Before we embark on this journey, while we are still packing our provisions, let us establish the long evolutionary arc of this exploration. The hard-won understanding beneath all of our work is very simple, although reaching it was not easy at all.
The source context of relatedness is the foundation of well-being.
For most of the long arc of human evolutionary history, the way that humans lived was in small band hunter gatherer groups, and the foundational understanding that rested beneath all of culture was our relatedness to All That Is.
For 99% of human history, at the root of culture was the living experiential practice of connection.
Modernity is the unfolding story of our alienation from this source context. It is the story of an accelerating deviation from this ancestral baseline in relatedness. Modern civilization, so-called, is the tragic story of how we became exiled from who we really are: how we entrenched and then organized our identities outside of the living fabric of inter-being.
Yet this ancestral context is present, available, and has been here the entire time. It is waiting for us to return to it. It is calling us home. It doesn’t yell, doesn’t shout, doesn’t insist. It doesn’t sound like a carnival barker with cheetos-colored hair. It doesn’t look down its nose askance at you, or try to seduce you by shaking its ass. It isn’t trying to sell you anything, and it is not discounted on a particular Friday associated with the color black. It’s not on your phone or your laptop, it’s not on TikTok or Facebook, whatever that thing is called now. It’s not in virtual reality. It can’t be scraped by ChatGPT. It is very quiet, in certain ways, despite its insistence.
All the same, it is calling you home. It is the original context. If your life is too busy, too fast, too modern, it may only reach you obliquely. It might come stalking you through illness. Or grief. Or tragedy. Or disaster. It might reach you in dreams. It is persistent, because it is the ground of reality. Most modern people spend most of their lives running from it, screaming.
It is very ancient, yet it stands outside of time. Modern humans have become divorced from it. We have lost the ability, and the intuitive ways of knowing required to come home to this experience of relatedness. We might say that the edifice we call ego developed to avoid it. In losing this relatedness, this kinship with animacy, we have lost our ability to come home to ourselves, one another, and the Living World, which means that we have lost the ability to come home to our true nature. We have lost our own embodied vitality and a living experience of the animacy of the entire universe, despite the fact that our most cutting-edge science affirms it. Affirms it without knowing how to access it. Points at it without knowing how to touch it.
This alienation is a result of many things, but the taproot from which it springs is domination. Domination is the way that humans who have been traumatized, and shifted into defensive responses, attempt to assert control over their lives when they no longer feel safe and vitally connected. In the absence of the dance of relatedness, in the absence of feeling alive, we move to dominate. Force is the shorthand of domination. What the Irish poet and Celtic Spiritualist John O’Donohue calls, our fatal attraction to aggression.
The civilization we live in, whose source code is an operating system that structures domination, is the systemic expression of hundreds of generations of humans exiled from their own hearts. We are the inheritors of the thoughtforms of Imperial Rome, the orphans of empires of domination. The physical empire has crumbled, yet the psychic empire has been internalized so completely it is invisible to us.
The civilization we live in, whose source code is an operating system that structures domination, is the systemic expression of hundreds of generations of humans exiled from their own hearts. We are the inheritors of the thoughtforms of Imperial Rome, the orphans of empires of domination. The physical empire has crumbled, yet the psychic empire has been internalized so completely it is invisible to us.
The origin stories of modern civilization, perhaps most obviously the story of the Fall, are attempts to grapple with this original wound in consciousness: this original exile from relatedness.
It is notable and unsurprising that the story blames this occurrence on a snake, which is a creature whose entire underside is in contact with the ground, since this story is about our rejection of our earth-based and indigenous natures, the loss of our deep rootedness, in collusion with a woman, since this story is also about our rejection of the feminine and the mothering instinct, particularly the undomesticated (wild) mother. It is obvious that this story was written by a man, and by one who was training us to worship sky gods and paving the way to kill the wild feminine (killing ‘witches’). Its very architecture points us precisely to what has been forgotten and fallen out of balance: our earth-based and feminine natures.
The civilization that we have been acculturated into is a lie. It is a propagandist fabrication of damaged minds generating denatured thoughtforms resulting from multi-generational harms. And it, as an operating system, engenders death in everything it touches. It is the engine of the poly-crisis of modernity.
About 12,000 years ago, as humans transitioned from small band hunter gatherer tribes to settled agricultural societies, human populations attained surplus food for the first time. This accumulation led rapidly to a series of innovations in abstraction, generating numeracy (let’s count all this grain!) and literacy (tell those folks we have extra grain!), birthing property boundaries (this arable land belongs to me!) and right angles (this land goes all the way to that corner!), originating the multi-generational transfer of property (let’s keep this in the family!), and rapidly initiating a re-organization of human sociability from horizontal modes of relatedness to vertical modes of domination.
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