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on the edge of a bomming outrage 3 miles from where am typing, should I go ahead with tonight's plan to publish 'Monkey's Marvelous Trip From The African Jungle To Inner & Outer Space'? that's my question tonight.
I was already worrying that Monkey's Marvelous Trip seems to be speaking of such a different world from the one that surrounds us each time we open the tv door that it might drive away half my readers - particularly those with authoritarian personalities:) but in the middle of a 'terrorist bomming' when everyone's blaming everyone and denying everything??!!
and yet... maybe that's exactly the point. maybe the unleashed emotional revulsion we're all feeling is the very key to opening our hearts (& minds). for this shocked outrage AT EXACTLY THIS MOMENT is not only for the poor officeworkers slaughtered today, it's for ALL the needless terrorism being carried on daily by too many governments. surely what we're feeling is a crying unarticulated fury at the UNNATURALLY LOW MORAL LEVEL at which our public life is operating. 90% of "ordinary" people on the planet wish (daily, secretly, desperately) for a totally different kind of world to that which the tiny fundamentalist "elites" are forcing on us.
and it doesn.t seem that difficult or weird. we should live cooperatively together what.s so hard or unnatural about that?! the Reality Model offered by Monkey's Marvelous Trip shows that it's what we have now that is really really weird, unnatural, and unnecessarily hard, for everyone.
at this moment in history, are we able to drop all our 'answers' for an hour and listen to the True Story?
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u cant understand the world without innerstanding yourself
UP! 232// july 7, 2005
MONKEY.S MARVELOUS TRIP, A SHORT HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES
la- la- la- lap-toppling da system!
u cant innerstand yourself without understanding the world
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REVERSING THE 'BIG LIE'
THE TRUE STORY OF
Monkey's Marvelous Trip
From The African Jungle
To Inner & Outer Space
A Short History of the Human Species
Fraser Clark. July, 2005
The genetically modified 'Society' in which we live has no Heart. No psychic centre. Indeed it actually encourages us to concentrate on looking out for ourselves. We, supposedly its citizens, share & feel no common Vision, nor does our 'Community' have any agreed overall Purpose. The signs of social breakdown are now so common we've begun to think they're natural. What we most lack is a Social Bonding that links us all together as equal, on some spiritual level.
This is written from what I believe is the longing in the secret heart of each of us for 'the Truth', and for the 'better life' which we sense could be, or which we remember from some distant past .
It.s an attempt to present the True History of the Human Species . as opposed to the Big Lie in which we've been embedded - in a manner that satisfies Terence McKenna's nostrum that&
"If the truth can be spoken so as to be understood,
it WILL be believed!"
In order to avoid argumentation, I've concentrated on sketching the overall outline, the skeleton, while staying as clear as I can of details. if I even half succeed, then endless details will be filled in over the years to come.
To keep it short enough to stand as a simple Story, I have had to make some large jumps - these are somewhat covered by the numbered blue NOTES at the end.
[an earlier draft published in Psychedelica Britannica, Feb, 1997]
IF YOU.D LIKE TO ADD FOOTNOTES, OR JUST RESPOND, WRITE TO:
MAKEHISTORYHERSTORY@PARALLEL-YOUNIVERSITY.COM
IF YOU THINK THIS COULD BE UNDERSTOOD BY OTHERS PLEASE LET THEM SEE IT.
SHARING A NEW VISION OF THE WORLD IS OUR SPECIES. BEST HOPE :)
Recommended Sources
Terence McKenna: .The Archaic Revival., .Food of the Gods..
Clark Heinrich: .Strange Fruits..
Giorgio Samorini: .Animals And Psychedelics..
Julian Jaynes: .The Birth Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind..
Freke & Gandy: .The Jesus Mysteries. Was The Original Jesus A Pagan God?.
Gordon Wasson: .The Road to Eleusis..
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the 'Evolutionary History' which we Human Apes have been taught about ourselves is actually the exact OPPOSITE of what really happened.
i call it The Big Lie, and it was originally imposed on us monkeys by a tiny sociopathic minority, never more than a couple of percent. understanding the truth about how we got to here as a species matters because it will define our potential future.
the Big Lie is EXACTLY opposite to the Truth for a reason .-the best way to keep us in utter ignorance is not to create any old Lie but to REVERSE the Truth. that way, if any contradictory information does sneak through, it sounds like utter nonsense. the 'opposite' of the truth!
that.s the problem I face here.
until very recently, almost no way existed of discovering (and NO WAY AT ALL of informing the population) that the Big Lie.s Reality Model was imposed (as we now know) with total contempt for most of the ape-human species, utter hypocrisy, and the most truly brutal slaughter and barbarous harassment of literally millions of people who believed in the OPPOSITE Model.
though the Big Lie is largely discredited now thanks to our ever increasing knowledge, the ingrained, never-questioned attitude to Life which its embedded Reality Model has imposed in us (first on pain of death and still, today, by social derision and exclusion) is much deeper and harder to spot. it is established in our Society.s upper echelons (who long ago forgot the True Story and merely concentrate on maintaining the superior social position the Big Lie has granted them). and it.s established more deeply in our basic assumptions about Life and Reality than we even begin to realise.
if you doubt this, there.s a test coming up which I still fail myself.
it all kicks in when we turn from the discredited Lie to discuss the True Story, The Demonised Story, The Devil.s Version. for remember, the perception that it.s precisely the OPPOSITE of the truth has been meticulously and ruthlessly cultivated in our Cultural DNA, over generations. .The True Story Of Monkey.s Marvelous Trip From The African Jungle Into Inner & Outer Space. is going to sound utterly fantastic, impossibly idealistic, deeply irresponsible, worthy of being illegalised, .burned at the stake., and so on. and on.
for, despite the brave researches of many alternative thinkers over the last century, each excavating their own specialist areas [see Recommended Sources for most of what I.m about to say], this is the first time the True Story has been assembled as a single, simple Plot, understandable by all. and I pray:
"if the truth can be spoken so as to be understood, it WILL be believed."
what or who dunnit?
what triggered monkey's marvelous trip?
the primary challenge for all evolutionary theories is to explain what is far and away the most spectacularly dramatic leap-forward since the single-celled amoeba appeared on this planet.
Marine life moved to the land 350 million years ago.
It took 300 million years for Mammalians to appear.
It took 45 million years for Humanoids to split off from the basic chimpanzee line.
Modern humans emerged 1/3 million years ago. AND, IN THAT COSMIC SECOND, THEY.VE SWAPPED SWINGING IN THE AFRICAN JUNGLES FOR THE GLOBAL WEB, NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY AND OFF-PLANET TRAVEL!
Darwin.s theory fits pretty well with the whole .upward. evolution from the single cell to the Great Apes. but when those monkeys stood up on their hind legs to form a new species, we entered a whole new Ball Game. we are talking of Cultural evolution now, not slow physical increments over generations. and there is nothing in Darwin.s theory that predicts such a continuous increase of complexity.
.The emergence of modern humans from the higher primates . with the enormous changes effected in brain size and behaviour . transpired in fewer than 3 million years. Physically, in the last 100,000 years, we have apparently changed very little. But the amazing proliferation of cultures, social institutions, and linguistic systems has come so quickly that modern evolutionary biologists can scarcely account for it.. Terence McKenna: .Food of the Gods..
it.s no wonder world religions have grown up to explain this .miraculous. acceleration.
but let's be scientific and look a the simplest explanation. one that chimes with our own experience. is there anything today which we know can change an individual totally, perhaps even in a single night?
and here the True Story begins. for, if we push aside our cultural conditioning, it.s obvious. only two things can trigger behavioural modifications on the scale of ditching banana hustling for nanotechnology - religious conversion ... and drugs. and the greatest of these is ... religious transformation through drugs. right?
although I concentrate here on one drug, because I think it was the first and remains the primary catalyst right up till today, other hallucinogenic alkaloids in plants were also clearly chemical factors in the protohuman diet that catalysed the emergence of human self-reflection.
a .cultured. species
committed to continuous evolution
.Chimpanzee traditions ebb and flow, from community to community, across the continent of Africa. On any day of the year, somewhere chimpanzees are fishing for termites with stems gently wiggled into curling holes, or squeezing a wad of chewed leaves to get a quarter cup of water from a narrow hole high up in a tree. Others are collecting ants by luring them onto a peeled wand, then swiping them into their mouths. These are all local traditions, ways of solving problems that have somehow been learned, caught on, spread, and been passed across generations.. Wrangham and Peterson: .Demonic Males..
a million years ago, with the african rainforest receding and the great grassy plains appearing, more and more apes were moving away from hanging round the old Tree of Knowledge, standing up on their own two feet, and experimenting with a whole new Life strategy.
the setting, then, for our True Story, was one of maximum individual transformation and cultural upheaval. among chimpanzees re-adapting to life on the tree-less Great Plains there was nothing but scope for individuals to seriously affect the whole species.
and, at precisely this point, our Ancestor encountered the Magic Mushroom. you can go to africa today, as i have done, and you.ll see that the primary activity of these apes, as they navigate the grasslands on foot, is nibbling at everything that looks interesting. it's inevitable, then, rather than far-fetched (as the Big Lie has programmed us to react), that our ancestors encountered the giant psilocybin mushroom which can stand 9 inches high. (pointing monkey to the stars?). i.ve seen monkeys jump down from the trees, scurry across to a magic mushroom, swipe its head off, and bolt back to the tree.
ultimately, in our Story, one or more experimentally minded, identity-exploring apes changed. radically. radically enough to create, over a (mere?) hundred thousand years, through .traditions which were learned, caught on, spread, and passed across generations,. a whole new cultural species.
the mushroom's first appearance is so perfectly timed as to suggest outside planning. here, just when individual ego is most in danger of being aroused by this new walking-on-your-own-back-legs away from the social enclosure of the tribe - bang!! - the old ego-dissolving / group-bonding psychedelic makes its Entrance.
in fact evolutionary researchers are discovering more and more that our ability to evolve was largely predicated on social bonding and caring, often via the females.
what actual changes do
mushrooms bring about in us, and would have brought about in them?
[see NOTE 1. Early Contact Highs]
the answer is much easier to find than we have been led to think. for, among the surprisingly few bits of bones, scraps of material, cannabis seeds in caves and scratchings on the walls, the only objective criteria we actually possess with which to pierce through, in an exact manner, to the lives of our ancient ancestors are the foods they ate& and the drugs they consumed. we KNOW (in a quite objective manner) how ancient shamanic peoples, or now, felt on magic mushrooms. and we KNOW what kind of lives were lived by communities who revered them. it is simply an objective fact, embodied chemically somehow in the mushroom, that peoples who gave them prominence in their lives were cooperatively inclined, non-militaristic, in tune with nature and so on. people who drank alcohol we know were usually quite au contraire.
.As man emerged from his brutish past, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of the mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of what mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since held as the highest attribute of his kind.. Gordon Wasson: .The Road to Eleusis..
regular (even one-off) mushroom ingestion must surely be linked to self-awareness, the development of higher conceptualising skills, a new sense of post-family, pre-urban community 
(the bonding that comes from tripping together), and spirituality (as in arousing the questions of who am i, what is all this, and what.s it for?). these are precisely the new skills which we know differentiated the later homo sapiens from previous great apes! everything our early evolved ancestors first unlocked in their minds and psyches represent the highest spiritual attainments that we speak of today.
and would certainly have triggered all the alternative .explanations. for our evolution offered by anthropologists as brainwashed as the rest of us monkeys - mastery of fire, discovery of the wheel, language, and eventually the shamanic need for the great .Agri-Cultures. which developed.
other contending explanations, by the way, include bipedalism, binocular vision, the opposite thumb, the throwing arm.
.What is the essential difference between the chimp and the human ape that became us? It is not the acquiring of some new trick like language or control of fire or agriculture. The difference is much bigger than that, and one that would increase the creative gaining of all the other tricks. Is it not our very spiritual sensitivity, our higher emotional states, our soul bonding beyond the mere call of duty? Beyond the demand of Nature? The beginning to emerge from Nature?. Terence McKenna: Food of the Gods.
certainly they would have quickly discovered the security problems around mushroom ingestion and formalised the taking of them. this was the original model for the .Initiations. which later dominated all pagan religions. powerful allies like
these would have quickly been perceived as dangerous if taken at the wrong time. hence, possibly, the fear and tabus that later grew up around cult use of such plants.
new cults, new movements, tribes no longer necessarily connected by blood family but by some new kind of vision, visions of a new Reality Model. the first brotherhoods, or, more likely, sisterhoods for most early shamans appear to have been women and agriculture was certainly in their domain. we could very well be descended from a single mushroom-inspired individual Great Ape who founded a super-colony that became the first Agri-Culture, and then .town,. and which evolved at an evolutionary speed of light. or there could have been several, even many such cults, starting with small groups here and there, maybe the people of the marijuana, or of the amanita muscaria in the north, most certainly ibogaine, but gradually coalescing into a new culture, a new exploratory species which is utterly distinct from our tree-dwelling ancestors.
all of these developments over a hundred thousand year period, and their gradual coalescence into a new kind of human ape culture, constituted what we nowadays call Evolution. and this ongoing .holy. relationship with the magic mushroom (etc) is precisely what triggered, and maintained that evolution. all of us modern apes have evolved from a stage of life in a tribal culture that revered and participated in regular (full moon) ego-dissolving, GroupMind, shamanic sessions involving all members of the tribe. our very .longing. for .a better life. comes from there. psychedelics dissolve ego. tribes dedicated to a shamanic lifestyle from birth did not produce, or certainly did not over-emphasise, individual ego.
let.s not argue over definitions of individualism and collectivism, a healthy balance of which is clearly necessary. by GroupMind, I mean the experience of community/ identity with the whole species or community whose lack we atomised souls feel most deeply today. a healthy and evolving GroupMind (so distant from anything we experience today!) will encourage maximum Individuality, even if only in its own species. interest.
[see NOTE 2. Monkey.s First Trip/The Vision of the Future]
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TEXT JOCKEY // TJ PHRASER (Fraser Clark) & THE MEDIA EVOLUTION
MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE KEYBOARD
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a new planetary awareness
founded in knowing it for ourselves!
.Increasingly, modern evolutionary primatologists accept the notion that modern Homo Sapiens arose in Africa 100,000 years ago, and made a second great outward migration from there to people the entire planet. They became users of fire, tools and language and emerged 100,000 years ago as self-aware individuals.. Terence McKenna, .Food of the Gods..
over one to two hundred thousand years, around the planet as far as the aborigines in Australia, this .evolutionary culture. spread and became dominant (as in preferred). this is why, wherever we modern apes have explored in recent centuries, we.ve found such shaman-based cultures. this WAS the original (and only) evolutionary culture!
it seems clear that, though this .second great outward migration. of psychedelicised apes encountered several other .allies. (amanita muscaria, marijuana, iboga) and incorporated or rejected them, it was the shamanic society itself which became the rule. indeed it was Initiation into some regular natural drug combination ritual that caused the evolution of the individual while the ritual itself was enshrined as the central .bonding. feature of the tribe/cult.
.These Mysteries have brought us from rustic savagery to a cultivated and refined civilisation. The rites of the Mysteries are called .Initiations,. and in truth we have learned from them the first principles of life.. Cicero, Roman statesman.
let us be as clear (though as un-detailed) as we can be about this Initiatory Society that became the new tribal norm. in its simplest and fullest form, such Shamanic Initiations involved the .convert. in consuming the ally in a correct .set. and .setting. (Tim Leary).
the .setting,. the physical situation, is clear enough, as it is today for a psychedelic initiation: a .safe. environment where the hierophant is encouraged to let go of his usual defences.
obviously many variants of the .set. (.spiritual./psychological expectations) were refined as evolution deepened into its maximum variety of experimentation, many social models using different drug combinations evolved, but all involved .Dying. (to your old Self, the Personal Ego, your previous model of reality) and .Being Reborn. (into your Higher Self, new Reality Model etc).
it is absolutely critical to see the difference between these first, primeval .naturally healthy religions. (meaning shamanically effective) and the pathetically reduced fractals embodied in today.s de-natured churches. in EXACTLY CONTRAST to taking anything on faith, we Applicants for Evolution were required to Test it, and Know It For Ourselves!
an experience of Inner and Outer Space as much more Marvelous than hitherto suspected, and Unity of All Living Beings, these were the basic revelations. GroupMind (.All in this Together!.) and Social Bonding of the whole Community were the results. and we know that women shamans played a large part (caring, nurturing, letting down defences, protecting), and that the vast majority of societies that grew up around the central Initiation, were cooperative/ tribal matriarchies who practised Goddess worship.
one word on the origin of the Gods. how would our monkey have felt after his Initiation had worn off? how to express the difference in his daily behaviour? would he not look back on his shamanic level as like a different person?! another Being? either you.d become or actualised Someone Else (Higher Self?) or you.d been .possessed. by some Higher Entity? in the plant? this was most likely the origin of the Gods.
this .new. species, then, successfully evolved, prospered and multiplied. and, as human-ape communities grew in size, the .new. evolutionary imperative demanded experimentation with more and more complex forms of .community organisation. than the original .unanimous consensus. of the smaller tribe - shamans/ chiefs/ kings/ priests/ warrior castes/ temples/ emperors and church/monasteries struggled for dominance.
when, in some of these experimental social collectives, some apes turned away from the community bonding rituals, they began to, individually, devolve once more. but, either the new chimpanzee .trick. did not stick., or the competitive elites which were thrown up remained small. as long as spiritual initiation remained central to the community, general evolution continued.
.Without the Sacred Mysteries life for the Greeks would be unlivable, for they hold the whole human race together.. Zosimos, Greek historian.
a common mistake of Big Lie indoctrinated historians is to interpret a society by its self-confessed .rulers., but any pre-Roman empire was more in the emperor.s eye than in reality, with little effect on the species. evolution. without today.s global-instant communications, a .royal. decision might never arrive in your valley! and the populations of what we now call .civilisations. probably never even heard of them in their whole lives!
the thread running through the period is this: as long as the bonding Initiation ritual remained at the heart of a community, even just in the local valley, people still governed themselves as all mammals have recently been proved to do: namely, the pack acquiesces with alpha males. decisions in very defined situations (access to females for example, or the highest hill in town) but, in all serious situations, works on a 51% GroupMind Decision (with the alpha male counting as just one vote).
.The shaman is a humanist who is vitally interested in the archaic traditions of his people. He is also concerned with the social dynamics in the community and consequently often finds himself assuming the role of sacred politics, resolving social conflict. Shamanistic trance, frequently induced by powerful hallucinogens, demonstrates the divine origin of the rules regulating social relationships. This is the means whereby the shaman restores harmony to the community.. John Halifax: .Shamanic Voices..
certainly the legends of Atlantis and other highly developed civilisations, and the folk memories in the mythologies of so many of the planet.s peoples, hark back to this evolutionary stage. could the whole spread and psychic network of this true civilisation of increasingly humanoid beings have been in communal telepathic communication (as some maintain the animal world still is)? certainly something still lurks, like a genetic imprint, in the secret, personal .longing. in every modern ape.s heart. whence did it come, this .still quiet voice" of our natural conscience, like a .Knowledge. deep in our .Memory. of how Life was, or was meant to be?
this True Civilisation appears to have reached its finest cultural flowering around 6000 BC in Tassilli, a vast area of caves in southern Algeria, where a mushroom-revering shamanic society has left cave paintings of mushroom-headed gods and shaman figures from whose bodies emanate distinct psilocybin shapes. they show our monkeys had developed a high level of art, language, and .civilisation. in its perhaps truer sense than anything we moderns, for all our fine (and horrific) technology, have even glimpsed.
some scholars locate the origin of the later Dionysus cult at Tassilli. and it seems likely that this whole cultural cluster spread, as the desert took over, up to the north coast of Africa, inspiring the Carthaginian .Empire., the Minoa goddess cultures, and that the Israelite slaves in Egypt were the last of the truly shamanic civilisations, enslaved by emerging new technocracies.
growing signs of decay
a corrupted level of pagan society
for an observer of our planet, watching from deep space for any appearance of Unbalanced Individual Ego (a clear threat to the .spiritual. evolution we have been witnessing), the danger signs would almost certainly include the appearance of very large structures, especially if these appeared before great technological development.
the pyramids are, therefore, a sign that an elite section of the newly evolved shamanic ape species, must be turning away from the all-equal-in-a-circle spiritual lifestyle of Initiatory Culture.
[see NOTE 3, The Fall]
by the greek era, this militaristic warrior caste, still tiny, is more permanently established, indeed with emergent lines of accession. Alexander the .Great. seems to have been the biggest psychopath in our history for the many monastic centres of wisdom initiation he destroyed in the East. indeed his .brutal. response to the nuanced traceries of process represented by the (symbolic?) Gordian Knot is the perfect image of a falling back (by some) to the chimpanzee stage.
however, though this tiny sociopathic group thought they were the future, the other 98% of greeks, and all other peoples, remained shamanic based. do you seriously think that the activities of Prince Charles or George Bush are what.s happening today?! the annual .social bonding. initiations at the temple of Eleusis, for example, were attended until the end of the 4th century by a large part of the population of Athens, all equal for the three days. greek Culture remained pagan-shamanic though greek .Society. had developed a corrupt, degenerative layer, an ego cancer that cut the individual from identification with the community, the species. the .refreshing. effect of the Mysteries practised at that ancient Mystic University have been described with total enthusiasm by every single famous greek you can mention, all, to a man, regarding them as inspirations to their lives and central to their concept of Society.
.We beheld the beatific visions and were initiated into the Mystery which may be truly called blessed& We beheld calm, happy, simple, eternal visions, resplendent in pure light.. Plato.
nor were these great Pagan philosophers the dry, academic intellectuals imagined today by our fallen .experts.. Pythagoras was a charismatic miracle-worker, Socrates a mystic who.d stand gazing rapturously into space for hours. Diogenes lived, penniless, in a jar by the temple door.
by the time of the Roman era, the militaristic tendency is well developed, and the rampant-ego lust for empire is in full stride. yet, even so, society among the rapidly evolving apes still possessed a parallel balance within it, and the vast majority of the populations of the abstract .Roman Empire. got on with their own local and personal evolutions, rendering what it must to Caesar but with scant attention.
the Roman elite, however, were gradually co-opting the holy shrines where the people went to consume the healing herbs and .Commune with the Gods.. they were turning the intimate inner revelatory group-bonding mysteries of the former pagan Goddess temples into a Spectacle for the .public., a Grand Entertainment. complete with pillars, amphitheatres and all the rest of it. simultaneously alcohol (often interpreted as .wine. but which usually included .aromatic herbs. and such) was beginning to replace, or intermix with the sacred mushroom.
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onward roman christian soldiers!
THE FALL INTO HISTORY
now we must answer the (for us, today) most important question of all:
how, after 50,000 years of successful evolution, involving discovery of all the other abilities which are usually perceived as CAUSES of evolution (fire, the wheel, language, social structure, religion), after the establishing of the large Agri-Cultures, and towns and cities, and cooperative empires where the spiritual life remained central, how, after all this, did we .Fall. into the .Dark Ages. and eventually get to the terribly fragmented, schizophrenic, alienated, ruthlessly competitive, super-violent, planet-destructive, terrorist-threatened, hi-testosterone, disintegrating aftermath of the Big Lie in which we find ourselves today?
the argument that the military-religious stage to come was the necessary engine for the technological miracles of today must be seen for the self-justifying Big Lie that it is. .Pagan civilisations built vast libraries to house hundreds of thousands of works of literary and scientific genius. Its natural philosophers speculated that human beings had evolved from animals. Its astronomers knew the Earth was a sphere which, along with the planets, revolves around the sun. They had even estimated its circumference to within one degree of accuracy. The ancient Pagan world sustained a population in Europe not matched again until the 18th century. In Greece, Pagan culture gave birth to the concepts of democracy, rational philosophy, public libraries, theatre and the Olympic Games, creating a blueprint for our modern world.. Freke & Gandhi: .The Jesus Mysteries..
surely the more open a culture (.opened,. .open-minded.), the more group bonded, then the faster and more balanced will be its discoveries. we must, fairly, consider the possibility that we.d already be populating the nearest planets if the Disaster had not struck which arrested .evolution. completely. and certainly we.d have none of the ecological side-effects and sociopathic business culture which now threaten us.
the Disaster began, and simultaneously the Big Lie, in 321AD, when, for its own nakedly selfish motives, the desensitised, competitive, and essentially male warrior mind of the degenerate Roman elite formed an Unholy Alliance with the least shamanic .Religion. available.
Emperor Constantine showed up at the notorious Council of Nicaea, a conference of the head bishops of one of the many gnostic christian sects that actually represented a renaissance of the pagan spirit. it wasn.t the biggest, nor the fastest growing, and certainly not the most persecuted (that was a part of the Big Lie to come). but that meant nothing to Constantine. what he wanted was a standardised, uni-fit, omni-cultural religion (think Coca Cola) that could unite his disparate empire (as he perceived the vast majority of normally evolving communities of great apes). something to make everyone feel .the same..
no longer roman, and no longer .christian,. today.s corporations and meta-governments perceive and project this same reality model.
and this sect, unlike the others, was already an autocratic organisation, complete with bishops, .experts. who made decisions, for its, well, .sheep. - its christian soldiers - precisely the sort of .religion. an emperor .could work with..