[*Quotes/highlights:*] “…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns also & thistles shall it bring forth to thee;”
“Adding to all our woes was that of strenuous lives of daily hardship. That was piled upon all the suffering come of poor prenatal & infancy nurturing, impoverished diet, & pitifully shallow life experience.”
“Out of “Eden,” now, as even *The Bible* portrays it, “by the sweat of one’s brow”...from one translation...we would henceforth sustain our meager physical existence.”
“This was in contrast to our lives in Nature, wherein the part of our lives that was spent in sustaining ourselves was contained within our play in wilderness.”
“In Nature, we had little distinction between work & play. As Colin Turnbull (1961) relates, regarding the Mbuti of Africa, the games they play as youngsters are forms of the kinds of activities they will do as adults.”
“They might scurry through or hide in the brush, for fun; climb & swing through trees; throw things, delighting in one’s precision of aim; hunt things & dig stuff up for the pleasure & wonder of it;”
“[The youngsters might] play at striving for accuracy with arrows, using the bow. Then, gradually, more & more of that activity has some benefit to the tribe, to the community.”
“There is no initiation into adulthood to provide that. No schooling, no college, not even a vision quest or some other ritual of passage—though their spiritual needs are hardly denied because of that. No.”
“Just that fishing done for fun begins to have a use in the sustenance of family & tribe. The same with tracking & hunting. Gathering comes about naturally as aspects of activities done, in the course of play, as young ones.”
“Till seamlessly, without any notice made to its happening, at some point all that playful activity of the child is serving the tribe & family through the actions of a full grown adult.”
“Simply that what was done for no purpose begins to gradually have a purpose & to bring with it additional rewards, beyond play & games, of the pleasure of feeling generous & nurturing;”
“of the hearty sense of worth in being valued by the other community members; of the warmth, heartfulness, & joy of belongingness in a tight knit & loving community;”
“The parallel course is taken by the girls & women of the tribe. There is no division between the fun things done, the companions one enjoys, or the things created as frivolity as children…”
“…with what is done in the warm bosom of the family & tribe as adults, bringing with it, as well, all the rewards of self-worth, valuing by others, joy, felicity, & love.”
“Indeed, for most of our existence as humans, as primal humans, we saw every day as adventure & fun. Virtually every dawn we greeted with happy anticipation, wondering what unexpected joys it might bring.”
“Yet we descended from those lives of pleasure into an ongoing working nightmare...dreading the rising of the sun for what efforts it would bring, all of which were pretty much the same as the day before.”
““Another day, same shit,” as that is expressed among working folks today. Especially so was our labor felt that way when what we did was totally at the behest of another, a higher up.”
“I have entire chapters on that alone, coming up. For now I am focusing on the increased labor involved in our days, regardless who reaped the rewards.”
“In any case & all in all, in seeking to avoid death at any & all costs to present happiness, we created lives in which it was clear we actually wished for death...where it was observably evident we were seeking it out.”
“We not only killed each other, we not only killed planetmates of all kinds, it was supremely evident we wanted to die. So we extended our lives in all these unnatural ways, at the expense of actually wanting to live that existence.”
“Such it is that we introduced tragedy to Nature. We became the suffering planetmate. We elevated Nature’s game of life & death on high to where our numbers would increase wildly & uncontrollably,..”
“…then be beaten back in mass outbreaks of disease, wars, or natural calamities—which our ever more concentrated population centers made far more severe than they had to be or would have been for us previously.”
“Regardless, in our sedentary living; our homesteading; our creation of ever larger residences & more fortified perimeters for our properties, our towns, then our cities; we did not acknowledge this horrible descent.”
“Whereas essentially we were huddling together like frightened children, bowing down to the products of our hands, & cowering before Nature & its ways.”
“Furthermore, our fear had us invent phantom helpers—gods, deities—that were equal, in stature, to our pain...to our fear...to our ever-arising & ever-beaten-down terror.”
“Obviously all this reduction to the cowardly, the childish, & the infantile, had its roots in our deprivational trauma. They were all a manifestation of a denial of the way events had actually occurred to us in infancy.”
“For they held out the promise that such satisfaction as was craved for as an infant would someday come for us as adults, somehow through all our efforts & our lives intensely focused on work.”
“Though of course it never did. & inasmuch as we had cut off all our connection to an existence in Nature where it could, to some extent, be had, it never would or could it, either.”
“As for our gods & supernatural helpers? These concoctions revealed their true origins through the fact they were often cruel & contrary in their beneficence, just as our caregivers had been experienced as being.”
“Remember that all other planetmates experience a perfect nurturing in their beginnings, under the Divine orchestration of biological events, creating a perfect trust in Reality as benevolent, perfect, & generous.”
“Whereas our experience of a variable quality of nurturing in our early infancies—always less than perfect & sometimes harsh & cruel—created for us a sense of mistrust toward existence & its designs.”
“This inner turmoil resulted—throughout our post-agrarian history—in our projecting that struggle, that pathetic crying out for, & that desperate & pitiful plea, upon the screen of heaven & Nature.”
“In doing so, upon those surfaces we painted the images of our imperfect & hurtful early caregivers in the form of ambivalent gods, insensitive & wrathful deities, & perverse & contrary Nature.”
“& the measure of our submission to these forces was equal to the measure of our suffering & pain. Feeling beaten down by the forces outside ourselves, from birth, had us begging, pitifully, from such forces throughout our lives.”
“We sacrificed our nobility of soul upon the altars of unappreciative & vain, capricious & punishing gods...which were reflections of our caretakers in the distant past.”
“We are an unexpected & singular outgrowth from a series of climatic events occurring millions of years ago, long before the apocalypse of today to which it all led.”
“All of our changes in morphology & anatomy were adaptations to these simple changes that were required of us by alterations in our environment about which we had no say at all.”
“There was no ethical failing involved in any of this. The only snake persuading us was our nagging birth pain & prenatal traumas, which snakes do indeed symbolize, but which we did not have any choice in.”
“In fact, from a moral perspective, we are the victims in this sequence of events. There was no “sin” or moral fall that preceded all this or precipitated such a harsh rejoinder as will be this response from Nature in the upcoming years.”
“It will be a monumental moral travesty—with horrific repercussions not just on ourselves but on all the innocents in Nature as well as our own children—if we succumb to those parts of us involving our death wish, our Thanatos,..”
“…[our Thanatos] which we humans uniquely have & all the rest of the world, arising & playing under the designs of Eros, do not. We wish to die to end our laborious lives & its suffering. For the sake of the innocents, we cannot allow that.”
“Looking at the entire arc of it, we might deduce that our unique & singular trajectory, bringing about all it did of bad & evil as well as good & miraculous, was a part Nature needed to have played for some grander design of It & the Divine.”
“But back then, once we separated from Nature, our crazed brains could not discern easily the Benevolent Designs the way our planetmate relatives could.”
“…[we put up our nose at “messy” Nature,] at “unseemly” wilderness, &...most unfortunate of all...at “inappropriate” emotion & “inconvenient” bodily feeling.”
“Indeed, though we acted for all the world as if we were in control & dominant, unperturbed & unaffected, we actually became increasingly enslaved to our unnatural drives & passions—”
“We lost the sense of having the potential for unlimited variety of experiences of life, as presented through the exigencies of the Divine, which actually gives one the sense of being free.”
“We imagined the actual ideal satisfaction of our needs—their completion, the way they should have been satisfied—& symbolized that as the existence of angels & deities in the skies, influencing events here on Earth to aid us.”
“We ever failed to notice that actual angels were directly before us, in the Nature we had left behind. In all the Flora & Fauna kingdom that ever helped, succored, nurtured, & pleased us in all the ways we needed to have as infants.”
“Indeed our planetmates were the unheralded angels in Nature. They came to us, against their better interests & often at the cost of their lives, & sought to assist & comfort us.”
“So less-technological, more natural agrarian cultures would be less split from Nature, that is true. They would have concepts of relation to Nature more symbiotic, however devolved they might still be from what we were in Nature as gatherers.”
“Thus matriarchal religions & harvest & mother goddesses of our Neolithic times were a stage between our current all-out break with Nature & the one of immersion in Nature of our gatherer-hunter days.”
“But more, for they felt a security about their lives we cannot know today. Just considering the physical needs of survival, simple gatherer-hunters feel, for the most part, more secure than we do in the efforts of survival.”
“This is evidenced in the way they feel & act toward material possessions, which has qualities of their being unattached to them, unpossessive of them.”
“In comparing their need for foodstuffs w our struggle for money to survive, from thr gatherer-hunter counterparts in modern times we conclude, as I have been stressing, they feel more secure & more trusting of Nature to provide thr sustenance.”
“[gatherer-hunter people] have the same surety as they feel about acquiring food about their ability to bring to themselves requirements of living such as shelter, tools, & personal items.”
“[gatherer-hunter folks] feel they also will be provided freely by Nature. Regarding the physical resources required for living, they are relatively affluent & have much more ease of mind about acquiring them.”
“Certainly “[gatherer-hunters] receive no wages; they have no Social Security. But they hardly need them. Whereas we cannot go to Walmart & pick up a basketball or kitchen knife & walk out with it, they enjoy a situation analogous to that.”
“Despite how much we tout our affluence & superiority (again!) over primal ways of life, the no-madic gatherer-hunters in our times show a disregard for & a lack of fixation on possessions we would find appalling.”
“Anthropologists, who almost universally come from the materialist cultures of today, consider them sloppy, perhaps foolish & reckless in their refusal to spend their time organizing, storing, & stacking their things.”
“Which, incidentally, allows them much more time to attend to “softer” things of life—family, spiritual relation to Nature, fun, dancing, amorous relationships, singing, ritual, trance & shamanistic work, ecstatic, entheogenic experience, etc.”
“It was understood, eventually by Western observers, to actually make sense, in that whatever one had would easily enough be able to be replaced, down the road—with no outlay of money or resources & with minimal effort.”
“So it was eminently logical to not put so much time & effort into caring for one’s possessions, when replacing those possessions was possible with *less* time & effort expended.”
“Again, it is more sensible to spend one’s time doing more enjoyable things rather than obsessing about one’s possessions, when if one were to lose or have something broken, it at least would not have to be carried to the next place.”
“One might also speculate there is much less advantage to caring so much about the stacking & organizing of things—or for that matter, attending to the improvement of one’s surroundings—when it is always only temporary.”
“When it is going to be broken down or left behind in the foreseeable future, what is the value in spending much effort or time in nesting? Why is it not a waste of time in having & caring for things or adorning one’s environment?”
“Which is not to say that gatherers are not artistic & creative. Indeed they are. More so are they, certainly, than humans who would outfit & fill up their homes, but let Ikea be the designer.”
“However, what [gatherers] expended their ever burgeoning creativity on—& yes it was much more of a pressing desire & impulse for them to create than it is for us—were items that could be moved, taken with one as one moves from place to place.”
“The next descent of man, reaching a peak in modern times w rapacious greed & the piling up of wealth at the expense of actual life experience, was accumulation...over-accumulation, actually, if compared to gatherer-hunters, our early humans.”
“Though what our early homesteaders gathered & stored would seem far less than what we consider a lot today, still it was considerably more than what could be owned by our nomadic forebears, who preceded them.”
“That ability to own more than what could be carried would make all the difference. For it came with a corollary that some would be able to own more than others.”
“Let us take a look, now, at what happened & what it meant for us when humans ceased their wandering ways, built themselves permanent homes, & began filling their “garages” & “pantries” to bursting.”
*Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man* by Michael Adzema is a devolutional look at human’s splitting away from Nature in the creation of a human nature at war with the natural.
The book, *Prodigal Human*, shows how in our creation of civilization, we locked in a human status that has us either as Controllers, Conforming Underlings, or Authentics.
We see how that change from our primal, prehistoric profile, has led us to the kind of personality today of folks who are able to end life on this planet, with hardly a second thought.
In doing so, *Prodigal Human* presents a new devolutional theory in anthropology. The book also explains how our deeper human nature, cooperative with Nature, can be regained and our world saved from apocalypse.
This devolutional theory of evolution demonstrates how bipedalism & the resulting birth trauma led to descents of humans from an original natural state, leading to misogyny, class war, hunting, sedentary living, farming, religion,& more.
The complete book is available online at the links.
you can read the book, which is posted on the blog, or you can follow the directions there & download a free copy of *Prodigal Human: The Descents of Man*.
“[*Quotes/highlights:*] “You cannot convince a fish it lives in water. You can only give the fish the experience of being in air; then it will understand.” []
“[*Quotes/highlights:*] “…we re-create that which we need to experience. We stood upright; & now, unless something radical happens, it will lead to the end of life for ourselves & possibly everything else on this planet in short order.” []
“[*Quotes/highlights:*] “The bond between them is a love having no source in either. It is there, ever present, flowing back & forth like waves lapping on a beach...effortlessly, lazily.” []
“[*Quotes/highlights:*] “We continually re-create the discomforts we have not faced. There is no escape from the things we have ‘put out of our mind.’ That is the closest thing to hell that exists, though there is redemption in it.” []