First Humans
I’m thinking about the first humans, y’all – for realz!
200,000 years ago they evolved on the planet as a species. It would be 200,000 years before Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus would introduce taxonomy. They had evolved from our predecessor species (not the Neanderthals by the way, they were a whole other species) to survive and thrive in the world as they then knew it. They depended entirely on instincts, which included ingenuity, an ability to cooperate with others humans and navigating the prehistoric world. They didn’t have GPS devices, they didn’t have almanacs. That wisdom (ingenuity, cooperation and navigation)was encoded into our DNA as much as the ability to breath, or chew or grab things with our hands.
2.5 million years before we even became human, we’d already developed the first tools. The first humans were pretty advanced considering they didn’t have instruction manuals to pass knowledge along. They barely had language. Language wouldn’t develop for another 100,000 years. Yet they knew how to survive and knew how to cooperate well enough to protect themselves and to rear their young. They knew how to use fire and knew how to cook. They figured out what to eat and how to dress ourselves against the elements.
That’s a lot of information we have stored up in our genetic memory bank. So do ants, squirrels, bees and all the other creatures that have figured out how to operate on the planet without going to war with each other. Even water has a kind of wisdom winding its way through stone with its persistence, making its way skyward (water could fly long before human developed that skill). The earth knows how to release pressure to prevent itself from simply exploding spontaneously into fragments. Gravity is a kind of wisdom that keeps life close. Plants have encoded wisdom to know when the climate is suitable to sustain their next phase of development.
Why would it be strange for humans to be able to talk to the trees? Every bird has the sense to know which branch is best to build a nest and when to fly towards the equator for the winter and which direction to go. Again, no GPS. Squirrels know how many nuts to store up to get through the winter and their bodies know to slow their metabolism to meet the change in conditions. Dogs can sense when we are sad or angry. Every species has figured out how to survive on earth (as we once had) based on their instincts.
Humans seem to have forgotten how to do it. Spirituality seems to be the way humans seek to tap into some forgotten ability to connect to the unseen and to know the unknowable. We give it names, but it’s possible what we experience when we experience God is actually us connecting to ancient lines of communication with the earth that we have allowed to grown dormant. Perhaps it’s so easy to believe in God because on some level we all are experiencing that deep level of connection to some universal cable provider whose network is eternal, never crashes and is absolutely free. The cost associated with our inner wisdom (our God-ness) may be one of the reasons why knowledge and belief in this mode of communication is suppressed or labeled hocus pocus. You can’t make money on a technology that every one is born with.
