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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Thursday 20 November 2014

A Democracy of Fruit


One day Captain West, Leader of the People of the Nation of Many Fruit, judged that the time had come to address the multitudes on a matter of great importance. 'Friends' he said to the assembled masses. 'Here in the Nation of Many Fruit we are a proud and privileged people. We are not like the aggressive, troublemaking people of Russland. Neither are we like the sly and cunning hard-as-nails Ironians. Again, we hold nothing in common with the slave-driven and pathological people of Northern Careers. And we are not at all like the repressive Rubik Cubans. No, friends, we have Freedom. We have Choice. And, above all else, we have Democracy!'

At this, the gathered throng squealed in delight. 'Here in the Nation of Many Fruit, we have democracy and choice' reiterated the Great Captain. 'Yes indeed, we give you a choice of fruit. It's for you to decide. We give you Coxes, Russets, or Golden Delicious!'

Once more, the people exploded into rapturous applause. 'Freedom, freedom, freedom' they chanted as of one voice. 'Coxes, Russets, Golden Delicious.'  One man at the back of the crowd, a surly-looking fellow with lank orange-brown hair and a wispy beard, slowly raised his head and spoke: 'I want a banana' he muttered. The crowd fell silent for a moment before breaking into a disparaging and slightly nervous chuckle. Then a young woman with long blond hair, porcelain pale skin, and painted red lips piped up: 'I'd rather like some strawberries.' At this, the people gathered in the square took to murmuring, then started to boo and hiss loudly.

The Captain stood still and stared for a moment. Then he spoke. 'Such nonsense' he declared. 'We have freedom. We have choice. We have democracy.'  'Bananas? Strawberries?' whinnied his left-hand man. 'Poisonous. toxic. Never heard of them. Probably don't even exist.'  'These people are terrorists' chimed in his right-hand man authoritatively. 'Conspiracy theorists. Out to destroy our Great Nation. Don't worry: we have their details.'

'We have Freedom' restated the Captain to the gathered throng. 'We have Choice. Above all, we have Democracy. I wish you all a good night.'

At this, the crowd applauded as one, before dispersing homewards, to discuss late into the night the Big Question: Coxes, Russets, or Golden Delicious.

Image: Cezanne, innit.



      

Thursday 6 November 2014

More Fruit, Please....... Part One


                  Ah, wild figs. These are the babies.....

I've always been fascinated by the past. Not yesterday - World Wars, the Victorians, the Tudors and Stuarts - but the really past past. I am not alone in this. The abiding, almost universal, love affair of children with dinosaurs resonates with a largely unconscious intuition of our dim and distant origins. Young people can identify with the prehistoric for good reason.

One of the foremost aims of the growing-up process is to remove fanciful notions such as this, instead introducing the child to the 'real world', and preparing it for life the way it should be led: go to school, get a job, get a mortgage, raise a family, grow old, and die. Fortunately for me - and to the acute discomfort of my father - this claustrophobic version of the Freudian reality principle failed to take proper root in my own psyche. I continued to fruitfully dream, and track back, back, back......

Fascinated as I was by our ancient past, I became further preoccupied with the nature of the human condition. Inherent to my status as a young human being was a compelling musing on the big and vital questions: what? who? why? how come? Distant past and perplexing present appeared to collide when I came across Robert Ardrey and his two books, 'African Genesis' and 'The Territorial Imperative'. Ardrey took a hard look at what he thought we know about our distant ancestors on the African plains, and concluded that hard-wired into our nature is the aggression, competitiveness, and power-based hierarchies that have been the cause of so much pain and suffering throughout human history. His bleak, nasty-by-nature vision was one that, even then, I suspected to be flawed; and how much we can deduce about human nature by looking at the past in this way remained a vexing question. Yet Ardrey's writings vividly conjured up a version of primordial humanity, and had a profound impact on me. I saw dominance structures and latent viciousness everywhere.

Two or three years down the line, age around twenty, I had pretty much discarded the 'killer ape' theory of humanity. I also began to write an occasional journal called 'Journey to the Centre of the Brain'. As the title suggests, it was intended as a head-on collision with the deepest existential questions of life. This sporadic, three-year venture contains no narrative, just a jumble of pieces falling fairly randomly onto the page on the subjects of Zen, freak philosophy, consciousness, LSD, and renunciation. Most of it is unpublishable. The relevant feature here is the opening chapter. titled 'My life during the Cretaceous'. The first paragraph goes like this:

'I suppose it could really be any time, the Carboniferous, the Triassic, the Pleistocene, but I feel that the Cretaceous has some sort of significance, because the present-day life forms and life styles seem to have started to come together at this time. Like the dopey dinosaurs were going down, disappearing for now and possibly forever, and mammals and 20th century vegetation types were really coming into prominence. It's like I can feel the Cretaceous within me, because somewhere along the line I was back there in the Cretaceous, and that's an inheritance that's within my bones; my mind and body.'

If there is any structure to 'Journey' it is just this. The investigation - the experience, even - must begin here, with the beginnings. And they need to be traced back as far as possible - to moments when we are, maybe, unrecognisable even to ourselves. We are not who we think we are. Not at all....

Fast forward to the year 2014 and the publication of 'Return to the Brain of Eden', essentially an update of 'Left in the Dark' from 2007. From time to time a book appears that is intriguing, and possibly very important: 'Return to the Brain of Eden' is one such book. Authors Tony Wright ('inspiration and research') and Graham Gynn ('translation and scribe') take a serious look at the human condition in the light of both modern brain neuroscience and what we now know about deep human and pre-human prehistory. In particular, they muster the courage to stare straight into the abyss of mystery and inconvenience, where lurk a bundle of unexplained and/or ignored anomalies and peculiarities about the human species. One-handedness, hairlessness, bipedalism, and female orgasm, to mention a few. Of greatest significance, however, and most remarkable of all, is our brain. Not so much its current size, but the astonishing trajectory of its growth through time. '....the assumption of a straight progression from a pea-brained ancestor to the ultrabrainy modern homo sapiens is decidedly shaky. Hominid brains appear to have remained fairly constant in size for a long period from some 1.8 million years ago until about 600,00 years ago. But then, from 600,000 to 150,00 years before the present, fossils show that the cranial capacity of our ancestors skyrocketed. Brain mass peaked at about 1,440 grams (3.17 pounds). Since then brain mass has declined to the 1,300 grams (2.87 pounds) that is typical today.' (Chapter Two, 'From the Forest').

So, get this: our ancestors of 100,000 years ago had bigger brains than we do. What the hell were they doing with all that brain capacity? This, you would have imagined, would be hot news indeed, with every scientist and academic worth her/his salt rushing to develop an explanation for this extraordinary element in our prehistory. A vital link in the quest to discover 'who we are'. Not so. It's a reality that does not fit comfortably into the neo-Darwinian worldview that shapes so much of modern mainstream society. It is generally quietly ignored.

In 'Return', Tony Wright proposes an answer. Our ancestors, in a prehistory stretching back over several million years, lived for the greater part of this duration in tropical forests, where their diet consisted overwhelmingly of fruit. The effects on our biochemistry of such a diet are complex and many, and are outlined in some detail in the book. Tony Wright posits that this diet would have initiated a positive feedback system, promoting physical health, psychological well-being and, as a by-product, a rapidly expanding brain size. Conversely, when they eventually left the forests and by necessity abandoned the fruit diet, the hominids brought into being a reverse process of all-round degeneration. Which is where we are today.

While any theories about the distant past will necessarily remain speculative in these times when effective time travel is a rarity, the notions put forward in 'Return' appear more convincing than any of the highly dubious ideas put forth by others. Though working within the overall framework of evolution theory, Tony Wright and Graham Gynn introduce a few vital twists of their own, ones which make all the difference.

Some of Tony's ideas and research can be explored further on his website, but the book is best. In the meantime, I'm off to eat a mango.....

To be continued.

Image: Africa Bike