Why would you ever leave? How comes we did? And how would you tell those people who came afterwards about those times, from a perspective of experience that no longer is possible now that the Garden of Eden has gone?
Understanding the Distance between the Ontological Perspective of the Caveman and ourselves
Despite the fact that hunter-gatherer people do not physically live in any distance of time or untraversable space to us, i.e. today aborigines still exist that practice this way of life, they do exist in a different perspective and experience to us, which calls from them a very different type of human-being, and a consequent different type of culture, of moral law, and of its idea of progress, and hence how it behaves.
It may seem to the atheist reader that this is highly irrelevant because the whole God thing is rubbish, but the reason that this is necessary to learn is that these people were the founders of civilization, and consequently of history itself. It is therefore the beginning point to ask, What is a human-being? Their answer is 99.8% truer than the last 5,000 years blip of civilization. Not only that but it contains the seed thoughts and experiences of humanity that have formed the next 5,000 years fundamentally:

“Today we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit.” (Durkheim:1982:69-70)

In order to explore this, we will firstly look at the cave-man through the perspective of philosophy, then anthropology, biology, and allegory in the form of the bible’s story, and other world myths, of the beginning of mankind up until Babylon, the first civilization, is created.

Throughout civilizations history, philosophers have put forward theories of just what it was like for early man to exist. Rousseau, the father of the French Revolution that gave birth to the phrase, Equalitie, Fraternitie, and Libertie (equality, brotherhood, and liberty), spoke of a noble savage, that treated each other in a social contract of natural law resulting in love and affection based upon man’s oneness with nature i.e. God. The most famous counter to this argument was Hobbes, the philosophical father of Absolutism (rule by the monarchy, as we shall see later), who stated that the reason that civilization began was due to the fact that before it there was a state of anarchy, in which life was, ‘nasty, brutish and short.’, and hence required a social contract based upon survival, and safety, in order to progress towards civilization. In both instances the belief in God was still paramount. Rousseau’s caveman took God’s instructions individually as they saw fit, and Hobbes’ caveman required God’s conduit, a King, in order to enforce his laws upon the undeserving people.

The journey that we are going to take uses the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre in order to describe a better synthesis of how I see the archaeological, anthropological, biblical and biological evidence, that will be presented. It should be stated that of these philosophers, Heidegger believes in a God, whilst Sartre does not. Therefore I am not positing the fact that there is or is not a God, I am merely using their language in order to construct a language-game that we can play with throughout this book, that I believe will enable us to understand the distance between ourselves and the cave-man, and between ourselves, our moral conduct, and our general practical reason of how to view the world.

How therefore did Heidegger describe the ontological perspective of the cave-man?
To Heidegger the caveman was one who saw his being (his ontology) as one with God. To this perspective he gave the name ‘being-in-Being’. That is before the perspective of human-kind becomes one of a ‘human-being’, that is to say, contra to an individual who is a ‘being-for-itself’, the cave-man was a being who saw their existence as a part of Nature, or God, as the greater Being. In other words the Meta- (greater) Physical (than our experience of the physical world) experience described as ‘dreamtime’. To gain some idea of the ‘art’ of living as a being-in-Being, and the ‘art’ of living as a being-for-itself, let us hear Heideggers explanation of the word building, bearing in mind that the hunter-gatherer had no building and the settler-farmer did:

“What, then does Bauen, building, mean? The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place. The real meaning of the verb bauen, namely, to dwell, has been lost to us. But a covert trace of it has been preserved in the German word Nachbar, neighbour is in Old English the neahgebur; neah, near, and gebur, dweller. The Nachbar is the Nachgebur, the Nachgebauer, the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby. The verbs, buri, büren, beuren, beuron, all signify dwelling, the abode, the place of dwelling. Now to be sure the old word buan not only tells us that bauen, to build, is really to dwell; it also gives us a clue as to how we have to think about the dwelling it signifies. When we speak of dwelling we usually think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell- that would be virtual inactivity- we practice a profession, we do business, we travel and lodge on the way, now here, now there. Buaen originally means to dwell. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense it also says how far the nature of dwelling reaches. That is, bauen, buan, bhu, beo are our word bin in the versions: ich bin, I am, du bist, you are, the imperative form bis, be. What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word buaen however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.” (Heidegger:1971:146-7)

“[L]anguage in a way retracts the real meaning of the word bauen, which as dwelling, is evidence of the primal nature of these meanings; for with the essential words of language, their true meaning easily falls into oblivion in favour of foreground meanings. Man has hardly yet pondered the mystery of this process. Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence.
But if we listen to what language says in the word buaen we hear three things:

Building is really dwelling.
Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.

…But in what does the nature of dwelling consist? Let us listen once more to what language says to us. The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more directly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be brought to peace, to remain in peace. The word for peace, Friede, means the free, das Frye, and fry means: preserved from harm and danger, preserved from something, safeguarded. To free really means to spare. The sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the one whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature, when we return it specifically to its being, when we “free” it in the real sense of the word into a preserve of peace. To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth.” (Heidegger:1971:148-9)

“Man’s relation to locations, and through locations to spaces, inheres in his dwelling. The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken.
When we think, in the manner just attempted, about the relation between location and space, but also about the relation of man and space, a light falls on the nature of the things that are locations and that we call buildings.” (Heidegger:1971:157-8)

“Dwelling, however, is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist. Perhaps this attempt to think about dwelling and building will bring out somewhat more clearly that building belongs to dwelling and how it receives its nature from dwelling. Enough will have been gained if dwelling and building have become worthy of questioning and thus have remained worthy of thought.
But that thinking itself belongs to dwelling in the same sense as building, although in a different way, may perhaps be attested to by the course of thought here attempted.
Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both- building and thinking- belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.
We are attempting to trace in thought the nature of dwelling. The next step on this path would be the question: what is the state of dwelling in our precarious age? On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason. Nor is there just talk; there is action too. We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise. However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.
But how else can mortals answer this summons than by trying on their part, on their own, to bring dwelling to the fullness of its nature? This they accomplish when they build out of dwelling, and think for the sake of dwelling.” (Heidegger:1971:160-61)

In the above quotes of Heidegger, ‘I think therefore I am.’ the rational statement of Descartes justification that indeed we do exist, turns out to have been couched in the simple phrase ‘I am’, ‘Ich bin’. ‘Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling’. How I think, therefore I am, or how I am thought I am, is a matter of perspective, certainly before we start thinking, there is a lot of perspective, that has already caused my existence and hence my thoughts.

“Thinking consists in arranging our ideas, and consequently in classifying them. To think of fire, for example, is to put it into a certain category of things, in such a way as to be able to say that it is this or that, or this and not that. But classifying is also naming, for a general idea has no existence and reality except in and by the word which expresses it and which alone makes its individuality. Thus the language of a people always has an influence upon the manner in which new things, recently learned, are classified in the mind and are subsequently thought of; these new things are thus forced to adapt themselves to pre-existing forms. For this reason, the language which men spoke when they undertook to construct an elaborated representation of the universe marked the system of ideas which was then born with an indelible trace.
Nor are we without some knowledge of this language, at least in so far as the Indo-European peoples are concerned. Howsoever distant it may be from us, souvenirs of it remain in our actual languages which permit us to imagine what it was: these are the roots. These stems, from which are derived all the words which we employ and which are found at the basis of all the Indo-European languages are regarded by Max Müller as so many echoes of the language which the corresponding peoples spoke before their separation, that is to say, at the very moment when this religion of nature, which is to be explained, was being formed. Now these roots present two remarkable characteristics, which, it is true, have as yet been observed only in this particular group of languages, but which our author believes to be present equally in the other linguistic families.” (Durkheim:1982:75-6)

It is only as humans settle therefore that the word ‘I dwell’, requires a new meaning because of how we now dwell as settlers. Why we dwell, why I am, turns into, ‘I think I’ll build my dwelling place’ and use my reason, not for God, but for me. I think I’ll be a human-being separate from natural existence, hunter-gathering. But by doing this I have changed the nature of my existence and so I am going to experience a new type of life-style and a new way of being, not that of being-in-Being, as I no longer rely on God’s bounty but on my own hard work and intelligence. Being a different kind of human, for the first time. This is the birth of ‘human-nature’, over Nature, of human-being, to human-kind. This new dwelling therefore requires new thoughts, and hence, new words strung upon a new ground, a worked-ground, requires some ground-work. It is a new lens with a different perspective, that twists old words in seeing their meaning. To dwell in the Garden of Eden, or to dwell in the house of God that you (as subject) built for him (as object) and in another house for your-self. This requires an act of a wilful change of perspective, and as we have seen this wilful change of perspective began as the ‘small insurance policy’ of spreading a few seeds in order to have a back-up harvest in case of lean times. It was a new ‘technique’ in how to live, born from a new way of thinking, willed by a few hunter-gatherers.

Heidegger tells us about the ramifications of this ‘willed-technique’ of living that led to the settled way of life. How can I use these metal fish in the external- objective world, for my happiness, over the inner subjective world of the magic horse?

“The willing of which we speak here is the putting-through, the self-assertion, whose purpose has already posited the world as the whole of producible objects. This willing determines the nature of modern man, though at first time he is not aware of its far-reaching implication, though he could not already know today by what will, as the Being of beings, this willing is willed. By such willing, modern man turns out to be the being who, in all relations to all that is, and thus in his relation to himself as well, rises up as the producer who puts through, carries out, his own self and establishes this uprising as the absolute rule. The whole objective inventory in terms of which the world appears is given over to, commended to, and thus subjected to the command of self-assertive production. Willing has in it the character of command; for purposeful self-assertion is a mode in which the attitude of the producing, and the objective character of the world, concentrate into an unconditional and therefore complete unity. In this self-concentration, the command character of the will announces itself. And through it, in the course of modern metaphysics, the long-concealed nature of the long-since existing will as the Being of beings comes to make its appearance.
Correspondingly, human willing too can be in the mode of self-assertion only by forcing everything under its dominion from the start, even before it can survey it. To such a willing, everything, beforehand and thus subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and its atmosphere become raw material. Man becomes human material, which is disposed of with a view to proposal goals. The unconditioned establishment of the unconditional self-assertion by which the world is purposefully made over according to the frame of mind of man’s command is a process that emerges from the hidden nature of technology. Only in modern times does this nature begin to unfold as a destiny of the truth of all beings as a whole; until now, its scattered appearances and attempts had remained incorporated within the embracing structure of the realm of culture and civilization.
Modern science and the total state, as necessary consequences of the nature of technology, are also its attendants. The same holds true of the means and forms that are set up for the organization of public opinion and of men’s everyday ideas. Not only are living things technically objectivated in stock-breeding and exploitation; the attack of atomic physics on the phenomena of living matter as such is in full swing. At bottom, the essence of life is supposed to yield itself to technical production. The fact that we today, in all seriousness, discern in the results and the viewpoint of atomic physics possibilities of demonstrating human freedom and of establishing a new value theory, is a sign of the predominance of technological ideas whose development has long since been removed beyond the realm of the individual’s personal views and opinions. The inherent natural power of technology shows itself further in the attempts that are being made, in adjacent areas so to speak, to master technology with the help of traditional values; but in these efforts technological means are already being employed that are not mere external forms. For generally the utilization of machinery and the manufacture of machines is not yet technology itself- it is only an instrument concordant with technology, whereby the nature of technology is established in the objective character of its raw materials. Even this, that man becomes the subject and the world the object, is a consequence of technology’s nature establishing itself, and not the other way around….
The formless formations of technological production interpose themselves before the Open of the pure draft. Things that once grew now wither quickly away.” (Heidegger:1971:111-13)

Now that we have the relevant language to play with let us look at the evidence found by science through the words of Emile Durkheim and others:
If the cave-man was living in such a God oriented state of mind as Rousseau and Heidegger have suggested then it would be reasonable to expect that his moral actions, resulting from such a perspective, would be ones of respect for other life and for his fellow man, because all of the world is not his but His (Gods). Every creation is His creation and should be respected and even wondered and awed at. Every action would be His will be done, before my will.
In other words, it would be a peaceful world, where no-one tried to gain advantage over another- a Garden of Eden.
If on the other hand, Hobbes was right then we should expect to see a lot of warring, raping, pillaging, and Godlessness.

The Evidence of the Perspective of the Cave-man

Emile Durkheim, was an atheist who believed that civilization could not come into existence without the belief in a god, simply because of the moral laws and experience that attend such a belief. It is these laws that give birth to co-operation, the division of labour, and the social contract. He also believed that God and religion were something that were created in order to explain the subsequent power of the ‘social group’ that adopted this belief and caused the subsequent form of each-others behaviours and culture.
Durkheim saw the primal perspective of our caveman as he came together as a group as the cause of the terms, ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, becoming willed into existence by experience. For Durkheim, the God-filled term, describing a, ‘being-in-Being’ of Heidegger, and the Godless version of a ‘being-in-itself’ as described by Sartre, were hand in glove realities that were chosen by the experience of human-beings as they came together to in settled communities. This change in experience itself, is the underlying practical scientific reason, as well as, the religious transcendental reason, that, as products of each other, come to frame our world and hence our God perspective:

“As I have said, distinction between the sacred and the profane is, for Durkheim, the greatest single distinction between good and bad, right and wrong, the logical and illogical, or any other. So powerful was this distinction upon the primitive mind, so binding and authoritative the hold of the sacred, that from this sphere of sacred experience sprang eventually the basic structures of human thought applied to all realms. Thus, Durkheim tells us, it was the experience over countless generations of participating regularly and rhythmically in the communal, sacred rites that gradually created a sense of time. Similarly, it was the spectacle of the all-powerful, absolute primitive community that established the idea first of god or gods and then of the kind of causal omnipotence that would in due time become secularized into the category of cause that exists in human minds.” (Durkheim:1982:ix)

“In one sense, it is logically implied in the very notion of sacredness. All that is sacred is the object of respect, and every sentiment of respect is translated, in him who feels it, by movements of inhibition. In fact, a representation which, owing to the emotion it inspires, is charged with a high mental energy; consequently, it is armed in such a way as to reject to a distance every other representation which denies it in whole or in part. Now the sacred world and the profane world are antagonistic to each other. They correspond to two forms of life which mutually exclude one another, or which at least cannot be lived at the same time with the same intensity. We cannot give ourselves up entirely to the ideal beings to whom the cult is addressed and also to ourselves and our own interests at the same time; we cannot devote ourselves entirely to the group and entirely to our own egoism at once. Here there are two systems of conscious states which are directed and which direct our conduct towards opposite poles.” (Durkheim:1982:317)

“But if a purely hierarchic distinction is a criterium at once too general and too imprecise, there is nothing left with which to characterize the sacred in its relation to the profane except their heterogeneity. However, this heterogeneity is sufficient to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from all others, because it is very particular: it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the scared and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common. The forces which play in one are not simply those which are met with in the other, but a little stronger; they are of a different sort. In different religions, this opposition has been conceived in different ways. Here, to separate these two sorts of things, it has seemed sufficient to localize them in different parts of the physical universe; there, the first have been put into an ideal and transcendental world, while the material world is left in full possession of the others. But howsoever much the forms of the contrast may vary, the fact of the contrast is universal.
This is not equivalent to saying that a being can never pass from one of these worlds into the other: but the manner in which this passage is effected, when it does take place, puts into relief the essential duality of the two kingdoms. In fact, it implies a veritable metamorphosis. This is notably demonstrated by the initiation rites, such as they are practised by a multitude of peoples. This initiation is a long series of ceremonies with the object of introducing the young man into the religious life: for the first time, he leaves the purely profane world where he passed his first infancy, and enters into the world of scared things. Now this change of state is thought of, not as a simple formation totius substantiae- of the whole being. It is said that at this moment the young man dies, that the person that he was ceases to exist, and that another is instantly substituted for it. He is re-born under a new form. Appropriate ceremonies are felt to bring about this death and re-birth, which are not understood in a merely symbolic sense, but are taken literally. Does this not prove that between the profane being which he was and the religious being which he becomes, there is a break of continuity?” (Durkheim:1982:38-9)

“But the real characteristic of religious phenomena is that they always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe, known and knowable, into two classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude each other. Sacred things are those which the interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first. Religious beliefs are the representations which express the nature of sacred things and the relations which they sustain, either with each other or with profane things.” (Durkheim:1982:40-41)

In other words one cannot be both- being-in-Being and being-for-itself without feeling the tearing of the soul or psyche of the individual as he/she struggles to maintain two faces to the world.

“The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas, corresponding to some determined object. This object has been conceived in a multitude of ways: nature, the infinite, the unknowable, the ideal, etc; but these differences matter but little. In any case, it was the conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be specifically religious.
But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience. In fact, they feel that the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others to another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith….
Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a recent apologist of the faith we admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them. We, too, think that, “a tree is known by its fruits,” and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots are worth. But from the fact that a “religious experience”, if we choose to call it this, does exist and that it has a certain foundation- and, by the way, is there any experience which has none?- it does not follow that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the idea which believers have of it. The very fact that the fashion in which it has been conceived has varied infinitely in different times is enough to prove that none of these conceptions express it adequately.” (Durkheim:1982:416-7)

“This is precisely what we have tried to do, and we have seen that this reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious experience is made, is society. We have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens this sentiment of a refuge, of a shield and of a guardian support which attaches the believer to his cult. It is that which raises him outside himself; it is even that which made him. For that which makes a man is the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes civilization, and civilization is the work of society. Thus is explained the preponderating role of the cult in all religions, whichever they may be. This is because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before all else an active co-operation. The collective ideas and sentiments are even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established. Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is it source.
In addition to all the reasons which have been given to justify this conception, a final one may be added here, which is the result of our whole work. As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin. We have seen that the same is true for magic and consequently for the different processes which have issued from it. On the other hand, it has long been known that up until a relatively advanced moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In summing up, then, it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion. Now in order that these principal aspects of the collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated expression of the whole collective life. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.” (Durkheim:1982:418-9)

“But, it is said, what society is it that has thus made the basis of religion? Is it the real society, such as it is and acts before our very eyes, with the legal and moral organization which it has laboriously fashioned during the course of history? This is full of defects and imperfections. In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns supreme, and the truth is often obscured by error. How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers? These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken their traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base a reality.
But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society, where justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evil in all its forms would be banished for ever? No one would deny that this is in close relations with the religious sentiment; for, they would say, it is towards the realization of this that all religions strive. But that society is not an empirical fact, definite and observable; it is a fancy, a dream with which men have lightened their sufferings, but in which they have never really lived. It is merely an idea which comes to express our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us; they come from the very depths of our being; then there is nothing outside of us which can account for them. Moreover, they are already religious in themselves; thus it would seem that the ideal society presupposes religion, far from being able to explain it.
But, in the first place, things are arbitrarily simplified when religion is seen only in its idealistic side: in its way, it is realistic. There is no physical or moral ugliness, there are no vices or evils which do not have a special divinity. There are gods of theft and trickery, of lust and war, of sickness and of death. Christianity itself, howsoever high the idea which it has made of the divinity may be, has been obliged to give the spirit of evil a place in its mythology. Satan is an essential piece of the Christian system; even if he is an impure being, he is not a profane one. The anti-god is a god, inferior and subordinated it is true, but nevertheless endowed with extended powers; he is even the object of rites, at least of negative ones. Thus religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of it, is in its image; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is not otherwise. If the relation between these two contrary forces were reversed, life would be impossible; but, as a matter of fact, it maintains itself and even tends to develop.
But if, in the midst of these mythologies and theologies we see reality clearly appearing, it is none the less true that it is found there only in an enlarged, transformed and idealized form. In this respect, the most primitive religions do not differ from the most recent and the most refined.” (Durkheim:1982:420-1)

“Some reply that men have a natural faculty for idealizing, that is to say, of substituting for the real world another different one, to which they transport themselves by thought…. Animals know only one world, the one which they perceive by experience, internal as well as external. Men alone have the faculty of conceiving the ideal, of adding something to the real.” (Durkheim:1982:421)

“In a word, above the real world where his profane life passes he has placed another which, in one sense, does not exist except in thought, but to which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus, from a double point of view it is an ideal world.
The formation of the ideal world is therefore not an irreducible fact which escapes science; it depends upon conditions which observation can touch; it is a natural product of social life. For a society to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity the sentiments which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself. Now this concentration brings about an exaltation of the mental life which takes form in a group of ideal conceptions where is portrayed the new life thus awakened; they correspond to this new set of psychical forces which is added to those which we have at our disposition for the daily tasks of existence. A society can neither create itself not recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal. This creation is not a sort of work of supererogation for it, by which it would complete itself, being already formed; it is the act by which it is periodically made and remade. Therefore when some oppose the ideal society to the real society, like two antagonists which would lead us in opposite directions, they materialize and oppose abstractions. The ideal society is not outside of the real society; it is a part of it. Far from being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other. For a society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself. …
Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize. It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that he has become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading him within its sphere of action, has made him acquire the need of raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society which this expresses. Thus both with the individual and in the group, the faculty of idealizing has nothing mysterious about it. It is not a sort of luxury which a man could get along without, but a condition of his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he could not be a man, if he had not acquired it. It is true that in incarnating themselves in individuals, collective ideals tend to individualize themselves. Each understands them after his own fashion and marks them with his own stamp; he suppresses certain elements and adds others. Thus the personal ideal disengages itself from the social ideal in proportion as the individual personality develops itself and becomes an autonomous source of action. But if we wish to understand this aptitude, so singular in appearance, of living outside of reality, it is enough to connect it with the social conditions upon which it depends.” (Durkheim:1982:422-3)

“ Thus there is something eternal in religion, which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between as assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the Decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life?
If we find a little difficulty to-day in imagining what these feasts and ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same ardour in us, either because they have come into common usage to such an extent that we are unconscious of them, or else because they no longer answer to our actual aspirations; but as yet there is nothing to replace them. We can no longer impassionate ourselves for the principles in the name of which Christianity recommended to masters that they treat their slaves humanely, and, on the other hand, the idea which it has formed of human equality and fraternity seems to us to-day to leave too large a place for unjust inequalities.” (Durkheim:1982:427)

“Religion sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language which does not differ in nature from that employed by science; the attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize them. We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are of religious origin. It is true that in order to utilize them, science gives them a new elaboration; it purges them of all accidental elements; in a general way, it brings a spirit of criticism into all its doings, which religion ignores; it surrounds itself with precautions to “escape precipitation and bias”, and to hold aside the passions, prejudices and all subjective influences. But these perfectionings of method are not enough to differentiate it from religion. In this regard, both pursue the same end; scientific thought is only a more perfect form of religious thought. Thus it seems natural that the second should progressively retire before the first, as this becomes better fitted to perform the task.” (Durkheim:1982:429)

“It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion exists; it is a system of given facts; in a word, it is a reality. How could science deny this reality? Also, in so far as religion is action, and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it; it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it presupposes it. Thus there is no conflict except upon one limited point. Of the two functions which religion originally fulfilled, there is one, and only one, which tends to escape it more and more; that is its speculative function. That which science refuses to grant to religion is not its right to exist, but its right to dogmatize upon the nature of things and the special competence which it claims for itself for knowing man and the world. …
But howsoever important these facts taken from the constituted sciences may be, they are not enough; for faith is before all else an impetus to action, while science, no matter how far it may be pushed, always remains at a distance from this. Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life cannot wait.” (Durkheim:1982:430-1)

“Impersonality and stability are the two characteristics of truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at least confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from sensuous appearances. But how have they been able to arrive at this conception? We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world. However, there is nothing in immediate experience which could suggest it; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences which it implies; when the discovery was made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent language. But if it is only at this epoch that the idea is expressed in philosophic formulae, it was necessarily pre-existent in the stage of an obscure sentiment. Philosophers have sought to elucidate this sentiment, but they have not succeeded. In order that they might reflect upon it and analyse it, it was necessary that it be given them, and that they seek to know whence it came, that is to say, in what experience it was founded. This is in collective experience. It is under the form of collective thought that impersonal thought is for the first time revealed to humanity; we cannot see by what other way this revelation could have been made. From the mere fact that society exists, there is also, outside of the individual sensations and images, a whole system of representations which enjoy marvellous properties. By means of them, men understand each other and intelligences grasp each other. They have within them a sort of force or moral ascendancy, in virtue of which they impose themselves upon individual minds. Hence the individual at least obscurely takes account of the fact that above his private ideas, there is a world of absolute ideas according to which he must shape his own; he catches a glimpse of a whole intellectual kingdom in which he participates, but which is greater than he. This is the first intuition of the realm of truth. From the moment when he first becomes conscious of these higher ideas, he sets himself to scrutinising their nature; he asks whence these pre-eminent representations hold their prerogatives and, in so far as he believes that he has discovered their causes, he undertakes to put these causes into action for himself, in order that he may draw from them by his own force the effects which they produce; that is to say, he attributes to himself the right of making concepts. Thus the faculty of conception has individualized itself. But to understand its origins and function, it must be attached to the social conditions upon which it depends.” (Durkheim:1982:436-7)

“To-day it is generally sufficient that they bear the stamp of science to receive a sort of privileged credit, because we have faith in science. But this faith does not differ essentially from religious faith. In the last resort, the value which we collectively form of its nature and role in life; that is as much as to say that it expresses a state of public opinion. In all social life, in fact, science rests upon opinion. It is undoubtedly true that this opinion can be taken as the object of a study and a science made of it; this is what sociology principally consists in. But the science of opinion does not make opinions; it can only observe them and make them more conscious of themselves. It is true that by this means it can lead them to change, but science continues to be dependent upon opinion at the very moment when it seems to be making its laws; for, as we have already shown, it is from opinion that it holds the force necessary to act upon opinion.” (Durkheim:1982:438)

“In summing up, then, we must say that society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which it has too often been considered. Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. At the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. They translate the ways of being which are found in all the stages of reality but which appear in their full clarity only at the summit, because the extreme complexity of the psychic life which passes there necessitates a greater development of consciousness. Attributing social origins to logical thought is not debasing it or diminishing its value or reducing it to nothing more than a system of artificial combinations; on the contrary, it is relating it to a cause which implies it naturally. But this is not saying that the ideas elaborated in this way are at once adequate for their object. If society is something universal in relation to the individual, it is none the less an individuality itself, which has its own personal physiognomy and its idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and consequently particularizes whatever it thinks of. Therefore collective representations also contain subjective elements, and these must be progressively rooted out, if we are to approach reality more closely. But howsoever crude these may have been at the beginning, the fact remains that with them the germ of a new mentality was given, to which the individual could never have raised himself by his own efforts: by them the way was opened to a stable, impersonal and organized thought which then had nothing to do except to develop its nature.
Also, the causes which have determined this development do not seem to be specifically different from those which gave it its initial impulse. If logical thought tends to rid itself more and more of the subjective and personal elements which it still retains from its origin, it is not because a social life of a new sort is developing. It is this international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs. As it extends, the collective horizon enlarges; the society ceases to appear as the only whole, to become a part of a much vaster one, with indetermined frontiers, which is susceptible of advancing indefinitely. Consequently things can no longer be contained in the social moulds according to which they were primitively classified; they must be organized according to principles which are their own, so logical organization differentiates itself from the social organization and becomes autonomous….
Thus it is not at all true that between science on the one hand, and morals and religion on the other, there exists that sort of antinomy which has so frequently been admitted, for the two forms of human activity really come from one and the same source. Kant understood this very well, and therefore he made the speculative reason and the practical reason two different aspects of the same faculty. According to him, what makes their unity is the fact that the two are directed towards the universal. Rational thinking is thinking according to the laws which are imposed upon all reasonable beings; acting morally is conducting one’s self according to those maxims which can be extended without contradiction to all wills. In other words, science and morals imply that the individual is capable of raising himself above his own peculiar point of view and of living an impersonal life. In fact, it cannot be doubted that this is a trait common to all the higher forms of thought and action. What Kant’s system does not explain, however, is the origin of this sort of contradiction which is realized in man. Why is he forced to do violence to himself by leaving his individuality, and, inversely, why is the impersonal law obliged to be dissipated by incarnating itself in individuals? Is it answered that there are two antagonistic worlds in which we participate equally, the world of matter and sense on the one hand, and the world of pure and impersonal reason on the other? That is merely repeating the question in slightly different terms, for what we are trying to find out is why we must lead these two existences at the same time. Why do these two worlds, which seem to contradict each other, not remain outside of each other, and why must they mutually penetrate one another in spite of their antagonism? The only explanation which has ever been given of this singular necessity is the hypotheses of the Fall, with all the difficulties which it implies, and which need not be repeated here. On the other hand, all mystery disappears the moment that it is recognized that impersonal reason is only another name given to collective thought. For this is possible only through a group of individuals; it supposes them, and in their turn, they suppose it, for they can continue to exist only by grouping themselves together. The kingdom of ends and impersonal truths can realize itself only by the co-operation of particular wills, and the reasons for which they co-operate. In a word, there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in all of us, and since social life embraces at once both representations and practices, this impersonality naturally extends to ideas as well as to acts.
Perhaps some will be surprised to see us connect the most elevated forms of thought with society: the cause appears quite humble, in consideration of the value which we attribute to the effect. Between the world of the senses and appetites on the one hand, and that of reason and morals on the other, the distance is so considerable that the second would seem to have been able to add itself to the first only by a creative act. But attributing to society this preponderating role in the genesis of our nature is not denying this creation; for society has a creative power which no other observable being can equal. In fact, all creation, if not a mystical operation which escapes science and knowledge, is the product of a synthesis. Now if the synthesis of particular conceptions which take place in each individual consciousness are already and of themselves productive of novelties, how much more efficacious these vast syntheses of complete consciousnesses which make society must be! A society is the most powerful combination of physical and moral forces of which nature offers us an example. Nowhere else is an equal richness of different materials, carried to such a degree of concentration, to be found. Then it is not surprising that a higher life disengages itself which, by reacting upon the elements of which it is the product, raises them to a higher plane of existence and transforms them….
What put them in this difficulty was the fact that the individual passed as being the finis naturæ- the ultimate creation of nature; it seemed that there was nothing beyond him, or at least nothing that science could touch. But from the moment when it is recognized that above the individual there is society, and that this is not a nominal being created by reason, but a system of active forces, a new manner of explaining men becomes possible.” (Durkheim:1982:444-7)

“Howsoever complex the outward manifestations of the religious life may be, at bottom it is one and simple. It responds everywhere to one and the same need, and is everywhere derived from one and the same mental state. In all its forms, its object is to raise man above himself and to make him lead a life superior to that which he would lead, if he followed only his own individual whims: beliefs express this life in representations; rites organize it and regulate its working.” (Durkheim:1982:414)

Durkheim therefore believed that the super-state of the ‘social life’ is explained back to the individual as an entity called God, a greater being of whose power they could feel and experience by the morality, actions and laws of their society, of which they themselves are a part of and are adding to by their will, namely as a being-in-this greater Being or what Sartre would call Being-for-others. Being a social entity and its subsequent powers- given by God itself. The being-in -itself, the individual ego within the society therefore saw itself split into a being-for-others, and a being-for-itself, and that is the story of the magic horse, and the magic fish. Will you Do it for the love of others, society,- the horse, or will you do it for the love of self, the individual- the fish. For Durkheim then, religion, God, society, and settling together, are different words to describe the same thing but allow us to think about them in different ways and hence to tell our story and form our society anew by the telling. In reality there is no difference between science and religion therefore, they both use techniques to maintain their reality through the experiences they achieve, and these experiences create the feeling of a larger entity, called society or God depending on the language game you are telling the story through. Science uses society. Religion uses God. Both these terms are transcendent of the individual within them. But only one is the true experience of the cave-man that we are getting to know.

Meeting the Cave-man before we walk a mile in his shoes

Now that we have the ability to see the perspective of the cave-man let us look at his actual lifestyle and how the religion of primitive man devised his beliefs and how these informed his lifestyle and its idea of progress. As we read these observations of Durkheim however we must look for the seeds of our civilized world. We must look to see if monotheism exists, if family exists, if war exists, if freedom, liberty and equality exist, etc… To assist in this I have highlighted certain words and phrases and added commentary where necessary to illustrate our contemporary institutions, totems, and similar beliefs taken from the sacred and encapsulated in the profane today. In particular we must remember the perspective of how they dwell, Bauen.

“At the basis of nearly all the Australian tribes we find a group which holds a preponderating place in the collective life: this is the clan. Two essential traits characterize it.
In the first place, the individuals who compose it consider themselves united by a bond of kinship, but one which is of a very special nature. This relationship does not come from the fact that they have definite blood connections with one another; they are relatives from the mere fact that they have the same name. They are not fathers and mothers, sons or daughters, uncles or nephews of one another in the sense which we now give these words; yet they think of themselves as forming a single family, which is large or small according to the dimensions of the clan, merely because they are collectively designated by the same word. When we say that they regard themselves as a single family, we do so because they recognize duties towards each other which are identical with those which have always been incumbent upon kindred: such duties as aid, vengeance, mourning, the obligation not to marry among themselves, etc.
By this first characteristic, the clan does not differ from the Roman gens or the Greek γένοҁ; for this relationship also came merely from the fact that all the members of the gens had the same name….The species of things which serves to designate the clan collectively is called its totem. The totem of the clan is also that of each of its members.” (Durkheim:1982:102)

“Outside of and above the totems of clans there are totems of phratries which, though not differing from the former in nature, must none the less be distinguished from them.
A phratry is a group of clans which are united to each other by particular bonds of fraternity…
Now in nearly all the cases where the phratries have a name whose meaning has been established, this name is that of an animal; it would therefore seem that it is a totem.” (Durkheim:1982:107-8)

“they do not put their coat-of-arms merely upon the things which they possess, but they put it upon their persons; they imprint it upon their flesh, it becomes a part of them, and this world of representation is even by far the more important one.” (Durkheim:1982:115-6)

“This is the case, for example, among the Warramunga, the Walpari, the Wulmala, the Tjingilli, the Umbaia and the Unmatjera (Nor,Tr,.339,348). Among the Warramunga, at the moment when the design is executed, the performers address the initiated with the following words: “That mark belongs to your place; do not look out along another place.” This means”, say Spencer and Gillen, “that the young man must not interfere with ceremonies belonging to other totems than his own: it also indicates the very close association which is supposed to exist between a man and his totem and any spot especially connected with the totem” (Nor,Tr.,p.584 and n).” (Durkheim:1982:118)

Remember the word to dwell, to be, to know ones place. In the world of the hunter-gatherer we can see that this place is an internal landscape not an external geography. It is the mark upon his person that marks his place, given by the others, but that mark is one of Nature and its congruent powers, transcending the society itself.

“Among the Kaitish and the Warramunga, a man of his totem is not allowed to drink water freely; he may not take it up himself; he may receive it only from the hands of a third party who must belong to the phratry of which he is not a member. The complexity of this procedure and the embarrassment which results from it are still another proof that access to the sacred things is not free. This same rule is applied in certain central tribes every time that the totem is eaten, whether from necessity or any other cause. It should also be added that when this formality is not possible, that is, when a man is alone or with members of his own phratry only, he may, on necessity, do without an intermediary. It is clear that the prohibition is susceptible of various moderations.
Nevertheless, it rests upon ideas so strongly ingrained in the mind that it frequently survives its original cause for being. We have seen that in all probability, the different clans of a phratry are only subdivisions of one original clan which has been dismembered. So there was a time when all the clans, being welded together, had the same totem: consequently, wherever the souvenir of this common origin is not completely effaced, each clan continues to feel itself united to the others and to consider that their totems are not completely foreign to it. For this reason an individual may not eat freely of the totems held by different clans of the phratry of which he is a member; he may touch them only if the forbidden plant or animal is given him by a member of the other phratry.” (Durkheim:1982:130-1)

In this citation of ritual and its place within the belief system we can clearly see that, as in Nature, life can not continue without other species of life to exist upon, so in the ritual of taking the waters of life, another phratry member would be necessary in order to obtain this sacred water for this sacred life. Imagine a Christian constructing a ritual that required a Muslim to perform such a necessary part of life. Imagine a Catholic requiring a Protestant or Calvinist or Quaker, even! Did then, the primitive’s believe in a single God, or a single clan, exist throughout the entire world in their perspective, and so all were a part of one Being?

“For the Australian, things themselves, everything which is in the universe, are a part of the tribe; they are constituent elements of it and, so to speak, regular members of it; just like men, they have a determined place in the general scheme of organization of the society. “The South Australian savage,” says Fison, “looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate whereof he himself is a part.” As a consequence of this principle, whenever the tribe is divided into two phratries, all known things are distributed between them. “All nature”, says Palmer, in speaking of the Bellinger River tribe, “is also divided into class [phratry] names… The sun and moon and stars are said… to belong to classes [phratries] just as the blacks themselves.”… All known things will thus be arranged in a sort of tableau or systematic classification embracing the whole of nature.” (Durkheim:1982:141-2)

“In reality, it is to this common principle that the cult is addressed. In other words, totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them. No one possesses it entirely and all participate in it. It is so completely independent of the particular subjects in whom it incarnates itself, that it precedes them and survives them. Individuals die, generations pass and are replaced by others; but this force always remains actual, living and the same. It animates the generations of today as it animated those of yesterday and as it will animate those of to-morrow. Taking the words in a large sense, we may say that it is the god adored by each totemic cult. Yet it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the world and diffused in an innumerable multitude of things….
But the Australian does not represent this impersonal force in an abstract form. Under the influence of causes which we must seek, he has been led to conceive it under the form of an animal or vegetable species, or, in a word, of a visible object. This is what the totem really consists in: it is only the material form under which the imagination represents this immaterial substance, this energy diffused through all sorts of heterogeneous things, which alone is the real object of the cult.
Thus the universe, as totemism conceives it, is filled and animated by a certain number of forces which the imagination represents in form taken, with only a few exceptions, from the animal or vegetable kingdoms: there are as many of them as there are clans in the tribe, and each of them is also found in certain categories of things, of which it is the essence and vital principle.
When we say that these principles are forces, we do not take the word in a metaphorical sense; they act just like veritable forces. In one sense, they are even material forces which mechanically engender physical effects….
All the beings partaking of the same totemic principle consider that owing to this very fact, they are morally bound to one another; they have definite duties of assistance, vendetta, etc., towards each other; and it is these duties which constitute kinship. So while the totemic principle is a totemic force, it is also a moral power; so we shall see how it easily transforms itself into a divinity properly so-called.
Moreover, there is nothing here which is special to totemism. Even in the most advanced religions, there is scarcely a god who has not kept something of this ambiguity and whose functions are not at once cosmic and moral. At the same time that it is a spiritual discipline, every religion is also a means enabling men to face the world with greater confidence. Even for the Christian, is not God the Father the guardian of the physical order as well as the legislator and the judge of human conduct?” (Durkheim:1982:188-90)

“Now among these peoples, above all the particular deities to whom men render a cult, there is a pre-eminent power to which all the others have the relation of derived forms, and which is called wakan. Owing to the preponderating place thus assigned to this principle in the Siouan pantheon, it is sometimes regarded as a sort of sovereign god, or a Jupiter or Jahveh, and travellers have frequently translated wakan by “great spirit.” This is misrepresenting its real nature gravely. The wakan is in no way a personal being; the natives do not represent it in a determined form. According to an observer cited by Dorsey, “they say that they have never seen the wakanda, so they cannot pretend to personify it.” It is not even possible to define it by determined attributes and characteristics. “No word,” says Riggs, “can explain the meaning of this term among the Dakota. It embraces all mystery, all secret power, all divinity.” All the beings which the Dakota reveres, “the earth, the four winds, the sun, the moon and the stars, are manifestations of this mysterious life and power” which enters into all. Sometimes it is represented in the form of a wind, as a breath having its seat in the four cardinal points and moving everything: sometimes it is a voice heard in the crashing of the thunder; the sun, moon and stars are wakan. But no enumeration could exhaust this infinitely complex idea. It is not a definite and definable power, the power of doing this or that; it is Power in an absolute sense, with no epithet or determination of any sort. The various divine powers are only particular manifestations and personifications of it; each of them is this power seen under one of its numerous aspects. It is this which made one observer say, “He is a protean god; he is supposed to appear to different persons in different forms.” Nor are the gods the only beings animated by it: it is the principle of all that lives or acts or moves. “All life is wakan.” (Durkheim:1982:192-3)

“This same idea is found among the Shoshone under the name of pokunt, among the Algonquin under the name of manitou, of nauala among the Kwakiutl, of yek among the Tlinkit and of sgâna among the Haida. But it is not peculiar to the Indians of North America; it is in Melanesia that it was studied for the first time. It is true that in certain of the islands of Melanesia, social organization is no longer on a totemic basis; but in all, totemism is still visible, in spite of what Codrington has said about it. Now among these peoples, we find, under the name of mana, an idea which is the exact equivalent of the wakan of the Sioux and the orenda of the Iroquois” (Durkheim:1982:194)

“The foundation of the Indian’s faith in the efficacy of the totem,” says Miss Fletcher, “rested upon his belief concerning nature and life. This conception was complex and involved two prominent ideas: First, that all things, animate and inanimate, were permeated by a common life; and second, that this life could not be broken, but was continuous.” Now this common principle of life is the wakan. The totem is the means by which an individual is put into relations with this source of energy; if the totem has any powers, it is because it incarnates the wakan. … The wakan repels all personification and consequently it is hardly possible that it has ever been thought of in its abstract generality with the aid of such definite symbols.” (Durkheim:1982:195-6)

“Under the pretext that in early times men were dominated by their senses and the representations of their senses, it has frequently been held that they commenced by representing the divine in the concrete form of definite and personal beings. The facts do not confirm this presumption. We have just described a systematically united scheme of religious beliefs which we have good reason to regard as very primitive, yet we have met with no personalities of this sort. The real totemic cult is addressed neither to certain determined animals nor to certain vegetables nor even to an animal or vegetable species, but to a vague power spread through these things. Even in the most advanced religions which have developed out of totemism, such as those which we find among the North American Indians, this idea, instead of being effaced, becomes more conscious of itself; it is declared with a clarity it did not have before, while at the same time, it attains a higher generality. It is this which dominates the entire religious system.
This is the original matter out of which have been constructed those beings of every sort which the religions of all times have consecrated and adored. The spirits, demons, genii and gods of every sort are only the concrete forms taken by this energy, or “potentiality”, as Hewitt calls it, in individualizing itself, in fixing itself upon a certain determined object or point in space, or in centring around an ideal and legendary being, though one conceived as real by popular imagination.” (Durkheim:1982:198-9)

“We are now in a better condition to understand why it has been impossible to define religion by the idea of mythical personalities, gods or spirits; it is because this way of representing religious things is in no way inherent in their nature. What we find at the origin and basis of religious thought are not determined and distinct objects and beings possessing a sacred character of themselves; they are indefinite powers, anonymous forces, more or less numerous in different societies, and sometimes even reduced to a unity, and whose impersonality is strictly comparable to that of the physical forces whose manifestations the sciences of nature study. As for particular sacred things, they are only individualized forms of this essential principle….
This is why there is scarcely a divine personality who does not retain some impersonality. Those who represent it most clearly in a concrete and visible form, think of it, at the same time, as an abstract power which cannot be defined except by its own efficacy, or as a force spread out in space and which is contained, at least in part, in each of its effects. It is the power of producing rain or wind, crops or the light of day; Zeus is in each of the raindrops which falls, just as Ceres is in each of the sheaves of the harvest… Moreover, it is this indecision which has made possible these syncretisms and duplications in the course of which gods are broken up, dismembered and confused in every way. Perhaps there is not a single religion in which the original mana, whether unique or multiform, has been resolved entirely into a clearly defined number of beings who are distinct and separate from each other; each of them always retains a touch of impersonality, as it were, which enables it to enter into new combinations, not as the result of a simple survival but because it is the nature of religious forces to be unable to individualize themselves completely.” (Durkheim:1982:200-1)

“But this notion is not only of primary importance because of the role it has played in the development of religious ideas; it also has a lay aspect in which it is of interest for the history of scientific thought. It is the first form of the idea of force.
In fact, the wakan plays the same role in the world, as the Sioux conceives it, as the one played by the forces with which science explains the diverse phenomena of nature.” (Durkheim:1982:203)

Yes Jedi’s (the most popular religion in the U.K. in a recent survey) you are right to worship the force! Just call it wakan if you want to come back down to earth.

“The Melanesian attributes this same general efficacy to his mana. It is owing to his mana that a man succeeds in hunting or fighting, that gardens give a good return or that flocks prosper. If an arrow strikes its mark, it is because it is charged with mana; it is the same cause which makes a net catch fish well, or a canoe ride well on the sea, etc. It is true that if certain phrases of Codrington are taken literally, mana should be the cause to which is attributed, “everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature.” But from the very examples which he cites, it is quite evident that the sphere of the mana is really much more extended. In reality, it serves to explain usual and everyday phenomena; there is nothing superhuman or supernatural in the fact that a ship sails or a hunter catches game, etc. However, among these events of daily life, there are some so insignificant and familiar that they pass unperceived: they are not noticed and consequently no need is felt of explaining them. The concept of mana is applied only to those that are important enough to cause reflection, and to awaken a minimum of interest and curiosity; but they are not marvellous for all that….
So the idea of force is of religious origin. It is from religion that it has been borrowed, firstly by philosophy, then by the sciences. This has already been foreseen by Comte and this is why he made metaphysics the heir of “theology”. But he concluded from this that the idea of force is destined to disappear from science; for, owing to its mystic origins, he refused it all objective value. But we are going to show that, on the contrary, religious forces are real, howsoever imperfect the symbols may be, by the aid of which they are thought of. From this it will follow that the same is true of the concept of force in general.” (Durkheim:1982:204)

“Thus between the logic of religious thought and that of scientific thought there is no abyss. The two are made up of the same elements, though unequally and differently developed.” (Durkheim:1982:239)

“However, this mythological formation is not the highest to be found among the Australians. There are at least a certain number of tribes who have arrived at a conception of a god who, if not unique, is at least supreme, and to whom is attributed a pre-eminent position among all the other religious entities.
The existence of this belief was pointed out long ago by different observers; but it is Howitt who has contributed the most to establishing its relative generality. In fact, he has verified it over a very extended geographical are embracing the State of Victoria and New South Wales and even extending up to Queensland. In all this entire region, a considerable number of tribes believe in the existence of a veritable tribal divinity, who has different names, according to the district. The ones most frequently employed are Bunjil or Punjil, Daramulun and Balame. But we also find Nuralie or Nurelle, Kohin and Mangan-ngaua. The same conception is found again farther west, among the Narrinyeri, where the great god is called Nurunderi or Ngurrunderi. Among the Dieri, it is probable that there is one of the Mura-mura or ordinary ancestors, who enjoys a sort of supremacy over the others. Finally, in opposition to the affirmations of Spencer and Gillen, who declare that they have observed no belief in a real divinity among the Arunta, Strehlow assures us that this people, as well as the Loritja, recognize, under the name Altkira, a veritable “good god.”
The essential characteristics of this personage are the same everywhere. It is an immortal, and even an eternal being, for it was not derived from any other. After having lived on earth for a certain length of time, he ascended to heaven, or else was taken up there, and continues to live there, surrounded by his family, for generally he is said to have one or several wives, children and brothers, who sometimes assist him in his functions. Under the pretext of a visit he is said to have made to them, he and his family are frequently identified with certain stars. Moreover, they attribute to him a power over stars. It is he who regulates the journey of the sun and moon; he gives them orders. It is he who makes the lightning leap from the clouds and who throws the thunder-bolts. Since he is the thunder, he is also connected with the rain: it is to him that men address themselves when there is a scarcity of water, or when too much falls.
They speak of him as a sort of creator: he is called the father of men and they say that he made them. According to a legend current around Melbourne, Bunjil made the first man in the following manner. He made a little statue out of white clay; then, after he had danced all around it several times and had breathed into its nostrils, the statue became animated and commenced to walk about. According to another myth, he lighted the sun; thus the earth became heated and men came out of it. At the same time that he made men, this divine personage made the animals and trees; it is to him that men owe all the arts of life, arms, language, and tribal rites. He is the benefactor of humanity. Even yet, he plays the role of a sort of providence for them. It is he who supplies his worshippers with all that is necessary for their existence. He is in communication with them, either directly or through intermediaries. But being at the same time guardian of the morals of the tribe, he treats them severely when these are violated. If we are to believe certain observers, he will even fulfil the office of judge, after this life; he will separate the good from the bad, and will not reward the ones like the others. In any case, they are often represented as ruling the land of the dead, and as gathering the souls together when they arrive in the beyond…
Moreover, the authority of each of these supreme gods is not limited to a single tribe; it is recognized equally by a number of neighbouring tribes. Bunjil is adored in nearly all of Victoria, Baiame in a considerable portion of New South Wales, etc.; this is why there are so few gods for a relatively extended geographical area. So the cults of which they are the object have an international character. It even happens sometimes that mythologies intermingle, combine and make mutual borrowings. Thus the majority of the tribes who believe in Baiame also admit the existence of Daramulun; however, they accord him a slighter dignity. They make him a son or brother or Baiame, and subordinate to this latter. Thus the faith in Daramulun has spread in diverse forms, into all of New South Wales. So it is far from true that religious internationalism is a peculiarity of the most recent and advanced religions. From the dawn of history, religious beliefs have manifested a tendency to overflow out of one strictly limited political society; it is as though they had a natural aptitude for crossing frontiers, and for diffusing and internationalizing themselves. Of course there have been peoples and times when this spontaneous aptitude has been held in check by opposed social necessities; but that does not keep it from being real and, as we see, very primitive.” (Durkheim:1982:288-9)

So it would seem that for 7,500 years primitive man worshipped the same one God, and, just as with Muslim’s, Protestants, Hindus, Egyptists, and Jedi’s and Buddhists today, they were unable to describe or attempt to draw it! The difference being that neither did they attempt to kill each other for believing in the same God, nor did they insist that every one had to do the same dance, or follow the same path to God, in fact they insisted that different clans assisted them in their dance to the same God because of their experience of this truth by their practices, and techniques of living.

What then of their institutions, did they have a Holy of Holies, as we see with the Jews (Solomon’s Temple) and the Muslims (Mecca) and the Christians (the Christ or the Crucifix), did they have symbols that represented their clans and phratries?
Well yes they did. The Primitive peoples had the Holy of Holies in the form of churinga. They had flags and crucifixes as well as totems and songs to represent their clan and its purpose. It is not my purpose to explain the meaning of these items in great depth here. That is for the next book, as intimated above. Here the purpose of detailing these things is merely to extend our understanding of how these primitive peoples gave birth to many of our perspectives on how we exist today, and how from leaving the sacred world of being-in-Being, they have become misunderstood and often profaned in order to serve the being-for-itself and society. Where then did the most sacred things dwell?

“Artless Dodgers

Most people have heard of cave paintings, naturalistic images of animals painted on cave walls deep underground. These everyone depictions often hold the place of honour as the earliest art in art history courses. They are one of the few bits of Palaeolithic evidence to have become a component of the general knowledge base of Western culture. Neandertals didn’t paint them; modern humans did. This single difference- no art from Neandertals, art from moderns- is partly responsible for the uncouth, primitive picture of Neandertals most people carry in their heads. It is a bum rap, to use a colloquial phrase, not because Neandertals painted caves, but because very, very, few modern humans, today and in the past, crawl down into dark caverns to paint images on wet cave walls. The Franco-Cantabrian tradition, to use a more formal term for cave painting, was a phenomenon limited to a narrow region of western Europe. It should not be seen as a necessary feature of modern behaviour, even though modern people were undoubtedly responsible. But it is fair to ask if Neandertals produced anything of a similar nature, anything that might be counted as depiction, or decoration, or ornamentation, because with very few exceptions all modern humans do at least some of these things.
The Neandertal archaeological record does offer several provocative items. In some sites archaeologists have recovered rock crystals that Neandertals apparently picked up and carried home. At the Hungarian site of Tata archaeologists found a round river cobble that had a straight crack running from one edge to the other. A Neandertal had engraved a second line perpendicular to the crack. [a crucifix- author’s note] From two sites in Spain, Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Anton, there are perforated marine shells most likely used as pendants. Such artificial examples suggest an attraction to patterns and perhaps a concern for appearance, but there are so few of them that it is dangerous to generalize. … Use of mineral pigments was far more common. These are minerals such as hematite and manganese dioxide that produce a distinct coloured mark when scraped across a surface or which can be ground into coloured powder. The most common is known as ochre (hematite), which comes in colours from red through yellow and orange. It is common in prehistoric sites around the world, and its earliest use extends back as far as 300,000 years ago in Africa, to the time of Homo heidelbergensis. Neandertals also used ochre, but manganese dioxide was even more common; pieces of manganese have been found in more than forty European Neandertal sites. Most of the pieces have evidence of scrapping to produce a black powder, and some were ground into pointed shapes, perhaps to use as a kind of pencil.
What were Neandertals doing with the pigments? There are two possibilities, one mundane and one provocative. The mundane explanation is that the powder was a component in some Neandertal technology. In southern Africa modern human hunter-gatherers mixed ochre powder with plant gum and beeswax to produce the glue that they used to attach points and barbs to spear shafts. The residue remains on some of these tools, which are over 70,000 years old. Perhaps Neandertals used manganese powder similarly as a binding agent for their glues, but there is no evidence for such use. The more provocative explanation is that Neandertals used the manganese powder to colour something, perhaps their bodies, an interpretation given more powder by the rare examples of pendants….
But if Neandertals painted their bodies and used ornaments it would have interesting implications. You do not generally alter your appearance for yourself; you do it to change how you appear to others. At a minimum this requires a Theory of Mind (I know that you see me), but it also suggests conscious effort to change how you relate to someone else. It needn’t have been symbolism; black or red need not have stood for anything, but it does suggest some intentional marking or manipulation of role. We just do not know. However we see it, it is important to note that for Neandertals and modern humans it was an old behaviour that can be traced back to Homo heidelbergensis, who was the first to use pigments not just in Africa, but in Europe as well.” (Wynn&Coolidge:2012:119-21)

A_This is a crucifix in a circle or orb of the universe. See World History Atlas for picture of it and Brian Cox’s doctor who programme for explanation of its symbolic meaning in Christianity and in pagan esoteric religion and in science. The red earth is of course Adam human (humus) being, or autochthonous or breath in dust or logos
“Yet the powers which are thus conferred, though purely ideal, act as though they were real; they determine the conduct of men with the same degree of necessity as physical forces. The Arunta who has been rubbed with his churinga feels himself stronger; he is stronger. If he has eaten the flesh of an animal which, though perfectly healthy, is forbidden to him, he will feel himself sick, and may die of it. Surely the soldier who falls while defending his flag does not believe that he sacrifices himself for a bit of cloth. This is all because social thought, owing to the imperative authority that is in it, has an efficacy that individual thought could never have; by the power which it has over our minds, it can make us see things in whatever light it pleases; it adds to reality or deducts from it according to the circumstances. Thus there is one division of nature where the formula of idealism is applicable almost to the letter: this is the social kingdom. Here more than anywhere else, the idea is the reality…. But here the part of matter is reduced to a minimum. The object serving as support for the idea is not much in comparison with the ideal superstructure, beneath which it disappears, and also, it counts for nothing in the superstructure. This is what that pseudo-delirium consists in, which we find at the bottom of so many collective representations: it is only a form of this essential idealism. So it is not properly called a delirium, for the ideas thus objectified are well founded, not in the nature of the material things upon which they settle themselves, but in the nature of society.
We are now able to understand how the totemic principle, and in general, every religious force, comes to be outside of the object in which it resides. It is because the idea of it is in no way made up of the impressions directly produced by this thing upon our senses or minds. Religious force is only the sentiment inspired by the group in its members, but projected outside of the consciousnesses that experience them, and objectified. To be objectified, they are fixed upon some object which thus becomes sacred; but any object might fulfil this function…. Therefore, the sacred character assumed by an object in not implied in the intrinsic properties of this latter: it is added to them. The world of religious things is not one particular aspect of empirical nature; it is superimposed upon it.
This conception of the religious, finally, allows us to explain an important principle found at the bottom of a multitude of myths and rites, and which may be stated thus: when a sacred thing is subdivided, each of its parts remains equal to the thing itself. In other words, as far as religious thought is concerned, the part is equal to the whole; it has the same powers, the same efficacy. The debris of a relic has some virtue as a relic in good condition. The smallest drop of blood contains the same active principle as the whole thing. The soul, as we shall see, may be broken up into nearly as many pieces as there are organs or tissues in the organism; each of these partial souls is worth a whole soul. This conception would be inexplicable if the sacredness of something were due to the constituent properties of the thing itself; for in that case, it should vary with this thing, increasing and decreasing with it. But if the virtues it is believed to possess are not intrinsic in it, and if they come from certain sentiments which it brings to mind and symbolizes, though these originate outside of it, then, since it has no need of determined dimensions to play this role of reminder, it will have the same value whether it is entire or not. Since the part makes us think of the whole, it evokes the same sentiments as the whole. A mere fragment of the flag represents the fatherland just as well as the flag itself: so it is sacred in the same way and to the same degree.” (Durkheim:1982:228-9)

“Among the Arunta the neighbouring tribes, there are two other liturgical instruments closely connected with the totem and the churinga itself, which ordinarily enters into their composition: they are the nurtunja and the waninga.
The nurtunja, which is found among the northern Arunta and their immediate neighbours, is made up principally of a vertical support which is either a single lance, or several lances united into a bundle, or of a simple pole. …
The waninga, which is found only among the southern Arunta, the Urabanna and the Loritja, has no one unique model either. Reduced to its most essential elements, it too consists in a vertical support, formed by a long stick or by a lance several yards high, with sometimes one and sometimes two cross-pieces… Thus the waninga has the appearance of a veritable flag.
Now the nurtunja and the waninga, which figure in a multitude of important rites, are the object of a religious respect quite like that inspired by the churinga. The process of their manufacture and erection is conducted with the greatest solemnity. Fixed in the earth, or carried by an officiant, they mark the central point of the ceremony: it is about them that the dances take place and the rites are performed….
Now its sacred character can come from only one cause: that is that it represents the totem materially. The vertical lines or rings of down which cover it, and even the cords of different colours which fasten the arms of the waninga to the central axis, are not arranged arbitrarily, according to the taste of the makers; they must conform to a type strictly determined by tradition which, in the minds of the natives, represents the totem.” (Durkheim:1982:123-5)

“The way in which this is done bears witness to the sentiments inspired by this design, and the high value attributed to it; it is traced upon a place that has been previously sprinkled, and saturated with human blood, and we shall presently see that the blood is in itself a sacred liquid, serving for pious uses only. When the design has been made, the faithful remain seated on the ground before it, in an attitude of the purest devotion.” (Durkheim:1982:126)

“The connection between the figure and the things represented is so remote and indirect that it cannot be seen, except when it is pointed out. Only the members of the clan can say what meaning is attached to such and such combinations of lines. Men and women are generally represented by semicircles, and animals by whole circles or spirals, the tracks of men or animals by lines of points, etc. The meaning of the figures thus obtained is so arbitrary that a single design may have two different meanings for the men of two different totems, representing one animal here, and another animal or plant there. This is perhaps still more apparent with the nurtunja and waninga. Each of them represents a different totem. But the few and simple elements which enter into their composition do not allow a great variety of combinations. The result is that two nurtunja may have exactly the same appearance, and yet express two things as different as a gum tree and an emu. When a nurtunja is made, it is given a meaning which it keeps during the whole ceremony, but which, in the last resort, is fixed by convention.” (Durkheim:1982:127)

Do we not have numerous nation-state flags of red, white, and blue and yet they too require how they are represented to be pointed out to the uninitiated, if not to appear arbitrary?

“So we must be careful not to consider totemism a sort of animal worship. The attitude of a man towards the animals or plants whose name he bears is not at all that of a believer towards his god, for he belongs to the sacred world himself. Their relations are rather those of two beings who are on the same level and of equal value.” (Durkheim:1982:139)

Is it not the statement of every western nation that every one within that nation is born with equal rights? This is pure Rousseau and taken straight from the French Revolution that he inspired. Yet it was gleaned from the noble savage, discovered in the eighteenth century, who had lived this way with nature, for thousands of years longer than any nation has yet to exist.

“Thus the men of the clan and the things which are classified in it form by their union a solid system, all of whose parts are united and vibrate sympathetically. This organization, which at first may have appeared to us as purely logical, is at the same time moral. A single principle animates it and makes its unity: this is the totem. Just as a man who belongs to the Crow clan has within him something of this animal, so the rain, since it is of the same clan and belongs to the same totem, is also necessarily considered as being “the same things as a crow”; for the same reason, the moon is a black cockatoo, the sun a white cockatoo, every black-nut tree a pelican, etc. All the beings arranged in a single clan, whether men, animals, plants, or inanimate objects, are merely forms of the totemic being.” (Durkheim:1982:150)

In other words, just as the crow needs rain in order to live, so the Crow clan needs the rain-clan, and indeed on a super-state of consciousness, which all rituals and ornaments are there to invoke, this feeling is experienced, both within the sacred world and the profane world. A difference that does not exist in the primitive mind of the being-in-Being. This is merely natural, and the inhibitions that arise from this are natural, they are The Way, it is willed, by God, as experience shows them. As the rain feeds the grass, so the grass feeds the animals, so the animals feed the grass, so the grass feeds the rain. Today, in science, we call this the carbon cycle, or the food-chain, etc, and see it from the perspective of a sequence of Natural events, that we are completely unconnected to, as therefore, is God. Perspective is all. Where you dwell is your perspective.

“It is constantly happening in the clans that under the influence of various sympathies, particular affinities are forming, smaller groups and more limited associations arise, which tend to lead a relatively autonomous life and to form a new subdivision like a sub-clan within the larger one. In order to distinguish and individualize itself, this sub-clan needs a special totem or, consequently, a sub-totem. Now the totems of these secondary groups are chosen from among the things classified under the principal totem. So they are always almost totems and the slightest circumstance is enough to make them actually so. There is a latent totemic nature in them, which shows itself as soon as conditions permit it or demand it. It thus happens that a single individual has two totems, a principal totem common to the whole clan and a sub-totem which is special to the sub-clan of which he is a member. This is something analogous to the nomen and cognomen of the Romans.” (Durkheim:1982:151-2)

Today in the profane world of democracy we all have the non-universal totem of our nationality, and those in our nation or clan then divide into our individual totems, each five years as we are allowed to show their power through the ritual dance called ‘voting in the election’. Where we show our sub-totem as: Labour, Lib Dems, Conservative, Republican, Democrat- i.e. classes or sub-clans of self-interest, of being-for-itself, in a world of being-for-others, ritualised into our society. However, like nation-states these clans require a United Nations institution by which to transcend themselves, and this they also have. However it has a slightly more universal nature to its united effect, than the United Nations does, which exists so that we don’t have World War Three, and to try and bring its ideals of equalitie, fraternitie, and libertie, to the world. The primitive version achieved it for thousands of years.

“We have seen above that every individual is thought to have a sort of property-right over his totem and consequently over the things dependent upon it. Perhaps, under the influence of special circumstances, this aspect of the totemic relation was developed, and they naturally came to believe that only the members of the clan had the right of disposing of their totem and all that is connected with it, and that others, on the contrary, did not have the right of touching it.” (Durkheim:1982:151)

“Far from being limited to one or two categories of beings, the domain of totemic religion extends to the final limits of the known universe. Just like the Greek religion, it puts the divine everywhere; the celebrated formula, everything is full of the gods, might equally well serve it as motto.
However, if totemism is to be represented thus, the notion of it which has long been held must be modified on one essential point. Until the discoveries of recent years, it was made to consist entirely in the cult of one particular totem, and it was defined as the religion of the clan. From this point of view, each tribe seemed to have as many totemic religions, each independent of the others, as it had different clans. This conception was also in harmony with the idea currently held of the clan; in fact, this was regarded as an autonomous society, more or less closed to other similar societies, or having only external and superficial relations with these latter. But the reality is more complex. Undoubtedly, the cult of each totem has its home in the corresponding clan; it is there, and only there, that it is celebrated; it is members of the clan who have charge of it; it is through them that it is transmitted from one generation to another, along with the beliefs which are its basis. But it is also true that the different totemic cults thus practised within a single tribe do not have a parallel development, though remaining ignorant of each other, as if each of them constituted a complete and self-sufficing religion. On the contrary, they mutually imply each other; they are only the parts of a single whole, the elements of a single religion. The men of one clan never regard the beliefs of neighbouring clans with that indifference, scepticism or hostility which one religion ordinarily inspires for another which is foreign to it; they partake of these beliefs themselves… If in theory the rites concerning a totem can be performed only by the men of this totem, nevertheless representatives of different clans frequently assist at them. It sometimes happens that their part is not simply that of spectators; it is true that they do not officiate, but they decorate the officiants and prepare the service. They themselves have an interest in its being celebrated; therefore, in certain tribes, it is they who invite the qualified clan to proceed with the ceremonies. There is even a whole cycle or rites which must take place in the presence of the assembled tribe: these are the totemic ceremonies of initiation… It is impossible that each clan should have made its beliefs in an absolutely independent manner; it is absolutely necessary that the cults of the different totems should be in some way adjusted to each other, since they complete one another exactly.” (Durkheim:1982:154-5)

“This aptitude of society for setting itself up as a god or for creating gods was never more apparent than during the first years of the French Revolution. At this time, in fact, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely laical by nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts. It was to these spontaneous aspirations that the cult of Reason and the Supreme Being attempted to give a sort of official satisfaction. It is true that this religious renovation has only an ephemeral duration. But that was because the patriotic enthusiasm which at first transported the masses soon relaxed. The cause being gone, the effect could not remain. But this experiment, though short-lived, keeps all its sociological interest. It remains true that in one determined case we have seen society and its essential ideas become, directly and with no transfiguration of any sort, the object of a veritable cult.” (Durkheim:1982:214)

In the above quotations from Durkheim we see therefore that the profane society is one based upon the moral code of primitive man and the science of reason is its religion, and yet as we shall see, it cannot last, because of its profanity. Without a transcendental figurehead, there is no transcendental society, there is no super-state upon which to rest morality (the decisions of the will from its chosen profane perspective) and ethics (the customary activities- ethos- of its people), nor the hope of an inner transcendence, from a reasoned-out world, a world we have reasoned ourselves out of as human nature and Nature.

“In fact, it is a well-known law that the sentiments aroused in us by something spontaneously attach themselves to the symbol which represents them. For us, black is a sign of mourning; it also suggests sad impressions and ideas. This transference of sentiments comes simply from the fact that the idea of a thing and the idea of its symbol are closely united in our minds; the result is that the emotions provoked by the one extended contagiously to the other. But this contagion, which takes place in every case to a certain degree, is much more complete and more marked when the symbol is something simple, definite and easily representable, while the thing itself, owing to its dimensions, the number of its parts and the complexity of their arrangement, is difficult to hold in the mind. For we are unable to consider an abstract entity, which we can represent only laboriously and confusedly, the source of the strong sentiments which we feel. We cannot explain them to ourselves except by connecting them to some concrete object of whose reality we are vividly aware. Then if the thing itself does not fulfil this condition, it cannot serve as the accepted basis of the sentiments felt, even though it may be what really aroused them. Then some sign takes its place; it is to this that we connect the emotions it excites. It is this which is loved, feared, respected; it is to this that we are grateful; it is for this that we sacrifice ourselves. The soldier who dies for his flag, dies for his country; but as a matter of fact, in his own consciousness, it is the flag that has the first place. It sometimes happens that this even directly determines action. Whether one isolated standard remains in the hands of the enemy or not does not determine the fate of the country, yet the soldier allows himself to be killed to regain it. He loses sight of the fact that the flag, is only a sign, and that it has no value in itself, but only brings to mind the reality that it represents; it is treated as if it were this reality itself.
Now the totem is the flag of the clan. It is therefore natural that the impressions aroused by the clan in individual minds- fix themselves to the idea of the totem rather than that of the clan: for the clan is too complex a reality to be represented clearly in all its complex unity by such rudimentary intelligences. More than that, the primitive does not even see that these impressions come to him from the group. He does not know that the coming together of a number of men associated in the same life results in disengaging new energies, which transform each of them. All that he knows is that he is raised above himself and that he sees a different life from the one he ordinarily leads. However, he must connect these sensations to some external object as their cause. Now what does he see about him? On every side those things which appeal to his senses and strike his imagination are the numerous images of the totem. They are the waninga and the nurtunja, which are symbols of the sacred being. They are churinga and bull-roarers, upon which are generally carved combinations of lines having the same significance. They are the decorations covering the different parts of his body, which are totemic marks. How could this image, repeated everywhere and in all sorts of forms, fail to stand out with exceptional relief in his mind? Placed thus in the centre of the scene, it becomes representative. The sentiments experienced fix themselves upon it, for it is the only concrete object upon which they can fix themselves. It continues to bring them to mind and to evoke them even after the assembly has dissolved, for it survives the assembly, being carved upon the instruments of the cult, upon the sides of rocks, upon bucklers, etc. By it, the emotions experienced are perpetually sustained and revived. Everything happens just as if they inspired them directly. It is still more natural to attribute them to it for, since they are common to the group, they can be associated only with something that is equally common to all. Now the totemic emblem is the only thing satisfying this condition. By definition, it is common to all. During the ceremony, it is the centre of all regards. While generations change, it remains the same; it is the permanent element of the social life. So it is from it that those mysterious forces seem to emanate with which men feel that they are related, and thus they have been led to represent these forces under the form or the animate or inanimate being whose name the clan bears….
But the clan, like every other sort of society, can live only in and through the individual consciousnesses that compose it. So if religious force, in so far as it is conceived as incorporated in the totemic emblem, appears to be outside of the individuals and to be endowed with a sort of transcendence over them, it, like the clan of which it is the symbol, can be realized only in and through them; in this sense, it is imminent in them and they necessarily represent it as such. They feel it present and active within them, for it is thus which raised them to a superior life. This is why men have believed that they contain within them a principle comparable to the one residing in the totem, and consequently, why they have attributed a sacred character to themselves, but one less marked than that of the emblem.” (Durkheim:1982:219-21)

American flag burning causes a furore in America, and when 9/11 happened Wal-mart couldn’t keep up with the demand for flags from its clan members who wished to display the power of America, and envoke it’s super-state within themselves and within their community.
In other words, God is not an option for a society, it is the society, even when it names itself (for-itself) as a nation not a God, ‘the sentiments aroused in us by something spontaneously attach themselves to the symbol which represents them’. Communism fails because of its mundanity (meaning down-to-earth from the French monde- world), because it made man his own God and completely objectivised the world into a thing for its collective will, whose transcended character could not be named as a figurehead or totem. One cannot remove the poetry from mankind, and expect transcendence.

“That is why we can rest assured in advance that the practices of the cult, whatever they may be, are something more than movements without importance and gestures without efficacy. By the mere fact that their apparent function is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to his god, they at the same time really strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member, since the god is only a figurative expression of the society.” (Durkheim:1982:226)

“In fact, if left to themselves, individual consciousnesses are closed to each other; they can communicate only by means of signs which express their internal states. If the communication established between them is to become a real communion, that is to say, a fusion of all particular sentiments into one common sentiment, the signs expressing them must themselves be fused into one single and unique resultant. It is the appearance of this that informs individuals that they are in harmony and makes them conscious of their moral unity. It is by uttering the same cry, pronouncing the same word, or performing the same gesture in regard to some object that they become and feel themselves to be in unison….Individual minds cannot come in contact and communicate with each other except by coming out of themselves; but they cannot do this except by movements. So it is the homogeneity of these movements that gives the group consciousness of itself and consequently makes it exist. When this homogeneity is once established and these movements have once taken a stereotyped form, they serve to symbolize the corresponding representation. But they symbolize them only because they have aided in forming them.
Moreover, without symbols, social sentiments could have only a precarious existence. Though very strong as long as men are together and influence each other reciprocally, they exist only in the form of recollections after the assembly has ended, and when left to themselves, these become feebler and feebler; for since the group is now no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand. The violent passions which may have been released in the heart of a crowd fall away and are extinguished when this is dissolved, and men ask themselves with astonishment how they could ever have been so carried away from their normal character. But if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable. These other things are constantly bringing them to mind and arousing them; it is as though the cause which excited them in the first place continued to act. Thus these systems of emblems, which are necessary if society is to become conscious of itself, are no less indispensable for assuring the continuation of this consciousness.
So we must refrain from regarding these symbols as simple artifices, as sorts of labels attached to representations already made, in order to make them more manageable: they are an integral part of them. Even the fact that collective sentiments are thus attached to things completely foreign to them is not purely conventional: it illustrates under a conventional form a real characteristic of social facts, that is, their transcendence over individual minds. In fact, it is known that social phenomena are born, not in individuals, but in the group.” (Durkheim:1982:230-1)

“We are now able to explain the origin of the ambiguity of religious forces as they appear in history, and how they are physical as well as human, moral as well as material. They are moral powers because they are made up entirely of the impressions this moral being, the group, arouses in those other moral beings, its individual members; they do not translate the manner in which physical things affect our senses, but the way in which the collective consciousness acts upon individual consciousnesses. Their authority is only one form of the moral ascendancy of society over its members. But, on the other hand, since they are conceived of under material forms, they could not fail to be regarded as closely related to material things. Therefore they dominate the two worlds. Their residence is in men, but at the same time they are the vital principles of things. They animate minds and discipline them, but it is also they who make plants grow and animals reproduce. It is this double nature which has enabled religion to be like the womb from which come all the leading germs of human civilization. Since it has been made to embrace all of reality, the physical world as well as the moral one, the forces that move bodies as well as those that move minds have been conceived in a religious form. That is how the most diverse methods and practices, both those that make possible the continuation of the moral life (law, morals, beaux-arts) and those serving the material life (the natural, technical and practical sciences), are either directly or indirectly derived from religion.” (Durkheim:1982:223)

“The power to which the cult is addressed is not represented as soaring high above him and overwhelming him by its superiority; on the contrary, it is very near to him and confers upon him very useful powers which he could never acquire by himself. Perhaps the deity has never been nearer to men than at this period of history, when it is present in the things filling their immediate environment and is, in part, imminent in himself. In fine, the sentiments at the root of totemism are those of happy confidence rather than of terror and compression. If we set aside the funeral rites- the sober side of every religion- we find the totemic cult celebrated in the midst of songs, dances and dramatic representations. As we shall see, cruel expiations are relatively rare; even the painful and obligatory mutilations of the initiations are not of this character. The terrible and jealous gods appear but slowly in the religious evolution. This is because primitive societies are not those huge Leviathans which overwhelm a man by the enormity of their power and place him under a severe discipline; he gives himself up to them spontaneously and without resistance.” (Durkheim:1982:224)

So, according to Durkheim, God is nothing more than society, and society nothing more than the creator of this necessary God. We will see later on, when looking at the myths of the actual peoples who experienced their God, ‘filling their immediate environment’- the Garden of Eden, and ‘imminent in himself’- being-in-Being, that Durkheim is both right and wrong, and the ancients knew it only too well. We will also see the necessary creation of this God of society and give him a name.

The Ontological Soul of the Cave-man

Now that we know how the ancients saw the world and how they therefore obtained their morality, we have seen that there was no religious exclusion, no need for prohibitions or laws, no inequality, no war and hence no need for the word peace. There is but one God and we are all a part of it, but have organised ourselves into clans, in order to live in harmony with Nature. The proof of this is the intimacy and unity of each totem seen as a necessary part of every other totem, whose true, unillustrable depiction is a the force that animates the very universe itself. A universe of which we are an intimate part, not an accidental part.
That is the outer world behaviour of these people, they require no metal fish, because they live in a world of plenty and are communing with a transcendent state permanently just by being.
What then does their inner world- the world the magic horse takes them to- feel like. What is that experience named? And what happens to them at death, if there is no punitive God, and hence no hell? And without hell, is there need of a heaven? Do they have saints that help them in their daily lives, despite being dead? Where do those saints live?

“Just as there is no known society without a religion, so there exist none, howsoever crudely organized they may be, where we do not find a whole system of collective representations concerning the soul, its origin and its destiny. So far as we are able to judge from the date of ethnology, the idea of the soul seems to have been contemporaneous with humanity itself, and it seems to have had all of its essential characteristics so well formulated at the very outset that the work of the more advanced religions and philosophy has been practically confined to refining it, while adding nothing that is really fundamental.” (Durkheim:1982:240)

“The idea of the totem and that of the ancestor are even so closely kindred that they sometimes seem to be confounded. Thus, after speaking of the totem of the mother, or altjira, Strehlow goes on to say, “This altjira appears to the natives in dreams and gives them warnings, just as it takes information concerning them to their sleeping friends.” This altjira, which speaks and which is attached to each individual personally, is evidently an ancestor; yet it is also an incarnation of the totem. A certain text in Roth, which speaks of invocations addressed to the totem, should certainly be interpreted in this sense. So it appears that the totem is sometimes represented in the mind in the form of a group of ideal beings or mythical personages who are more or less indistinct from the ancestors. In a word, the ancestors are the fragments of the totem.” (Durkheim:1982:255)

“For society, this unique source of all that is sacred, does not limit itself to moving us from without and affecting us for the moment; it establishes itself within us in a durable manner. It arouses within us a whole world of ideas and sentiments which express it but which, at the same time, form an integral and permanent part of ourselves. When the Australian goes away from a religious ceremony, the representations which this communal life has aroused or re-aroused within him are not obliterated in a second. The figures of the great ancestors, the heroic exploits whose memory these rites perpetuate, the great deeds of every sort in which he, too, has participated through the cult, in a word, all these numerous ideals which he has elaborated with the co-operation of his fellows, continue to live in his consciousness and, through the emotions which are attached to them and the ascendancy which they hold over his entire being, they are sharply distinguished from the vulgar impressions arising from his daily relations with external things. Moral ideas have the same character. It is society which forces them upon us, and as the respect of their origin, with an authority and a dignity which is shared by none of our internal states: therefore, we assign them a place a part in our physical life. Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves. This is the objective foundation of the idea of the soul: those representations whose flow constitutes our interior life are of two different species which are irreducible one into another. Some concern themselves with the external and material world; others, with an ideal world to which we attribute a moral superiority over the first. So we are really made up of two beings facing in different and almost contrary directions, one of whom exercises a real pre-eminence over the other. Such is the profound meaning of the antithesis which all men have more or less clearly conceived between the body and the soul, the material and the spiritual beings who coexist within us. Moralists and preachers have often maintained that no one can deny the reality of duty and its sacred character without falling into materialism.” (Durkheim:1982:262-3)

“It remains true that our nature is double; there really is a particle of divinity in us because there is within us a particle of these great ideas which are the soul of the group.
So the individual soul is only a portion of the collective soul of the group; it is the anonymous force at the basis of the cult, but incarnated in an individual whose personality it espouses; it is mana individualized.” (Durkheim:1982:264)

“The primitive generally accepts the idea of death with a sort of indifference. Being trained to count his own individuality for little, and being accustomed to exposing his life constantly, he gives it up easily enough. More than that, the immortality promised by the religions he practices is not personal. In a large number of cases, the soul does not continue the personality of the dead man, or does not continue it long, for, forgetful of its previous existence, it goes away, after a while, to animate another body and thus becomes the vivifying principle of a new personality.” (Durkheim:1982:267)

Is there Proof of a Soul?

In the above quotes regarding the concept of the soul within primitive man we can see that the soul was a fully-formed idea at the beginning of mankind and that it involved the idea of reincarnation, and that this by the understanding of the soul, society reasonably lent itself to respect of the ancestors whose soul energy (mana) and presence still pervaded the integrity, morality, continued existence, and way of life for their progeny.
Just as we saw many beliefs and practices, such as the flag, moral law, and democracy couched within primitive man, so too lies the idea of the soul and of its rebirth into a carnal body- reincarnation, as a fundamental basis of all religions:

“The belief is held (with variations in details) by adherents of almost all major religions except Christianity and Islam. In addition, members of many Shi’ite Muslim groups believe in reincarnation, and between 20 and 30 per cent of persons in western countries who may be nominal Christians also believe in reincarnation. Although reincarnation is not a feature of orthodox Judaism, the branch of Hasidic Jews believe in it. Ethnologists have documented the belief among nearly all the traditional religions of ethnic groups in Africa, North and South America, and Australia/Oceania. The tribes of north-west America continue to believe in reincarnation despite the negative attitudes towards it on the part of Christian missionaries and churches. The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer offered a definition of Europe as that part of the world where the inhabitants did not believe in reincarnation.” (Henry:2006:224)

What is surprising is that the some of the gospels left out of the bible, but written by people who actually met Jesus (whilst the liturgical gospels authors, never did) state that he believed in reincarnation also. What is still more surprising is that the branch of academia that researches psychic phenomena has already researched reincarnation and found evidence that it exists! Yes that’s right, there is proof of it occurring.
What this section attempts to add, all but too briefly, is the evidence of a soul, of reincarnation, and of other such psychic phenomena, as it stands in the academic and also the behaviour of the nation-state world of today. By detailing these findings, I hope to elucidate the evidence that is not usually promulgated, but that is available to any who wish to investigate it, that science itself has found out about these ancient beliefs. That is to say that a religion called science whose beliefs cannot contain a morality or a soul or a God, have found to out much in negation of their beliefs, because they have the good sense to still apply their ritual practice of keeping an open mind. That after all is all I am asking you to do using evidence, that is reasonable. How often do you think they look though, and why do they look when they do? Well as we shall see the answer is not very often would, and not to look for God or the soul when they do. Still I think that for the uneducated in this field, and for a brief overview, this lack of looking and looking in the wrong place with terrible techniques has still resulted in some very important findings. Findings that have changed the behaviour of nation-states due to them:

“The best evidence supporting the belief in reincarnation comes from the cases of young children who, typically between the ages of 2 and 5, make statements about a previous life they claim to have lived before being born. Their statements are often accompanied by behaviour that is unusual for their family but appropriate for the life the child claims to remember. For example, a child of Sri Lanka said he remembered a life in which she had drowned in a flooded paddy field; she referred to a bus that had splashed water on her before she had drowned. These and other statements corresponded to the life and death of a girl in a nearby village who had drowned when, walking along a narrow elevated road, she had stepped back to avoid a passing bus and fallen into a flooded paddy field. Even before the subject could speak, she had shown a marked fear of being immersed in water and also a fear of buses. She also showed traits, such as a fondness for bread and sweet foods, that were unusual in her family and characteristics of the girl who had drowned (Stevenson 1977).
Cases of this kind can be found readily in many parts of the world, and more than 2,500 of them have been investigated, mainly in South Asia, western Asia, West Africa, and north-west North America. These are areas where nearly all inhabitants (or members of certain tribes) believe in reincarnation. About 200 similar cases, however, have been investigated in western Europe, and among non-tribal people of the United States and Canada.
Four features of the cases occur with such regularity in all cultures that we may appropriately refer to them as ‘universal features’. They are: the early age of speaking about the previous life (2 to 5); a forgetting of the imaged memories between the ages of 5 and 8; a high incidence of violent death in the claimed previous life; and mention of the mode of death by the subject. Other features vary widely in different cultures. For example, in about 26 per cent of the cases in Myanmar (formerly Burma) the child says it had a previous life as a member of the opposite sex (Stevenson 1983). Cases of the ‘sex-change’ type also occur frequently in Nigeria and Thailand; but only 3 per cent of cases in India have this feature” (Henry:2006:225)

“Some 35 per cent of the subjects have birthmarks and birth defects. In the majority of these cases the subject’s marks or defects correspond to injuries or an illness, experienced by the deceased person whose life the subject remembers; and medical documents have confirmed this correspondence in more than forty cases (Stevenson 1997a, 1997b). Pasricha (1998) has reported ten cases in India with birthmarks and birth defects; in most of the cases medical records verified the correspondence of the abnormalities to wounds on the concerned deceased persons….
Two pairs of monozygotic twins who remembered previous lives differed significantly both in physical features and in behaviour; the physical and behavioural differences accorded with features in the persons whose lives the twins remembered (Stevenson 1997a, 1997b, 1999). Such twin pairs have identical genes and closely similar environments; the different previous lives they remembered may explain the observed differences between the twins of such pairs. These biological components in the cases appear to be of great potential importance. They suggest a previously unrecognised factor in the causation of some birth defects and other bodily features.” (Henry:2006:226)

“An important criticism of the cases is their much greater frequency in countries and cultures with a strong belief in reincarnation. In addition, in many cases the subject and the deceased person whose life the subject remembered have belonged to the same family or village. These facts could prepare patients to expect that a particular person would reincarnate in their family, and from this expectation they might attach undue importance to vague allusions a child might make; and they might even, by asking leading questions, guide the child to identify itself with the deceased person. This argument has merit for many cases, but becomes weak or valueless when applied to cases in which the two families have lived in quite separate communities and have had no contact with each other before the case developed. Many cases have this strength. Ten examples of this type of case were reported in Stevenson (1975), three in Stevenson and Samaratratne (1988a, 1998b) and fifteen in Stevenson (1997a: see table 15-2, p.1144). Mills has published four examples of this type of case (Mills 1989, Mills et al.1994) Pasricha (1990) has published two examples. Haraldson has published three examples (Haraldsson 1991, Mills et al. 1994).” (Henry:2006:227-8)

“Another criticism suggests that even when the two families have not known each other before the case developed, they might- when they did meet- have mingled and confused their memories about what the child had said earlier. They might then- quite innocently- have credited the child with paranormal knowledge about a deceased person that he or she had not really demonstrated. A counter-argument to this criticism is provided by a small number of cases- unfortunately still only 1.5 per cent of all those investigated- in which someone made a written record of what the child said before the two families met. In these cases at least, errors of memory can be excluded. I have published reports of two cases of this group in Stevenson (1975) and another three examples in Stevenson and Samararatne (1988s, 1998b). Haraldsson has published two examples in Haraldsson (1991) and another example in Mills et al. (1994).
In many other cases, especially ones in which an investigator arrives soon after the families meet, it seems improbable that errors of memory can account for all the facts of the case. Moreover, a comparison of the cases with and without a written record of the child’s statements made before the two families met showed that the overall number of statements was lower for the case with a written record made after the families concerned had met; and there was no difference between the two groups in the number of correct statements the subject made (Schouten and Stevenson 1998). This result tells against the suggestion that informants tend to embellish and improve cases after the families concerned have met. Nevertheless, an important task for future research is that of finding more cases than can be investigated before the families concerned meet.” (Henry:2006:228)

“Children who claim to remember a previous life are a natural phenomenon the features of which have now been reported for more than a hundred years. Many cases show weaknesses in the accuracy of the testimony. Many may be childish fantasies. In other cases the deceased person about whose life the child spoke belonged to the child’s family or community, and the child might have learned about this person by normal means. When we exclude all these cases, however, a substantial number of others remain in which the child made correct, often detailed statements about the life and death of a deceased person who lived in another community and belonged to a family completely unknown to that of the subject. In some of these cases written records made before the child’s statements were verified exclude errors of memory on the part of informants.
Interpretations of the cases as due to paranormal cognition between the subjects and living persons who knew the concerned deceased person fail to account for all features of many cases. This is particularly true of cases in which the subjects have birthmarks and birth defects corresponding to wounds or other marks on the person whose life the subject claims to have lived.
The cases have much relevance to the mind/brain problem and to other unsolved problems of biology and medicine, such as physical and behavioural differences between monozygotic twins and the causes of some birth defects.” (Henry:2006:229-30)

“About three-quarters of the general public believe in psychic phenomena and somewhere between a half and two-thirds claim to have had a psychic experience such as telepathy or communication with the dead.” (Henry:2006:1)

It may seem amazing to discover that reincarnation is a documented event, scientifically, but let us not forget that belief of this is a trait of mankind, throughout the 99.8% of time, without organised religion, as we know it. What is stunning is that despite the denial of the soul by science most people on Earth still claim to have psychic experiences:

“Despite their name, anomalous psi experiences appear to be quite common. Around six in ten people in Europe and the USA claim to have had a psychic experience (Haraldsson 1985). At least a third claim to have experienced telepathy and about a fifth clairvoyance, but under a tenth psychokinesis (Haraldsson and Houtkooper 1991). Something like three-quarters of the population in Europe and the USA believe psi exists, which is more than double the number who claim to believe in God or ‘some power or presence beyond themselves’, found in similar surveys (Hay and Morisy 1977), though this figure my be an underestimate as qualitative interviews produce a considerably higher percentage of believers (Hay 1987). In addition one-quarter of Americans believe in ghosts and a tenth claim to have seen or sensed one (Gallup and Newport 1991).” (Henry:2006:9)

One would expect science to have investigated such experiential evidence with much fervour, but in the public domain it would seem that this is hardly the case:

“Currently this is a select profession with perhaps fifty professionals world-wide (largely because the area has not been well-funded to date rather than for want of interest.)” (Henry:2006:1)

Outside of the public domain, however, both America and Russia have explored psychic phenomena in order to train spies to remote view, meaning to travel psychically to a set of co-ordinates given to them and then relay information about that physical location back to Intelligence. In this book I have not got the space to look in greater detail at these discoveries, suffice to say, that in Desert Storm, the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. army used psychics to remote view the location of scud missiles. To elucidate yourselves further watch, the Secret Life of Uri Geller a BBC production, for further details or please watch- ‘The men who stare at goats’, staring George Clooney and Ewan MacGregor.
The work, ‘Russia: Psychic Discoveries behind the Iron Curtain’ which details Russia’s psi research during the Cold War is also extremely elucidating. For now I would like to show you a photo of the soul of a plant, taken by a man named Kirlian, whose technique of photography was to place the object to be photographed upon the actual camera film and then pass an electric current through it. This type of photography, Kirlian photography, is now widely available and is used to take a photo of your ‘soul energy’, for want of a better term and understanding.
This energy has also been captured by NASA (and many other scientific institutions) who created an especially sensitive detector to read the energy coming from their astronauts when in space, and to see if cosmic radiation had any effect on it. What they discovered was that the various frequencies of energy recorded by this machine corresponded to the auras that some people have said they can see, for the entirety of man’s existence. Here, in figure 1, is the Kirlian picture of the leaf.

Fig. 1. Above the arrows there is no physical leaf. The line where the leaf has been removed is clearly visible.

The picture came about because of a blind test upon two leaves from two different plants, one of which was infected with a disease that only showed in the roots and flowers of the plant. The test was to see if Kirlian photographs could reveal which leaf belonged to that diseased plant. The result was a photo of a leaf without any residual energy trace and one with, as depicted above.

It would seem, given the above evidence and actions of nation-states upon it, that psychic phenomena, beyond that of a made up story of society, has some weight to it. Let us return to academia however, and see what sort of phenomena they have witnessed to prove such exists:

“Utts (1995) conducted an overview of the US government-sponsored remote viewing research conducted at Stanford Research Institute (now referred to as SRI International) and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Using effect size as the most reliable measure of replication (see Utts 1988, 1991), an overall effect size of 0.21 was found for the 770 remote viewing trials conducted at SRI, with the 445 trials conducted at SAIC producing an effect size of 0.23. A detailed examination of various possible methodological flaws led Utts to state that they did not influence the overall effect sizes. In reporting back to the American Institutes for Research who had commissioned Utt’s analysis (at the request of the US Congress and Central Intelligence Agency) she concluded, ‘Using the standards applied in any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance’ (Utts, 1995, p.289)…
The critic Hyman (1995) was commissioned to review the remote viewing database along with Utts. While his overall interpretation of the outcomes is that he does not believe the existence of ESP has yet been proved, he states that the remote viewing data provide the best data yet in support of a psi hypothesis. Considering the remote viewing data along with other ‘contemporary findings’, such as the ganzfield, Hyman concedes that ‘something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place. I also have to admit that I do not have a ready explanation for these observed effects’ (Hyman 1995, p.334)” (Henry:2009:47).

“…shamans were the first magicians as well as the first healers. They realised the value of drama, of shock, and of surprise in mobilising a client’s self-healing capacities, and provided these elements through theatrical means. Murphy (1964), in her work among Eskimo shamans on Canada’s St Lawrence Island, discovered that instruction in ventriloquism and legerdemain were part of shamanic training. Reichbart (1978) suggests that deliberate sleight-of-hand can be used by shamans to create a psychological environment conducive to the manifestation of genuine parapsychological phenomena.
In the meantime, the psychoneurology of shamanism may yield insights into the operation of psi phenomena. Winkelman (2000) has proposed a ‘neurophenomological framework’ that would explain the world-wide distribution of shamanic characteristics and the role played by alterations of consciousness in shamanic practice (p.75). Researchers in ‘neurotheology’ have used brain imaging techniques to study spiritual adepts, noting shifts in brain activity that accompany reports of such unitive experiences, as ‘oneness with the universe’ (Newberg et al.2001, pp.115-16).” (Henry:2006:159)

“Many popular techniques are available for inducing the experience [of Outer Body Experience], most of which use imagery and relaxation as key components (Blackmore 1982, Rogo 1983). Experimental techniques have also been developed using special sounds and visual displays, as well as imagery exercises and relaxation. From the early days of psychical research, hypnosis has been used to induce OBEs or ‘travelling clairvoyance’ (see Blackmore 1982, Alvarado 1992). Drugs have been known to produce OBEs, especially the psychedelics LSD, psilocybin, DMT and mescaline, and the dissociative anaesthetic ketamine which often induces feelings of body separation, floating and even dying. However, there is no known drug that can reliably induce an OBE.
There is no evidence to suggest that people who have OBEs are mentally ill in any way. Gabbard and Twemlow (1984) in their study of over 300 OBErs found that they were generally well adjusted with low levels of alcohol and drug abuse and no sign of psychotic thinking….
In a well-known experiment one subject correctly saw a five-digit number, but this success has never been repeated, and most other experiments have had equivocal results. There are many claims from case studies that people really can see at a distance during OBEs but the experimental evidence does not substantiate them.
The third type of experiment has involved physiological monitoring of OBErs. No unique physiological state seems to be involved. In the few studies done, the subject was found to be in a very relaxed waking state or in a state resembling that on the very edge of sleep. It is certainly clear that OBErs were not in REM (rapid eye movement), or dreaming, sleep. Therefore OBEs cannot be considered to be a kind of dream.” (Henry:2006:190-1)

The irony of the above information is that the primitive peoples who we are finding out about now; King Croesus who we will look at as the founder of civilisation as we know it today- Greece; and all of the rulers of the world, including today’s governments, all use psychics in order to gain an edge in their wars! That’s 22,000 years of psychic spying secretly conducted within the walls of power, whilst its peoples today are educated in the scientific facts regarding the illusion of these things even though the academia that teaches it is disagreed with by those who have studied it. That is to say the ‘around fifty people’ today, possibly the least in the history of humanity, studying these matters with no funding, in comparison to that given to the armies of Russia and America that is, and especially unlike the rulers of ancient times who founded cities around their oracles and Uri Gellers.
It would seem then that the inner world of the Magic-Horse, of primitive man, that spoke of magic and of escaping the body as a spirit, etc, etcetera, have some basis in fact. We will return to this at other points in the book, especially in relation to medicine and placebos within our culture today. But let the point be stated here and now from the above, that science has more people researching tooth-paste than it does psychic research, and that the ritual drugs that enable man’s physiology to experience these psychic phenomena in a super-state have all been made illegal and taboo by our society, along-side with any institution that attempts to provide a space for them, yet those individuals and small groups who do take them also talk and create art about a feeling of being one with the universe and the paradigm shift of consciousness that this evokes, as well as the subsequent morality that arises within the experiencer. A shift in consciousness that, as we have seen above, has been mapped by an MRI scanner.
In other words, primitive man, did feel a oneness with the universe, what in our language game we are referring to ontologically as being-in-Being.
If you have never heard of your aura as the store of your energy field and have never rested your aura by going to a store that assists you in resting your aura, for instance after you have broken your fast, then I presume you have never gone to a restaurant to have break-fast!? Or never heard of someone giving off an aura of power or walked into a room and felt the aura of an elephant in the room whose presence you can feel being exuded by all around you.
Later on we will simply experience this auric field to end any arguments of opinion with experiential knowledge, but that is for Part Two.

The social environment of the caveman

If it is therefore the case that being-in-Being was a universal experience of the hunter-gatherer and his phratry, then one would expect a sociology and culture that reflected this belief system. For example, in the West today we believe that intelligent people deserve an unequal share of everything, because we are all individuals, not a part of one Great Soul- wakan, and so every ‘one’ today is a being-for-itself, and using their talents to gain over another ‘one’. In primitive man, if our understanding is right, then this gaining over another part of nature for ‘ones’-self would be sacrilege, because how can one gain over another, when all is His. By this I do not mean, therefore it is everyones (a common misconception, as in the term ‘commonwealth’), I mean that it is His, as you are His, intimately.
When I went to a Church of England primary school, one day a vicar came to give an assembly. At five years of age I was told that God had given us all a unique talent, and that our life was about discovering that talent and then using it for the good of mankind. What the vicar failed to notice however was that the institution that I was sitting in, and that his institution, the Church of England, paid for, was set up deliberately in order to discover that talent and then use it to gain for myself personally by my individual wages. For primitive man this would be seen as taking your God given talent and using it in being-for-itself. How could one conceive of gaining over another of God’s creatures, simply because that talent was not as abundant in others as it was in you?* This then surely was the mindset of such a society if we have understood it correctly, and so now we must hold up the facts to the hypothesis:

*“Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.
And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon general, and infallible rules, called science; which very few have, and but in few things; a being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, as prudence, while we look after somewhat else, I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For prudence, is but experience; which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceit of one’s own wisdom, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.
From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and the in way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another….
And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the person of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation requireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist….
So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third for reputation.” (Hobbes:1651:80-81)

“While we cannot pronounce with certainty about equity during the Stone Ages, many of the surviving tribal societies seem to have been reasonably equitable. In Voyage of the Beagle (1839) Charles Darwin described how the native of Tierra del Fuego lived in a state of ‘perfect equality…even a piece of cloth is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another’. Christopher Boehm, the anthropologist who directs the Jane Goodall Research Center of the University of Southern California, noted that among contemporary tribal peoples:

“The Kalahari San ‘cut down braggarts’. Among the Hazda, ‘when a would-be chief tried to persuade other Hazda to work for him, people openly made it clear that his efforts amused them’…. Australian aborigines ‘traditionally eliminated aggressive men who tried to dominate them.’ In New Guinea, ‘the execution of a prominent individual who has overstepped his prerogatives is secretly arranged.’
Boehhm’s quotes from E.Sober and D.S. Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behaviour, Harvard University Press, 1998

….Boehm has concluded that the anthropological evidence suggests that:

“as of 40,000 years ago, with the advent of anatomically modern humans who continued to live in small groups and had not yet domesticated plants and animals, it is very likely that all human societies practised egalitarian behaviour.” (Kealey:2008:70-72)

“When the great French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan excavated Pincevent in the 1960s, many fragmented reindeer bones were found clustered around the hollow fireplaces where the meat had been roasted and eaten. Two decades later, the American archaeologist James Enloe found that fragments from different fireplaces could be fitted together, showing how one single joint had been shared. Whole carcasses had been divided in this fashion- the left forelimb of one animal was found beside one hearth, the right forelimb of the same animal at another. Food sharing was at the centre of social life for those who camped at Pincevent- as indeed it has been with all hunter-gatherers throughout human history.” (Mithen:2003:126)

So, what today we call an entrepreneur, i.e. a being-for-itself and not a being-in-Being would have been laughed at or killed for trying to make more for themselves over the group (as Durkheim would see it), or for trying to employ another to use His life-time for his own personal gain, (as the ancients would see it).
Why this behaviour then? Because to the cave-man the sacred is not true or false, it is not distant and needed to be gained by any action. It is an intimate experience of harmony in Nature. The invisible world of communal love (where the Magic Horse takes you) is more valuable than anything that a for-itself (the iron fish destination) can achieve. But that experience formed the morality that would see the entrepreneur as someone who corrupted this harmony by taking from themselves, and that the common good, could not continue under the reign of personal desire as a social fabric, without causing the end of their way of life, or tearing the fabric of their community apart. A fabric, woven into a symbolic totemic flag, representing their experience. At first it seems, that laughter was enough to end an entrepreneurs individual desire to use another, but eventually death must have had to have been raised as the only solution for the sake of the group, for the sake of morality, for the sake of God’s harmony. They did not do it to keep equality, or to keep the peace or because that was just, they did it because they were God’s people, to be used as being-in-Being not as a being-for-itself or being-for-others.
In other words we can say that,’Contained within this perspective, lies the ‘Nature’ of freedom, equality, peace, and justice, but that it is only when they are separated from societies existence by their opposite being acted out, do they become an ideal, against the backdrop of the real, and only then do we find the necessity of naming them. Oppression, requires the word freedom, inequality requires the word inequality, war requires the word peace, and injustice requires the word justice. As we have just seen, for 40,000 years around the entire world, equality was an experience, not a word, a reality not an ideality. All due to an experience of a thing called a soul, that is part of one God, of which we now even have photographic evidence for and the behaviour of our own nation-states to attest to.
Just as in science, all science used to be called natural philosophy, so as each gained knowledge of its-self it began to break up into philosophy, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc, before discovering that all of that separation business is tosh because underpinning all of it is a quantum world of probabilities where all quantum particles move inter-relatedly regardless of time or space, i.e. all these things are of one fabric, so to does primitive man see ‘all as one’, and refuses to split people into smaller units than physical parts of the Great Soul, the fabric of the Universe- wakan.

Now that we have seen have individual mindsets were dealt with by ancient peoples, and for why, let us see how they actually treated each other. The most important part of what we are about to read, for us, is the notion of sacrifice in regards to what it meant from their perspective, and what it means in ours:

“By suffering such conditions, Spencer and Gillen provided some of the earliest accounts of the Central Desert Aborigines, publishing a succession of classics including The Native Tribes of Central Australia in 1899, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia in 1904 and The Arunta in 1927….Both Spencer and Gillen had become fully initiated members of the Arunta tribe and were allowed to attend many ceremonies previously unwitnessed by Western eyes.” (Mithen:2003:320)

“The key to survival was opportunism- being prepared to move to wherever rain had been seen to fall, and where a water catchment was known. To do so they needed very few possessions and ‘permanent abodes’ would have been no use at all. Rainfall could be seen from 80 kilometres away and vast distances were regularly covered; in just three months during 1966, Gould’s group moved to nine different campsites spread across 2,600 square kilometres. This lifestyle required a detailed and extensive geographical knowledge that was embedded in the Dreamtime stories. As the younger members of the group learned the mythology and were initiated into sacred knowledge, they had to memorise the names and locations of many landmarks, notable water-holes. Such initiations took place on the rare occasions when hunting was good; up to 150 people would gather and remain together until local game became depleted. And so the story-telling, ceremonies, and dancing- that performed by Spencer and Gillen’s ‘naked, howling savages’- were absolutely essential to human survival.
Another key ingredient of the desert adaptation was the sharing ethic. All food brought into the camp was meticulously shared between all members of the group, even when it was no more than a small lizard.” (Mithen:2003:323)

“The Aborigines of the twentieth century survived in the incredibly difficult environment of the Australian desert with this combination of tools, rules and profound geographical knowledge. But is this how the Aborigines who made the stone flakes and fireplaces in Kulpi Mara and Puritjarra Caves had also lived? We must be extremely cautious about imposing modern patterns of behaviour on to the past- especially when dealing with such archaeologically invisible matters as cross-cousin marriage.
Richard Gould excavated two rockshelters in the desert: Puntutjarpa and Intirtekwerle. Both had long sequences of deposits that stretched back to 10,000 BC. And both had stone artefacts little different to those used by the Aborigines with whom Gould had lived during the 1960s. In his 1980 book, Living Archaeology, which described his experiences and excavations, Gould proposed that the culture of seed grinding, marriage networks, and Dreamtime mythology stretched back not only to that date but to the very first occupation of the arid zone at 30,000 BC. This was a bold claim as, in the 1960s, the oldest known grinding stones dated to a mere 3500 BC. It wasn’t until 1997 that Gould was vindicated by the discovery of grinding-stone fragments at Cuddie Springs- the site in New South Wales where people had once either hunted or scavenged upon the carcasses of now extinct mammals. Excavations by Richard Fullagar and Judith Field of Sydney University have recovered thirty-three grinding-stone fragments from a 150-centimetre-deep trench with layers dating from earlier than 30,000 BC up to the present day.” (Mithen:2003:324-5)

“Each individual, from the very young to the very old, had their own set of gift-giving partners, found within their own group and among others. Some partners may have seen each other just once a year, if that. No two people had exactly the same set of partners, producing a ‘gift-giving network’ that stretched for hundreds if not thousands of kilometres across the landscape.
When the anthropologists Polly Wiessner studied gift-giving amongst Kalahari Bushmen in the early 1970s she found that more than two-thirds of each person’s possessions had been received as gifts from their gift-giving partners. The remainder had been either made or purchased, and were destined to be given away.
This gift-giving network turned out to be crucial to survival in the Kalahari Desert. With its unpredictable rainfall, every group faced a constant risk of insufficient food and water. If this did occur, its members were able to call on help from their gift-giving partners living elsewhere, as they were obliged to share their food. Wiessner describes how this worked from her own experiences in 1974. A group of !Kung faced severe food shortages: high winds throughout the spring had destroyed the crop of nuts they were hoping to collect, while exceptionally heavy rainfall had led to unusually tall grass, making snaring difficult and scattering the larger game. By August the !Kung were spending their time making handicrafts to serve as gifts and learning from passing visitors about conditions elsewhere. By September, the group had begun to disperse, people reporting that they wished to visit relatives ‘because they missed them and wanted to do gift-giving’. Within two weeks, half of the population had departed, scattering thinly among other groups and relieving the pressure on those who remained.” (Mithen:2003:478)

“The interest of the system of rites which has just been described lies in the fact that in them we find, in the most elementary form that is actually known, all the essential principles of a great religious institution which was destined to become one of the foundation stones of the positive cult in the superior religions: this is the institution of sacrifice.
We know what a revolution the work of Robertson Smith brought about in the traditional theory of sacrifice. Before him, sacrifice was regarded as a sort of tribute or homage, either obligatory or optional, analogous to that which subjects owe to their princes. Robertson Smith was the first to remark that this classic explanation did not account for two essential characteristics of the rite. In the first place, it is a repast: its substance is food. Secondly, it is a repast in which the worshippers who offer it take part, along with the god to whom it is offered. Certain parts of the victim are reserved for the divinity; others are attributed to the sacrificers, who consume them; this is why the Bible often speaks of the sacrifice as a repast in the presence of Jahveh. Now in a multitude of societies, meals taken in common are believed to create a bond of artificial kinship between those who assist at them. In fact, relatives are people who are naturally made of the same flesh and blood. But food is constantly remaking the substance of the organism. So a common food may produce the same effects as a common origin. According to Smith, sacrificial banquets have the object of making the worshipper and his god communicate in the same flesh, in order to form a bond of kinship between them. From this point of view, sacrifice takes on a wholly new aspect. Its essential element is no longer the act of renouncement which the word sacrifice ordinarily expresses; before all, it is an act of alimentary communion.” (Durkheim:1982:336-7)

Aliment means to nourish, and this is an interesting point, for it is this word that is the root word that describes the intimate difference between the perspectives of individuals and groups. The first word is ‘adult’, meaning to grow-up, and this is the term used by western society today as a target of progress for our children in our society of individuals. The second word is ‘coalesce’, which means, ‘to grow-up-together’. In modern terms a loving couple of 50 years might be said to have coalesced, and become one- to have communed. Imagine that feeling for over 30,000 years from day one of your individual existence to your individual death. Imagine a belief in reincarnation entwined within it. Imagine your reality. Imagine your morality. Imagine your reasons for acting in the world, by being.

“Sacrifice was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them. Here, as elsewhere, the artifice was born only to imitate nature…. : in fact, we have just seen that in an important number of societies the totemic sacrifice, such as Smith conceived it, is or has been practised. Of course, we have no proof that this practice is necessarily inherent to totemism or that it is the germ out of which all the other types of sacrifices have developed. But if the universality of the rite is hypothetical, its existence is no longer to be contested. Hereafter… alimentary communion is found even in the most rudimentary cults known to-day.” (Durkheim:1982:340)

“Of course the sacrifice is partially a communion; but it is also, and no less essentiality, a gift and an act of renouncement. It always presupposes that the worshipper gives some of his substance or his goods to his gods. Every attempt to deduce one of these elements from the other is hopeless. Perhaps the oblation is even more permanent than the communion.” (Durkheim:1982:343)

Sacrifice then, began as a nourishing communion with God, not a renouncement of something that is yours. How can you sacrifice anything when your God given talent and possessions, are not yours, but are Gods. In fact you and God are not separated into you and God, as an individual would understand, or name their experience.
What we must imagine therefore is no longer a cave-man, conceived in ignorance as we began this chapter, thinking that such an individual existed, but instead, we must mature our idea to coalesce closer to the reality that we have discovered. We are talking about a lifestyle-, but not a culture, a morality but no law, of equality but no inequality, of a transcendence together through each other and not of an adult individual with rights to the above but no power to achieve them. They are given, they are not sacrificed, they are His to give not his. We are talking about a universal mind-set intimately inseparable from any ‘thing’ or any ‘one’ due to that experience.

In order to understand this ‘ancient universal conscious experience of existence’ further, as well as our own ‘recent individual conscious experience of existence’, it is useful to ask, the question that must be itching, “If it was so damned perfect, then why did it all end?” or to put it in biblical terms, “If we were in Eden, then what was ‘the partaking of the apple’ that made us leave it? That is the reason for Chapter Two.

To give a quick hint I will end this chapter with another quote. Remember how the Western mind discovered these ancient peoples in both North America and Australia?

“…in Rousseau’s state of nature, when men and women lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, the philosopher pictured people more easily understanding themselves, and so being drawn towards essential features of a satisfied life: a love of family, a respect for nature, an awe at the beauty of the universe, a curiosity about others, and a taste for music and simple entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial ‘civilization’ had pulled us, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.
For those who might interpret this as an absurdly romantic story to be explained away as the fancy of a pastoral author unreasonably angered by modernity, it is worth adding that, if the eighteenth century listened to Rousseau’s argument, it was in part because it had before it one stark example of its apparent truths in the shape of the fate of the native populations of North America.
Reports of American Indian society drawn up in the sixteenth century had described it as a materially simple, but psychologically rewarding: communities were small, close-knit, egalitarian, religious, playful and martial. The Indians were certainly backward in a financial sense. They lived off fruits and wild animals, they slept in tents, they had few possessions. Every year, they wore the same pelts and shoes. Even a chief might own no more than a spear and a few pots. But there was reputed to be an impressive level of contentment amidst the simplicity.
However, within only a few decades of the arrival of the first Europeans, the status system of Indian society was revolutionized through contact with the technology and luxury of European industry. What mattered was no longer one’s ownership of weapons, jewellery and alcohol. Indians now longed for silver earrings, copper and brass bracelets, tin finger rings, necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, alcohol, kettles, beads, hoes and mirrors.
These new enthusiasms did not come about by coincidence. European traders deliberately attempted to foster desires in the Indians, so as to motivate them to hunt the animal pelts that the European market required. By 1690, the English naturalist the Reverend John Banister was reporting that the Indians of the Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want ‘many things which they had not wanted before, because they never had them, but which by means of trade are now highly necessary to them.’ Two decades later, the traveller Robert Beverley observed, ‘The Europeans have introduced luxury among the Indians which has multiplied their wants and made them desire a thousand things they never even dreamt of before.’
Unfortunately, these thousand things, however, ardently sought, didn’t appear to make the Indians much happier. Certainly they worked harder. Between 1739 and 1759, the 2,000 warriors of the Cherokee tribe were estimated to have killed 1.25 million deer to satisfy the European demand. In the same period, the Montagnais Indians on the north shore of the St Lawrence river traded between 12,000 and 15,000 pelts a year with French and British merchants in Tadoussac. But happiness did not increase in line with levels of trade. Rates of suicide and alcoholism rose, communities fractured, factions squabbled among themselves over the European booty. The tribal chiefs didn’t need Rousseau to understand that what had happened, but they unknowingly concurred with his analysis nevertheless. There were calls for Indians to rid themselves of dependence on European ‘luxury’. In the 1760s, the Delawares of western Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley tried to revive the ways of their forefathers. Prophecies were heard that the tribes would be wiped out if they did not wean themselves from dependence on trade. But it was too late. The Indians, no different in their psychological make-up from other humans, succumbed to the easy lures of the trinkets of modern civilization and ceased listening to the quiet voices that spoke of the modest pleasures of the community and of the beauty of the empty canyons at dusk.” (Botton:2004:202-3)

“Defenders of commercial society have always had one answer to American Indian sympathisers, and anyone else who might complain of the corrupting effects of an advanced economy: that no one forced the Indians to buy necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, kettles, beads, hoes and mirrors. No one stopped them living in tents and made them aspire to owning wooden houses with porches and wine cellars. The Indians left behind a sober, simple life of their own accord- which might indicate that this life was perhaps not as pleasant as has been made out.
This defence is similar to that used by modern advertising agents and newspaper editors, who will assert that they are not the ones responsible for encouraging undue concern with the lives of the famous, with changes in fashion or the ownership of new products….
It is ironic that it should be advertising agents and newspaper editors themselves who are typically the first to downplay the effectiveness of their own trades. They will insist that the population is independently minded enough not to be overly affected by the stories which they themselves lay before the world, or to be taken in for long by the siren calls of billboards they have themselves so artfully designed.
They are, unfortunately, being too modest. Nothing more sharply illustrates the extent of their disingenuousness than reports of the rapid way in which what was once a possibility will, with sufficient prompting, come to seem a necessity.

Percentage of North Americans Declaring the Following Items to be Necessities.

19702000
Second Car20%59%
Second television 3%45%
More than one telephone 2%78%
Car air-conditioning11%65%
Home air-conditioning22%70%
Dishwasher 8%44%

“(Botton:2004:204-5)