A Quote From Meher Baba

"The task for the aspirant is to pierce through his own layer of self-imposed self sufficiency and expose a layer of vital awareness to the world around him, which would teach him if it could." 

Outer Wilds -- Timber Hearth

 Human beings have gathered around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years, looking up into the mystery of the night sky, playing songs, telling tales.  May the perception of beauty lead you beyond your own confusion.  Harmony -- in whatever form -- is a remembrance from deep within your soul about who you really are, and where you really come from.  You are the mystery of the cosmos, incarnate.

Simplicity of heart is the secret key to life.  Drop your burdens.  Leave the lies, hidden hatreds, roiling rages, dark desires -- who are you, really, behind all that?  Merely a witness watching it all roll by.  Who you really are is quietly watching from within, untouched by the mud and mire, the spit and spite of life. Be still; remember the simple silence of your own being, before all this began.

This music reminds me of that fleeting experience.  Outer Wilds, one of my favorite finds of the past year.

The Ice Ages

All fall I've been reading a book by Brian Fagan entitled, "Cro-Magnon -- How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans."  There's more than a bit of Eurocentrism in that title, as by 45,000 years ago modern humans had spread throughout Asia and possibly into the Americas.   But I don't intend to pick that battle today.

As I'm of Northern European descent according to my DNA, excepting about 3% that's Middle Eastern / Ashkanazi Jewish, I've long felt a sense of psychological roots when confronted with the cave art from prehistorical Europe.  It rings a bell for me somewhere inside.  I've also long wondered where exactly the West went wrong, because it was painfully obvious to me even in my childhood that Western culture was emotionally and spiritually bankrupt, its Christian facade notwithstanding.

So I decided to read about the time period in question, which would be from perhaps 45,000 BCE to about 12-13,000 years ago, the time when the Ice Age finally ended, or at least this interstadial began with a global warming that produced the Holocene, and transitioned European humanity from the paleolithic, through the mesolithic, and finally delivered us to the beginnings of a settled lifestyle in the neolithic.  We can trace our intermittent development through contemporary archeology back to about 8,000 to 10,000 years, but not really much further.  It's only natural to wonder, what came before?

We know that the Neanderthals preceded modern humans in Europe by perhaps 200,000 years.  The first half of the book really dealt with this species, about which I don't hold the same level of interest, partly because they really aren't the forbears of homo sapiens.  Although geneticists tell us that some Neanderthal DNA continues to exist in our populace, I still don't feel the pull to study their history and, in fact, there's very little to study.  Archeology is largely a field of supposition; its claims to knowledge of the past are mostly imagined because, really speaking, who knows what happened or how people lived?  We can only infer based upon our best guesses or  refer to polar cultures that subsist today.

What I gather with respect to the Neanderthals is that their culture changed very little over their 200,000 year occupation of Europe.  By that I mean that the tools they made changed very little, if at all.  They apparently passed on their knowledge but didn't progress measurably.  They must have been adaptable in order to have survived as long as they did, but it doesn't seem evident from their technological stasis.  

People wonder what led to the Neanderthals' demise and this book makes no particular claim on the subject.  However, the entrance of another, more inventive hominid species into their environment no doubt had an effect. There was also a major volcanic eruption in what is present-day Italy about 39,000 years ago that interrupted the development of the Cro-Magnons who had already entered the continent and perhaps hastened the Neanderthal's demise.  They seemed to relocate to sites along the Mediterranean and coastal Spain, and then gradually their population dwindled.  I'm guessing homo sapiens entered their territory and either out-competed them for resources and food, or were aggressive towards them (although there isn't really factual, archeological evidence of such conflict, given the history of people of European descent, it wouldn't surprise me).  It also occurs to me that the evidence of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon "coupling" was probably not always, if ever, consensual.  

Archeologists divide the Ice Age cultures amongst the modern humans who moved into Europe into three or four major groupings, based primarily upon the differences in how they made and shaped their tools.

The first culture is called Aurignacian and they dispersed over the entire continent, at least that portion that was livable.  This culture flourished for about 10,000 years, from about 39,000 to 29,000 years ago.  They were following game migrations or using specific locales which lent themselves to hunting and/or other resources.  Until the spectacular discovery of the splendid art in Chauvet cave in the south of France in December of 1994, it was believed that this culture had little to offer in the way of cave art.  If you've seen the incredible bestiary portrayed in the Chauvet cave, you know that presumption to be false.

A deepening of the Ice Age circa 30,000 bce had two results: the apparent disappearance of the Neanderthals from the fossil record, and the emergence of a new culture of modern humans in Europe.  This culture has been called the Gravettian.  Again, they lasted for about 10,000 years.  There was a brief culture, again identified by their own specific forms of weaponry, called the Soultrean, specifically in northern Spain and southwestern France.  And finally, the last major culture, from about 18,000 years ago until the end of the Ice Age, called the Magdelenians.  The famous cave paintings found at Lascaux are attributed to this culture.

I highlighted much of the text of this book and intend to go back and make notes on those sections.  But my primary take-away from the entire study is simply this:  we -- that is, the culture of northern Europeans -- were once indigenous.

Think of what that means: it means the culture of Europe was not unlike, and perhaps very similar to, the culture that developed in North America until these self-same Europeans came to disrupt it.  If you've looked into the Sami culture in northern Finland, or listened to their musical chants, you'd easily mistake them for a tribe from North America.

Why that interests me is for this reason: we in the West once had the same orientation to the earth, to nature, and to life that indigenous peoples in the Americas had.  Where, why, and when did we lose that?  Because one of the most prominent, and negative, features of our culture is our complete separation from the natural world and our lack of concern for it at all, beyond seeing it simply as a resource to be plundered.

When did we come to see the world from such a distance?  When did we lose our relatedness to other forms of life and to the natural world itself?  My guess is when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to a settled people who had begun domesticating animals and plant-forms for our own purposes.  Somewhere in that process, a few screws came loose -- we lost our spiritual center and became unmoored.  And we've been spiritually and emotionally adrift ever since.  That's what all this means to me.

I want to trace where we went wrong, so that I can trace the way back to that existential center.

And that's what my study has been about this fall.  I'm now looking into the transition from the paleolithic to the mesolithic, in terms of our spiritual beliefs, because something happened there.  We went awry in that transition.  Looking at the Venus figurines of, say, 30,000 years ago, which were ubiquitous across the European continent, it seems apparent that a goddess/Mother Earth form of worship towards life and the cosmos may have prevailed.

When and how did we transition from the divine Feminine mediating spiritual guidance for us, to male warrior sky gods imposing their judgements upon us?  

That's the basic spiritual question I have for the time of our cultural origins.

I have to admit that the subzero weather of this week has put me into a mindset of thinking about all these things.  I've wandered out into the cold just to experience it firsthand, and to remember the world from whence we came.

That's all for now.

Seventy

I turned seventy this week.  In keeping with my life of the past several months, I was alone.  My erstwhile friends and sometime hosts left last Friday to drive to Texas.  It was probably a much less stressful way to travel than those people who have left their journey for the past few freezing days.  I don't know about you but the last place I want to be over the holidays is in an airport crawling with thousands of others, all wondering if our flights have been cancelled -- yet.

I had covid the two weeks prior to my birthday.  I had been working but that ended with my illness.  Although they say you're not infectious after five days, the fact of the matter was, I was still very ill.  As my friends were leaving shortly, I quarantined in the basement for two weeks, and never came upstairs unless it was the middle of the night and my friends were in bed. And I wore gloves and a mask.  It worked.  They left healthy, fat and sassy.

I've since tested negative.  But I still don't feel quite up to snuff.  Regardless, I almost went back to my day job -- a crappy mandatory 12 hour day, six days a week with one day off.  As if I had nothing better to do.  And I live 45 miles away.  Not only that, on my birthday it snowed several inches, and then the arctic cold front came down from the north.  It's below zero and that's not counting the constant wind and therefore the windchill factor.  T'would freeze a witch's warts right off her nose.

I had a winter like this when I was sixteen.  It was 40 below zero for two weeks.  We got high-centered on a snow drift in the family car, all heading for school or work at six am one morning.  I had to walk a mile to a farmer's house for help, in that forty below zero weather, with ice-cold wind ripping through my ribs right to my bones, and me a stupid teenager in a windbreaker and tennis shoes.  It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and so remains.

Thus, I arose at 2:45 am on my birthday, hit the road at 3:30 am, a mile drive on a snow-packed gravel road to a two-lane highway, then a fifteen mile drive through rocks and rangeland with no houses or farms until one reaches the interstate and its perpetual herd of semis.  It was snowing and there was already 4-5 inches blanketing the road.  I got maybe half a mile down the flat on the state highway, thought about how the next two hours would be spent bent over the wheel driving 25 mph on compact snow and ice, with the chance that at any moment I might slide off the road -- which is raised by several feet above the surrounding fields -- and be stuck walking back several godforsaken miles in the freezing cold at 4 am.

"Fuck it," I said, as I turned around, drove home, and climbed back into my toasty warm bed.

I've been home ever since, what with the temperature well below zero in the brittle daylight, and who knows how cold under the night's chill and heartless stars.  Although I have the heat on in the house around the clock,  woke up this morning to a house that was 56 degrees inside.  I'm thankful that at least the electricity is still on because it almost blinked off last Sunday night.  Running the heater all day, I got the house up to balmy 62.  I have a space heater down in the dungeon room and it's the warmest place in the house right now.

I called my employer and said I wouldn't be in until the roads improved.  But truth be told, I've decided not to go back to that job.  Working mandatory 72 hour weeks is not my idea of how to live life at the sainted age of seventy.

You see, I've sighted mortality on my horizon.  Limited time means some hard choices.  I don't have time to waste on shit jobs, nor on people who have nothing to offer, but only want to take. Let them fritter their own time and life away -- not mine. 

I'm unburdened by the usual ubiquitous desires people have in life.  I was never acquisitive, beyond books.  I never wanted to be saddled with a house or to pay taxes on property.  I didn't want to tie myself down to the good earth in that way.  I never chased the sweet slime of success or the supposed debaucheries of the "good life."  I wasn't trying to keep up with the Joneses.  I decided long ago, when I was ten or so, that the adult world was completely fucking insane and nobody had the slightest idea why they were living the way they were.  I had no intention of emulating their stupidity in any way, shape, or form.  I'll create my own forms of fruitless endeavor, thank you very much.

Besides, I've been on a quest all my life.  A quest with several facets, to be sure, but one of the main purposes of my life has been to try to get a bird's eye view of the "big picture."   I've done that sufficiently, I think, despite the fact that if you keep learning -- if you continue to stay open to life as you age instead of shutting down -- then your "big picture" will forever be expanding beyond your current horizons.  

That seems to be the case with my horizons, which is quite alright with me.  I find it exciting.  The constant learning and the attempt to understand life more deeply, dearly or to hold a longer view or broader vision of life, is both engaging and enlivening,  Brisker than bat's teeth on a gnat's ass.  It gives life, however mundane,  an overall sense of meaning and purpose.

The question then becomes, well, where do I fit into this "big picture?"  

I've answered that question for myself and to my own satisfaction. "My" place is not center stage but somewhere on the far edge of the periphery where, I might add, I've never set eyes on the likes of you.  You might be even less relevant than me.  Hence, I don't feel the need to present that answer here nor to justify my existence to you or anyone else.  I'm content with my place in life.  I came with nothing; I'll leave with nothing, and I haven't wasted a wastrel's day of my solo sojourn in competing for who has the bigger, better, or  most expensive toys.  If you wasted your life in such pursuits, I pity your poor choices.  Better luck next lifetime, compadres.

I would like to write a book before I go.  Some biographical vignettes of my foil and folly, perhaps, and then my sense of that "big picture."  Where we in the West came from, where we went wrong, and where I see us going once we've exhausted all the myriad errors that life keeps offering us.  Human beings seem to be especially perverse in that way.  They never, ever try doing anything the right way unless they have attempted every possible short cut, wrong turn, or dead end first.  It's very strange.  Anyway, I'm going to paint that picture.  The picture that I see.  The canvas of our confusion.  It may help another sorry soul cut down on their futile pursuits and karmic toil and trouble.

And if not, if it's all simply a vain pretense on my part, well, may it be so.  It's still how I choose to spend the time left to me.  And when my time's up, I'll be happy to go, no second thoughts and no second guesses.  Until then, then......