The Thom Hartmann Reader

by Thom Hartmann

  Here were planted the intellectual seeds that would later take shape as his hypothesis of older and younger cultures. Hartmann also began to appreciate the power and the capacity of his own mind and to believe that a single person’s thoughts could be the pivot that leads to the transformation of the world. This idea recurs throughout his work, and long after that summer in the tipi he made it the mission statement of his nationally syndicated talk radio program: Saving the world, by awakening one person at a time. It’s not an original idea, as Hartmann readily concedes, but it’s a critical one. True and lasting social change has to begin with an idea. Movements gain momentum as ideas spread through enough people to reach a critical mass.

  This is the underpinning of The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now, the most personal of Hartmann’s books. Part spiritual autobiography, part travelogue, part self-help manual, The Prophet’s Way is also a colorful portrait of the remarkable Gottfried Müller, Hartmann’s mentor and longtime friend. Müller, the founder of Salem International, started a network of communities for orphans and abused children in Stuttgart, Germany. (Salem is pronounced “sah-lem,” from the Hebrew and Arabic words for peace, shalom and salaam.) A Christian mystic, Müller devoted his life to healing people and the environment and working for peace. He believed there was great power in practicing small, anonymous acts of kindness and that these acts become “culturally contagious,” spreading the way a YouTube video spreads virally on the Internet. Since meeting Müller in 1978, Hartmann has helped Salem set up hospitals and schools in Australia, Colombia, India, Israel, Russia, Uganda, and several other countries as well as the residential treatment program he describes in “Starting Salem in New Hampshire.”

  With Hartmann’s passion for knowledge, it’s no surprise that his ideas on public education are both visionary and provocative. Why, he asks, have so many modern people lost access to their intuition? Why are so many people disconnected from their emotional lives? And why is our society, while on the cutting edge of intellectual development, so often lacking in empathy and tolerance? Grounded in his research on neurobiology, “How to Raise a Fully Human Child” tackles these questions, describing how children are psychologically harmed by schools that treat them like items on an assembly line. The obsession with good grades, academic success, and high-stakes tests extinguishes kids’ natural curiosity. Kids aren’t the ones who are failing school; school is failing kids.

  Two essays from The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight—“Younger-Culture Drugs of Control” and “The Secret of ‘Enough’”—make it clear why that book has had such a galvanizing effect on readers. The premise of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight is that the global crises we face stem primarily from our younger-culture way of thinking, and the only lasting solution is to relearn the lessons of older cultures, our ancient ancestors who lived sustainably for thousands of generations. Hartmann names and analyzes our problems, and then he offers a new way of thinking about the world that is original, powerful, and nothing short of visionary.

  Life in a Tipi

  From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

  Every day people are straying away from

  church and going back to God.

  —LENNY BRUCE

  MY BEST FRIEND THROUGH SCHOOL WAS CLARK STINSON. WE met when we were 13, and instead of pursuing the normal pastimes of teenagers we spent our time studying Sanskrit (we had an old study-guide book I found in my father’s library), reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and arguing minutiae of the Bible. Clark’s mother was interested in metaphysics and shared with us a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. Years later, when I went to Detroit with her and Clark to attend an initiation in Kriya yoga by Yogacharia Oliver Black, the oldest living disciple of Yogananda, I recognized Yogananda’s Kriya technique as identical to an ancient Coptic exercise that Kurt Stanley had taught us years earlier, called the Cobra Breath.

  I introduced Clark to Master Stanley, and Clark and I began a serious study of spirituality. We were both in our late teens by then, and Clark had recently married. I was recovering from a painful breakup with a girlfriend, and we agreed that to do our spiritual work best we should seek isolation.

  So, Clark and his wife bought a tipi, and I bought one, and we three gave away everything else we owned in the world except some clothes and our spiritual books. We bought 100 pounds of wheat, 100 pounds of dried fruit, and some basic camping equipment and got a ride up into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where an old trapper led us on a three-day trek back into the Chippewa National Forest to a small lake that isn’t on most maps.

  We spent the summer there, Clark and his wife on one side of the lake, me on the other. We practiced silence three days a week, and we did meditation and prayer every day for hours.

  I had a pet tachinid fly, a small insect that looks like a honeybee but is actually a fly. When I’d meditate in the morning on my blanket outside my tipi, he’d come and hover just above my right hand, as if he were drawing nourishment from me. Sometimes he’d hover there for as long as 20 minutes; occasionally, he’d land and walk around with careful steps like an astronaut exploring a distant but friendly planet. I also shared my tipi with a large and furry brown-and-black wolf spider, who came out at night as the sun set and picked the sleeping mosquitoes off the canvas on the west side of my tipi; I watched the play of life and death, predator and prey.

  One cold and rainy afternoon, Clark and I were walking through the woods, looking for berries and edible plants. We’d gotten pretty skilled at identifying what was safe and what wasn’t and were filling a bag with leaves and fruits.1

  “This must be what our ancestors lived like,” Clark observed. “Hunting and gathering.”

  “Except that we’re vegetarians, so we’re just gathering,” I said, joking.

  But to Clark it wasn’t a joke. “Seriously. What we call civilization started when humans started farming. But humans like us were around for tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of years before that. Fully conscious, awake and aware, thinking and feeling just like us. But they were hunters and gatherers instead of farmers.”

  “Without agriculture there would be no civilization?” I asked. It was an interesting thought.

  “Remember Miss Hemmer?” Clark said. Miss Hemmer had been our eighth-grade biology teacher and one of the best teachers I’ve ever known. Clark and I conspired to make her life difficult, but we also loved her and learned more from her each month than from any of our other teachers in a year. And she was a huge fan of Margaret Mead. “She said that in primitive societies there isn’t suicide, depression, drug addiction, all that stuff.”

  “The noble savage,” I said, shivering. “I’m skeptical. And cold. And the Indians who once lived here were probably cold, too.”

  He shrugged and said, “This life seems much more natural to me.”

  At least I had to agree with that.

  A few days later, Clark came running over to my tipi with his Bible, all excited. “Look at this,” he said, pointing out Genesis 4:2. “It says, ‘Cain was a tiller of the ground.’ The Bible is talking about how the first murderer was also the first farmer. And in the twenty-fifth verse, it makes it clear that Abel, the brother who was not the farmer, was the one whom God loved the most.”

  “So what? It’s a classic archetype of the oldest child being the most beloved but also the one who screws up; it’s all over, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare.”

  “Don’t you see? Adam and Eve were gatherers, like we are now. They walked around the Garden of Eden and picked up food. But then they tasted of the knowledge of good and evil, of life and death. That’s your food supply—you live or die by it. When you live as a gatherer, you live by the whim of nature: if there’s no food, you die. When you begin to store up food, you can defy nature and survive a drought. You then have the power to control life: the knowledge of life and death, or good and evil. So the tasting of the apple must mean that Adam and Eve experimented with agriculture, th
at they defied the god of nature. It’s a warning. It’s saying that the primitive life of hunting, gathering, and herding was more in accord with nature’s way than is agriculture.*

  Clark dove deeply into the issue, but I didn’t consider it all that important at the time. I couldn’t see how when people started farming after the end of the last ice age it could have been a bad thing—after all, it brought us modern society and science. Clark, however, was totally certain that agriculture and what he called “the organized ones” (whom I’d later call, in writing about attention deficit disorder, the “farmers”) were responsible for the coming death of the earth. I wasn’t to seriously consider the issue again, though, for more than 20 years.

  I was also told during that time, quite clearly and directly in several dreams and strong intuitions, that my ultimate spiritual teacher would not be a yogi from India or any of the other Eastern religions (even though I was studying these too) but a Christian from Europe. I was amazed by this, as the Maharishi and all the other teachers seemed to be coming out of India, but the message was unmistakable. And ever since I’d first read Carl Jung’s writings (particularly his autobiography), I’d paid careful attention to my dreams and took seriously their content.

  At the time I assumed it must have meant Master Stanley, as he was Swiss. But I later learned that, as Master Stanley had said, he was not my ultimate teacher.

  That summer in the tipi was profoundly transformational for me, a time of preparation for what would come next. It taught me that I should never be afraid to lose or give away everything (as I’ve done more than once since then), that possessions can be meaningless, and that there is great peace in solitude. As a “gifted but hyperactive” young adult, I learned for the first time how to truly and profoundly relax and gain control over the wild racing of my mind. I learned to look within for strength and discovered that the forest is afire with life. I felt truly alive, truly connected to my creator, in a more real and visceral way than I’d ever before experienced.

  From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,

  © 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.

  How to Raise a Fully Human Child

  From The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child

  WHY HAVE SO MANY MODERN PEOPLE LOST ACCESS TO WHAT Albert Einstein called the “gift” of our intuitive minds and are thus less capable of critical and deep thought? Why is our society rich in intellectual rationality but seems too often to be lacking in compassion, insight, and understanding?

  When we go back to developmental neurobiology, we discover that building a brain is somewhat parallel to building a computer. A computer system is made of obvious parts—the monitor, the power supply, the tower, and the keyboard—and the more sophisticated parts of the computer’s motherboard and its chips for audio, video, and processing function. There are its memory chips, which determine in speed and capacity via their interaction with the processor chip or “brain” of the computer the ability the computer will have. If the memory chips are too slow in their ability to handle data, no matter how fast or fancy the processor chip we build into it, the computer will never go faster or farther than the limits of the slower memory chips.

  Similarly, every stage of brain development builds on those that came before it, all the way back to the first pruning of the brain in utero. The baby in utero has determined to some extent whether the world outside is safe or hostile. This process continues from birth into the early twenties, during which time half the total mass of synapses—more than 500 trillion—are pruned away and discarded.

  At every stage the brain must decide which of the two poles—safe or hostile—to emphasize. On this foundation is built the earliest of the brain’s structures, and these depend to a significant degree on the level of care and nurturing the child experiences with his mother. On this experience are built the toddler and later brain structures that depend on a child’s having nonhostile, supportive interactions with his father and mother, siblings, extended family, and the larger world. Throughout childhood, daily experiences such as stress in a school environment or living in a war zone continue to determine the nature and the shape of the brain the child will have when he achieves adulthood.

  If we want to produce children who are deep and thoughtful in their emotions and intellect, every step along the way requires that they receive full reward and nurturing and avoid more than the occasional burst of cortisol from an occasional brush with a tiger.

  Invasion of the Lizard People

  I have a friend who, in all seriousness, once took me aside to assure me that “the lizard people have taken over the United States.”

  “And who are the lizard people?” I asked. This friend has multiple graduate school degrees (including a master’s in psychology) and a very high IQ, but recently I’d begun to wonder about his reading habits.

  “Lizard people!” he said. “Some people think they live under the earth and then zip into human outfits when they come up to the surface; others think they’re some sort of incubus that inhabits the bodies of regular people, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it’s obvious they’ve taken over. How else would you explain the current state of world affairs? I’ll bet that the president gets up every morning, zips on his human suit, and then starts his day. Have you noticed how sometimes his features seem like they’re not quite right, like his smile is phony and might even slide off his face? It’s the rubber suit he wears over his lizard body.”

  “And where are these lizard people from?”

  “Again, there’s some controversy,” he said. “Some people think they’re from a distant star, maybe explorers marooned here tens of thousands of years ago. Others think they’re simply the first highly intelligent beings to have evolved on this planet, probably during the time of the dinosaurs, and it was when we started evolving that they figured out how to infiltrate us and take control of our societies. They became our first kings and leaders and are to this day. What we call history is really the history of the lizard people’s control of the human race.”

  In a way my friend may be partially right. From just before birth all the way into the early twenties, the brain is constantly facing the decision of whether to produce a mind that is more lizard (reptile brain–dominant) or more human (forebrain- or prefrontal lobe–dominant). More than 500 trillion synapses are pruned away to leave dominant either one structure or the other, and all of adult life is then based on that dominant structure.

  It’s not surprising that hierarchical, power-based cultures, from warrior tribes to feudal societies to modern empires, are stressful places for most of their inhabitants. Even those individuals who rise to the top of the power and wealth structure experience regular stress because of their constant need to defend what they have.

  Thus we see that reptile brain–dominant people are the ones best adapted to fight and claw and climb their way to the top of the social, political, and economic ladders—after all, that’s what reptiles do best. Survival of the fittest! is their slogan. Might makes right! is their marching theme. Compassion and insight are for wimps: Get while the getting is good!

  Those mothers and children hit by the greatest stresses are often at the most survival-oriented end of our social structure—the economic bottom. But the stresses echo all the way up the ladder, particularly in high-pressure households or among children exposed to high levels of advertising. Even though the changes induced at the level of the individual brain are subtle and small, when expressed over a nation of millions of people, their effects are amplified and become broadly visible.

  Are We Stuck in a Loop?

  It would seem that this is a never-ending loop; once a culture enters into it, there’s no clear way out. The culture restrains its members from developing into the most evolved state humans are capable of because each generation is birthed in stress, forming reptile brain–powered brains instead of those powered by transcendence and intuition. Children who have been born in stre
ss, whose neural pruning favors the reptile brain, become the adults that control and maintain ever more rigid hierarchical and wealth- and power-centered governments, companies, and social institutions as well as more and more violent and rapid-fire media. In this way more stress is produced for new mothers and the next generation of developing children and young adults. And on the cycle goes.

  When a society or nation goes into decline because of a loss or lack of resources and fighting over the crumbs begins, the stresses in the culture produce more and more children whose brains defer to the survival mechanisms of the reptile brain. These children, in turn, grow up to produce cultures that are less feeling, less intuitive, more power oriented, and—as is seen in both ancient and modern feudal societies—very stable and persistent. The culture feeds the neurology, and the neurology sustains the culture.

  Triggering Events

  In The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit,1 Joseph Chilton Pearce suggests that some sort of triggering event drove societies worldwide into this cycle of domination, stress, and proliferation of children whose reptile brains are dominant. This echoes the work of Allan N. Schore in his book Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self2 and the similar works of others. The science behind it is solid. Stressors alter brain development, and the modified brain, in turn, has the potential to change culture in ways that make life more stressful.