But -- and this perhaps is the point of my writing against the stream -- it is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of how we think of ourselves and our place in the life of this planet.
To me it seems that we, homo sapiens sapiens (aware that we are aware), have lost much of our humanity by a new way of thinking. Our ancient history is not Hollywood cavemen, but simple, modest people who laughed and sang and buried their dead, who made the most incredible drawings and paintings on rock walls 40,000 years ago. True, they did not have one of the many True Religions, but they also did not have wars. They did not rearrange nature; they knew themselves part of nature. How can we be anything else?
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I thought about all that. Talked about it; wrote about it. And gradually, sorting through a lot of information and my own experiences, isolated what I thought was the one, most important, idea that must have changed the world. The difference between us and our far foreparents must have been our divorce from Nature. Our thinking that we know better. Thinking it is we who must "design" a world. As if it is up to us to design worlds.
That was an idea First Man could not have imagined. To him, the world is as we find it, our job is to fit in the best we can.
"We Indians think of the earth and the whole universe as a never-ending circle, and in this circle man is just another animal. The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers, the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest ant, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find--they are all relatives."
Jenny Leading Cloud
White River Sioux
We, modern man, stepped out of the circle.
That is what changed us. And look where it has gotten us today.
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