“…in terms of the well-being of ourselves & all life on this planet, the worst development of all, however, was put into motion when we began to grow our own food.”
“*The Neolithic Era & the Beginning of “Work”
“This began the Neolithic Era & this huge change has been dubbed the “agrarian revolution.” The agrarian revolution developed out of the same forces that caused us to begin hunting…”
“…& to being able to murder, which have to do with our unnatural fear of scarcity of resources & lack of faith in a Divine Providence to meet our needs even better than we could alone.”
“The controlling of vegetative food sources, *horticulture*, grew out of our impatience with the Divine harmony & plan, & our desire to control—what could also be seen as *interfering* in—”
“This [agrarian] development took hold of increasing numbers of humans beginning about 25,000 years ago & took on momentum approximately 10,000 years ago, & really increased in speed & spread worldwide about 5,000 years ago.”
“Humans began determining the life cycles of the vegetation they found in their environments. They continued their God-like determination of the life & death of other beings, as they had with fleshy planetmates, now with leafy ones, but more:”
“For now [our human ancestors] determined the entire who, what, where, when, & how of their existences. We record this as a revolution, yet it was a fall from Nature & into increasing ego immersion.”
“The richness of life, as lived in Nature, faded, as we regimented our lives along the temporal lines required for planting & harvesting. As *The Bible* points out, in *Genesis*, this was the beginning of “work.””
“…& control of other humans through aggression & murder, we at this point began determining, not just the deaths, but the entire lifecycles of the Earth-rooted beings among us.”
“We were less & less content to live in harmony with Nature; we were more & more, because of the birth trauma which put us mistrustful, at odds, & downright angry at Nature, more & more inclined to war with Nature.”
“Thus, we began our controlling obsession with hunting. Yet we were continually goaded by an anxiety around insufficiency of resources, which had its roots in the traumas I have been describing, in particular, fetal malnutrition.”
“Certainly, hunting gave us the feeling of power of control over others. & power is its own kind of addiction, when one feels as helpless as humans do from a time even before birth.”
“But like all addictions, the life come of it was reflective of but not equal to an authentic life; it was a substitute for life in Nature, with all its rich immediacy of feeling & experience.”
“It was more a mental world of planning & strategizing; we began to have “agendas” about our presence in Nature & with other humans in our tribes. Things were not sufficient unto themselves & able to be appreciated in their wholeness.”
“No. In controlling, in exerting our power, we needed to excise from our environment & the things & beings in it that small amount that would feed our ability to physically exist.”
“Horticulture did not come easily, so it took a long time after hunting had been adopted. There are reasons for that which you might want to ponder...we did not really desire such a regimented & effortful existence.”
“As we will see later with corralling of planetmates & the variation of it that involved nomadic herding, there was a kind of farming taken up by nomadic horticulturalists.”
“Some tribes would travel to a certain place to grow things, then in the off-season they were nomadic. Noting this is to evidence that there was some sort of desire to be nomadic that humans did not want to give up.”
“So [our prehistoric ancestors] arranged compromises with their more controlling tendencies. It appears our increasing egoic desires to control vied with a more adventurous spirit regarding life.”
“Inevitably though, after hunting came horticulture, for through hunting we were able to imagine manipulating the flora of Nature as well as the fauna.”
“Similarly, we observed that the offshoots of the beings of the Flora Empire—the nuts, seeds, & fruit—would give rise to new beings of that nature when they ended up under ground.”
“Seeing that, & driven by our pervasive insecurity, it was inevitable we would begin taking that job over onto ourselves: We had hunted; now we planted.”
“We decided where they would be “born” & when, when they would end their existences, where they would live, who of them would get to be superior in numbers, how they would live, & the manner of their deaths.”
“Hence we fought back our dread of uncertainty by “kidnapping” these offspring of Flora & putting them under soil in our immediate environs. This God-like determination of Flora we called a revolution, after a while...an *agrarian revolution*.”
“However it was a major incursion into & overturning of any possible harmony with Nature we still had. All other beings live under the grace of Nature, or at least in partnership with it.”
“We possessed it [Nature]; we aggressively determined it. It was a major incursion of control into Nature’s domain, & it could not have been more significant for our own fates as well as theirs.”
“Indeed, for us, planting [farming] was the worst development of all. I will lay out, in upcoming chapters, how it step-by-step & over the course of history led to the attempted control of all else of our reality;
“how [farming] removed from us the felicity & ease of life which is the birthright of all other planetmates; how it brought in disease & suffering not known previously & actually reduced, not increased, our life span;”
“how [planting/farming] filled our lives with pain & suffering, even more than we already, as the suffering planetmate, had; how it took the interest & adventure out of life & replaced it with monotony & drudgery;”
“how [agriculture] led to inequality, domination, submission, loss of self & authenticity, increasing bigotry, increasing misogyny, increasing war & violence, increasing destruction of & despoliation of Nature;”
“& how [the adoption of planting/farming/agriculture, with its necessary sedentary lifestyle] led us inevitably to the apocalyptic brink we are standing upon today.”
“Most directly, this development continued the tendency toward insensitivity we had already begun as we needed to repress even more, to “toughen” ourselves, in order to tolerate such a diminished life experience."
“We increasingly, for reasons I will explain, focused on family & we made those families economic units primarily & not coves of intimacy, love, joy, & companionship.”
“We became ever more inured to the consequences of our actions & were able, given time, to pile up our atrocities against each other, as well as Nature.”
“So an even more reduced connection to our felt experience allowed us to further diminish that experience through the cultivation of plants; & that,..”
“…because of the increased focus on survival to the detriment of all other of life’s possibilities & all that was concomitant to that, acted back again upon experience to diminish our lives even more.”
“Remember, we need to contrast this intense involvement in the control of Nature to our former existence within Nature, which was characterized by relative ease:”
“All one needed to do was to follow the path along Nature’s cornucopia: Different seasons & different environs would throw up an incredible variation of anything we needed.”
“Not only were our gifts from Nature more various & delightfully surprising, but our lives as well were profoundly interesting...characterized as they were by nomadic wandering, following mellifluous weather…”
“Indeed, compared to later, our existences [as nomadic foragers] were more characterized by pleasure & felicity, by love & human feeling, by care & play with children & friends. These were our halcyon days, without a doubt.”
“With a delight comparable to children seeking out Easter eggs, we [as nomadic foragers] would scour & immerse ourselves in Nature in order to seek out its blessings.”
“But with the pain-driven & ever increasing lack of faith in Divine Providence & the increasing hardening of our sensitivities to existence, we lost the magic of living.”
“We focused, because of fear, on the quantity of said existence instead of the quality of it. & even in the quantity of it we failed, though we did not know we were doing that at the time.”
“As I said, we introduced new & virulent diseases into our lives with horticulture, & especially with farming & agriculture with their necessary concentrations of population as in villages & cities.”
“So our life spans diminished. The only thing we really added to our lives with horticulture was the addictive highs of power & control, which were ever & easily dissipated & in need of continual refeeding.”
“Meanwhile, life in Nature had been playful. Foraging was adventurous & we were often surrounded in beauty, with delight-inducing fragrances, comforting & familiar sounds of insects & animate Nature,..”
“However, with horticulture, all the adventure & pleasure of Nature was set to the side in favor of more certainty in our lives, regardless how much effort we had to expend to bring that about.”
“We were living more in time now, as I said. We had to adhere to Nature’s timetables for sowing & reaping & all the rest of the requirements of farming. Our beginnings involving pain had already set us up to wish to escape from the present.”
“This [escaping from the present] we did by conniving possible futures, which drew us forward, however ignorant it would make us of the people & pleasantness surrounding us in the present.”
“Fish & crab & such showed themselves as they would; vegetation, however uncertain, provided variety & alternatives, which we could take advantage of per our desires.”
“Surprise & adventure characterized our lives, & through them we were continually reassured of the beneficence of Reality. That by itself was a pretty good antidote to our fear of uncertainty.”
“We were continually reminded of & reinforced in the knowledge that we were always in the hands of a kindly & invisible power that knew all, including our needs & desires, even better than we did ourselves.”
“Being open to Nature, we would be taught, but also comforted by it. It was all at once counselor, teacher, & friend. It was most kind, though it gave us the hard lessons we needed.”
“And [Nature] was playful, tricky. Unexpected as any trickster, we could not help but be engrossed & engaged, & often delighted by it. It played with us & delighted us & even confounded us.”
“Regardless, everything would work out in the end far better, we often realized, than if we had planned it ourselves. So we trusted in Nature’s ways & intentions toward us.”
“Not so, after we put ourselves in place as the Determiners. Ever more we found it more difficult to realize our life in the entrancing state of the Now.”
“The richness of life was ever more faded from our existence, as the present became only a precursor to a more desirable future...always off ahead of us...always out of reach.”
“For though with sowing & reaping we could not have all we wanted when we wanted, we thought it desirable to know the timetable upon which it would arrive.”
“The emptiness we feared would be there if we did not work hard & store up ahead of time was the realization in our lived existence of the hole in our guts from an inaccessible time when we starved.”
“Living more now in time than in experience, we could give our intolerable impatience a promise of a time & an image of a future where it might be eased.”
“Descending from a state of full existence as this amounted to, however, when that time arrived it would be soon over, & those fearsome feelings of uncertainty & impatience would rise up ever & again.”
“We failed to learn from that, driven as we were, & would simply concoct another future to pull us forward, full of that satisfaction we so desperately desired.”
“Focusing on that future reward for the grueling & unfeeling existence we had adopted—wrought of the incredible expenditures of energy required by horticultural & farming “work”— we failed to open our “presents” in the here & now.”
“So much did we project our happiness into a future time when we would be rewarded for our suffering in the Now, that eventually we would concoct the same for our time after death.”
“More despairing at the end of our lives, as knowledge of the futility of all of our days of struggling arose within us, we pushed our longed-for time of Aliveness beyond our period of life itself.”
“We could rationalize our unfelicitous & unfelt existences by imagining some kind of afterlife—the most revealing being the “heaven” of the Muslim & Christian traditions—where we could get the enjoyment of life we were depriving ourselves…”
“…[“We could rationalize our unfelicitous & unfelt existences by imagining some kind of afterlife where we could get the enjoyment of life we were depriving ourselves] of while alive, to which a part of us knew we were entitled.”
“Hunting & horticulture not giving us what we wanted, what we needed, but glorying in our ability to control, we focused that [controlling] fetish on another food source.”
“Having raised ourselves up as the “corn kings” of Nature in determining the lifecycles of Flora, it was only logical we would seek to be “king of the jungle” as well by dominating & controlling that of Fauna as well.”
The complete book is available online at the links
you can read the book, which is posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man*.
“[*Chapter 21 text begins:*] “You don’t know what I’m getting at. But this is the indicator of the gradual change in our country that would be missed by those younger than myself.”
“I only see this glaring discrepancy because of having lived many years in an America whose values were different, and who thought differently, more compassionately than today.”
[*Quotes/highlights:*] “Ultimately our physics...is going to demonstrate that essentially there is no such thing as matter. All there is, is mind & motion.” —Armand Labbe []
[*Quotes/highlights:*] “…in early gatherer-hunter times, yes, we had plenty for everyone. But with fear rose anxiety over one’s ability to survive, thus competition over resources—” []
[] “…a competition which was not needed—& then the very creation of what one was trying to avoid: The possibility that one might need to kill or one would be killed.” []