In fact, many of the bones of early hominids show the scratches and tooth marks of large cats. Human beings were on the African Savannah with lots of game, but also with big predators. They were extremely vulnerable, and a great deal of human mentality, she argues, was shaped by millions of years of being preyed on. It wasn’t until about fifty thousand years ago that there was an improvement in hunting technologies, whereby human beings could indeed become more effective hunters.
She shows that this sheds light on many religious traditions in which there’s the idea of a sacrificial victim. When a predator approaches a herd of wildebeests or baboons, they usually attack isolated members of a group—the old, the young, or sometimes the young males who are defending the periphery of the group. They get killed first. After they’ve killed one and start eating it, the rest of the group can relax. They sometimes stand around and watch the predator eating the prey. When the predators have a victim, they are not interested in the rest of the group. So one member of the group dies, and the others are safe for a while. This is a simple fact of predation.
Ehrenreich shows that this pattern, a sacrificial victim that dies for the sake of the rest, is deeply embedded in our consciousness as an archetypal pattern. She points out that most of the early gods and goddesses were seen as carnivores, for example Horus, the hawk god of Egypt. Even Jehovah is a carnivore. In the story of Cain and Abel, Cain is a farmer who offers the fruit of the earth to God as a sacrifice, and Abel is a herder who offers a sheep (Gen. 4. 2-10). God prefers Abel’s offering. God likes meat more than produce, so Cain kills Abel. He’s jealous.
Ehrenreich then points out that whole nations identify with predators, and in wars the whole nation becomes like a predator. The symbol of England and many other countries is the lion; the symbol of the United States, the eagle. All around the world predatory animals are national emblems.
I think Ehrenreich’s insights are particularly interesting because they show that so much of our mythology, religious structure, and fears are related to this long period of being preyed on. The nightmares of young children in modern cities like New York are not about child molesters or being run over by cars; they’re about being eaten by monsters and wild animals.
Stephen Mithen’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s ideas about early human history have important implications for our collective memories. I would think of them as collective memories that we inherit by morphic resonance. Jung would call them archetypes in the collective unconscious. Our memories, those things that are built into our past, shape the way that our minds are today, in ways that we’re largely unaware of. This is because our usual study of history begins with the civilizations of the Near East, Egypt, Greece and Rome. It leaves out the previous three-and-a-half million years of human history, a time that has really done so much to shape our evolutionary nature and therefore, conditions the way we respond to each other today and in the future.
Terence McKenna: First of all, let’s assume that I’ve responded to this with the usual rap about diet and mushrooms. In trying to greater understand this moment of transition or breakthrough fifty thousand years ago, I come very close to what Rupert’s just been discussing. I can’t help but notice that a successful predator must think like its prey, that there is this peculiar intellectual symbiosis that goes on between the predator and the prey. I think that top carnivores, like hunting cats, internalize the behaviors of their prey.
At the very dawn of the evolutionary emergence of mind, the central human figure in that equation is the shaman. At the high Paleolithic stage, the shaman is essentially a kind of sanctioned psychotic. In other words, shamans are able to move into states of mind so extreme that their immediate social efficacy is arguable. What I mean is that the shaman is a person, a designated member of the social group, who can mentally change into an animal. The shaman can become so animal-like that other members of the social group are appalled and draw back. So, in a weird way, at this fractal boundary where human consciousness emerges, the first human consciousness was not human at all. It was a human ability to model effectively the thinking processes of other predators.
Ralph Abraham: With mathematical models.
TM: Yes, with mathematical models and precision. So when we’re talking about hunting, we’re talking about strategic thinking, which always involved bifurcating trees of choice. If we go to the water hole at dawn, perhaps we can make a kill. If we leave the women and children, take food, and go in this direction several days, perhaps we will make a kill. Perhaps not. Perhaps by abandoning the women and the children we will undercut our gene pool and return to catastrophe
Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present. In other words, there’s a kind of time-binding function here. So I’m really not so much posing a question to Rupert as adumbrating what he said. This is where it all comes together, in this very complicated relationship between fear, expectation, strategizing, and the imagination. The two areas where I’m sure we spent a great deal of time studying these bifurcating trees of possibility were in the food gathering and hunting domain, and then in the sexual domain, which today we call erotic fantasy. But in the high Paleolithic, erotic fantasy was rather closely welded to where our genes went and how our biological propagation proceeded.
So whatever the causal mechanism was—the stimulation of psilocybin or modeling the behavior of the top predators that we competed with—the domain in which the change was born, and in which we will live until we leave the body behind us, is the domain of the imagination. This is what we created that is uniquely human, and that has defined us ever since. When our discussions look more into the future, I think we will see that as the imagination has been our past, and the cradle of our humanness, so it also is the domain in which our trans-human metamorphosis will occur.
RA: As far as I can see, this is like dancing around an intellectual black hole. The question of what caused the bifurcation in the evolution of consciousness or culture fifty thousand years ago is of interest to us because we’re in one now. Rupert proposed that you would, of course, answer psilocybin mushroom among the clans of Africa.
TM: And the need to think strategically.
RA: But not only was this need a constant throughout the three-and-a-half million year evolution of hominids, but it was also present in apes, swarming bees, schooling fish and many other animals. What was it then, if anything, that happened fifty thousand years ago? There’s a dichotomy of two different views about this bifurcation: the divine intervention one, and the physiological, random mutation, natural selection one. In this dichotomy we see Rupert and Terence opposed. Terence believes the eating of psilocybin mushrooms is a purely material explanation, right? It requires no recourse to a divine intervention in the field by way of angels or dreams. You use the word imagination.
TM: Rupert’s not suggesting a little divine intervention. He’s just speaking metaphorically.
RS: I’m speaking literally. It’s Mithen who’s speaking metaphorically. One of the things we have to explain is that religion, a relationship that is beyond the human realm of consciousness, is found in every human culture today. One way or another every culture speaks of a world of spirits, angels, or gods. But to explain the universal distribution of this aspect of traditional human thinking requires that, at some stage in the past, there has been an awareness of other realms of consciousness. This is not incompatible with psilocybin or any other drug hypothesis, because psychedelics might have kick-started this connection with other realms of consciousness.
If we recognize that shaman cultures and all other cultures and other kinds of conscious entities beyond the human level—some in animal forms and some in other forms—in some stage in the past experienced these other realms of consciousness, whatever they are. Not just metaphors, not just archetypes in the collective mind, but forms of consciousness that might well be actually out there.
TM: In trying to think conservatively about the possibilit
y of a nonhuman local intelligence, it seems to me that Nature herself presents intelligence. The understanding of Nature is the understanding of complex integrated systems of such complexity that denying them consciousness is just a reluctance of the reductionist mind. For anyone not burdened by that prejudice, it’s self-evident that Nature is alive, cognizant, responding.
It’s interesting that really all we can agree upon here is that the time frame is roughly fifty thousand years. So a whole bunch of things are triangulating on that moment. One could say, as I’ve argued, that it was the eating of psilocybin mushrooms. You could make a more general statement and say that was the subset of the consequence of an omnivorous diet.
RA: Where were these mushrooms a hundred thousand years ago?
TM: The way I think about it is there was an incremental involvement that had punctuated breakthroughs in it. In other words, the slow meeting of mind, mushroom, social complexity, acoustical abilities linked to neurophysiological states didn’t just smoothly proceed. It all came together, but then at a certain point it jelled, and this is the fifty-thousand-year point where social understanding, technology, linguistic repertoires, and depth of diet all came together.
RA: You’re clinging to this material stuff.
TM: There will be material stuff even if you believe that angels descended from on high.
The invention of writing nine thousand years ago was an enormous breakthrough. But all of these things proceed out of the further integration and complexification of the nervous system in connection with the function of the imagination.
RA: I can’t believe that you’re presenting yourself as a conventional, materialist, evolutionary theorist.
TM: With the mushroom theory, you can always just say our human ancestors encountered the mushroom and then it proceeded from there. But you can go one step back and ask who placed the mushroom in their path?
RA: Oh, I can give you a hand there. There was the preceding civilization of Lemurians. They died out because they had poisoned the environment with toxic chemicals and created global climate warming. This resulted in a drying of the Sahara desert, from which sprung forth a bloom of psychedelic mushrooms that had been hiding under the surface previously because it was too wet.
TM: The loud hum I hear is William of Ockham spinning in his grave.
RA: I see. You think that DNA and the expression of genes is a simpler explanation than a divine intervention.
TM: I think the DNA is divine.
RA: Ah!
TM: Escape! Rupert, what do you, as the middle man, think?
RS: I can’t quite get your position, Terence, because the new hard-nosed skeptic that you’re revealing to us here is another personality that doesn’t seem to fit too well with the Terence McKenna of nonhuman entities and self-transforming machine elves. Are these other kinds of consciousness, other forms of entity just inside our brains, appearing in relation to pharmacologically induced states of mind? The idea that they’re out there seems to me an integral part of most of what I’ve heard you say over many years.
TM: I think the key thing is not to concentrate on materialist versus nonmaterialist explanations. Rather, it is to realize that the new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information, and information is expressed in the DNA. It’s expressed epigenetically in culture. What’s happening is that information was running itself on a primate platform, but evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense we have a symbiotic relationship to a nonmaterial being which we call language. We think it’s ours, and we think we control it. This isn’t what’s happening. It’s running itself. It’s time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving toward its own conclusions.
RS: The discussion so far has been remarkably earth-bound. What if information and consciousness are not confined to this planet? Other parts of the universe—stars, suns, and galaxies—may be conscious. If so, it becomes very likely that, at some stage, minds on earth could somehow link to those higher forms of consciousness.
Who knows how? Maybe by some kind of telepathy. But if there was a direct connection at some stage between human consciousness and other forms of consciousness in the universe, then when that contact was established there would have been a big transition. It could have been stimulated by drugs, or by other means. But however it happened, this connection with other forms of consciousness would have transformed human nature.
RA: Terence, can I remind you of a quotation from the front pages of your first book? You speculated that mushroom spores are intergalactic travelers, that they have a hard case impervious to ultraviolet rays which enables them to float on the galactic wind from planetary system to planetary system, bringing us linguistic communications from other life forms, including immaterial life forms that they’ve been in conversation with in the past. I think this is an approximate summary of your premise.
TM: But notice how materialist and space-and-time bound that hypothesis is. I could agree with everything Rupert said. I think now our intellectual tool-kit has been enriched by the virtual confirmation of the idea that there is a Bell-type, nonlocal aspect to the universe, as in quantum entanglement. So I do think we’re in contact with all intelligence in the universe through quantum nonlocal connections. But that means that this connection has no history. It has always been there complete and entire. So while there is a sense of progressing toward it, or it’s erupting through into normal earthbound affairs, it is not because someone in the Andromeda galaxy makes a decision, “Now we will reveal ourselves to the earthlings.” It’s that the antennae system and the nervous system of the earthlings evolved to a point that suddenly this connection became self-evident.
RA: Now we’re coming to the question for the first time in the enlarged context, where which we have, not only all space, but all time informing us. And here I may remind you of Father Bede’s letter (see Chapter 11), where he challenges us to consider the mystical element, which he describes, more or less, in the language of David Bohm’s implicate order—that all time and space somehow exist as an interconnected ball of intelligence.
Let’s just assume that the science of our colleagues is more or less a true story of evolution. There was a change and language did come upon us at a certain moment. Before that moment we didn’t speak; afterward we did. So the question arises: How could it be, with or without divine intervention, that there is this progress in human intelligence, culture, capability, tool-using, and exponential population growth, that it is correlated without any causal implication with the descent of the novelty wave?
TM: Novelty Theory would just say the universe is a complexity-conserving engine. Whatever complexity it achieves, by any means, it makes that the platform for a further thrust into deeper complexity.
RA: Because the morphic field never forgets.
TM: They forget a little. They can be set back, but they can never be set back to zero, and once they get out of the ditch, they always head back in the same direction, They have a vector field preference.
Then you mention David Bohm. His idea of emergent properties seems to achieve the same end as novelty theory. He simply says that when you complexify a system, new properties will emerge suddenly and unexpectedly that couldn’t have been predicted. Both Emergence Theory and Novelty Theory predict that the universe would proceed along the line of complexification of morphogenetic expression, density of connectivity, and all the things that retard entropy and give rise to the complex, nonentropic, ordered, apparently teleologically-informed cosmos that we’re in.
RA: Now we see that you’ve revealed a kind of evolutionary theory as a cosmological hypothesis. This is a theological position, basically that there is timeless, implicate order. According to this position there is life on planet Earth, and in the rest of the universe, which evolves according to this theoretical rule by an increase of complexity. When something is revealed there’s a development. It’s not forgotten; it builds upon that. This mystical unity, while knowing all, is not telling all, b
ut revealing gradually—because that’s just the law of life, as we know it. Is that what you’re saying?
TM: From my point of view, the only difference between the morphic field that Rupert has enthusiastically proposed, and the ideas of my Novelty Theory is for me it’s pulled from the future. For Rupert it’s pushed from the past. What you get at the end of the day is the same thing. It’s just a matter of preference and how much of orthodoxy you want to grind against. The phobia against telos—against ends, goals or purposes—is an artifact of nineteenth century rationalism and that doesn’t go very deep. You described the complexification of the universe as self-evident, and I believe it is self-evident. The failure of science to address this is what makes it so frustrating.
The Evolutionary Mind Page 2
