Humanity was not restricted to small bands of hunter-gatherers, agriculture did not lead inexorably to hierarchies and conflicts and there was not one mode of social organisation that prevailed, at least until thousands of years after the introduction of agriculture.
On the contrary, they maintain, prehistory was a time of diverse social experimentation, in which people lived in a variety of settings, from small travelling bands to large (perhaps seasonally occupied) cities and were wont to change their social identities depending on the time of year.
Posted to Weird Collapse, an interesting essay about vestigal shamans. The idea is, the weird people we have now, and the ways they serve society with their weirdness, are not that different from shamans in low-tech cultures. At the end the author offers some advice, including "Don't retreat into fantasy worlds." I would say, plunge confidently into fantasy worlds, but don't get stuck there. The Tao Te Ching said it best: "Use the bright light but return to the dim light."
A good Hacker News thread on Willingness to look stupid. From the top comment:
I brace myself to be the idiot. I'm going to waste everyone's time asking questions that everyone knows the answer to, and I just got looped in, so everyone's going to feel like they need to walk through all the super-obvious stuff to satisfy the one guy who didn't do his homework.
So I start asking questions, and slowly begin to realize that nobody in the room has any idea what they are talking about. That there are fundamental misunderstandings and misconceptions about existing systems. And, naturally, it turns out that the questions I have are questions that other people have.
Finally, New study calls into question the unique benefits of Western classical music in psychedelic therapy. It's a small study, but it seems that overtone-based music works at least as well as classical. Here's an overtone music playlist.
]]>"My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: 'Well, I understand all the words... but how am I supposed to know what I feel?'"
And one more psychology link, Exposure to authoritarian messages leads to worsened mood but heightened meaning in life. Can't we just be in a good mood and have life be meaningless?
Isak Dinesen said, "All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story." That's pretty optimistic. The way it usually works is that people are capable of causing any suffering if it's part of a story.
Taking a stab at putting it all together: All life seeks to be part of something larger. Humans are in the process of trying a bunch of new ways for many people to become one. Most of them are not going to work out. A lot of those failures are breaking down right now. Some older things are filling the gap, the worst of which is to follow the most belligerent ape in fighting the enemy apes.
Personally, I'm not seeing anything I want to be part of, except my own body and all life on earth.
]]>An idea that I keep coming back to is: the main lever of will is awareness. As awareness expands, our choices expand.... It seems to be the case in multiple spiritual traditions that, as awareness deepens, interconnectivity becomes more obvious. Causation looks more like connection. Your "own" desires are suddenly contextualized within a web of being.
(Related: Big Blood fans, go to my fan page and scroll to the fifth paragraph past the sun for a new interpretation of Haystack.)
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