# Progressive Summary Our consciousness, rooted in human supremacy and separation from nature, is driving the 6th mass extinction. This operates as a bedrock assumption that shapes our social and political systems. A similar situation prevailed in Chinese society several thousand years ago, before it went through a cultural transformation under the influence of Taoism and Buddhism. This gives us hope that a similar transformation might occur in the modern era. In fact, it has already begun, with the discovery of Lucretius, the Indigenous critique of Europe, the writings of Alexander con Humboldt, the Romantics, the American Transcendentalists, existentialism, and poetry and art in the 20th century. Hinton views Taoism, Lucretius and von Humboldt as protagonists in a revolutionary project to “secularize the sacred while at the same time investing the secular with sacred properties.” The second part has a lot of similarities with Gaia Alchemy. Seen from the perspective of vast Gaian time, what is happening now is completely natural, part of the alchemical process of dissolution, so that new forms can be created. # Structured Notes ## Definitions Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) - extends from the earliest known use of stone tools (c. 3.3 million years ago) to the end of the Pleistocene, c 11650 cal BP. Humans were primarily hunter gatherers. Neolithic (New Stone Age) - start date 10,000 BC, end date 2,200 BC. Humans were primarily farmers. Transcendental spirit-center - what has become known as soul within a Christian cosmology; something that is alien to this world (ie transcendent), permanent (spirit) and isolated (center). Wild mind integral to wild earth - the Paleolithic / Chinese cosmology exemplified by Zen practice, Ch’an poetry and Taoism. Believes that “humankind belongs to the Cosmos conceived as a living and self-generating tissue.” Tao - the living, wondrous, self-generating tissue of reality gynocentric - centered on or concerned exclusively with women; taking a female (or specifically a feminist) point of view ahimsa - the compassionate commitment to cause no unnecessary harm pantheism - a doctrine which identifies God with the universe; a transitional belief system from a theological to a Taoist worldview; it leaves the Christian separation of human and nature intact, because the divine is still “out there” ## Ideas Before intention and choice, before knowledge and understanding, is our love for the world. Togetherness and kinship are primordial. ### Cultural transformation in China Paleolithic people had a very different cosmology from ours. They did not have a dualistic understanding which separated humans from nature. When humans started farming during the Neolithic era (about ten to fifteen thousand years ago), they began seeing nature as something to be controlled, and developed a detached, instrumentalist relationship to the earth. At the same time, spirituality underwent a similar transformation, and monotheistic belief systems emerged involving deities who existed in a realm outside of nature, controlling it from above, sometimes for the benefit of humankind. In China, the Shang dynasty (1766-1040 BCE) was built on this Neolithic paradigm. It was believed that a deity known as Shang-Ti, or Lord Celestial, created and controlled everything. His spirit realm was a heaven to which people would return when they die. The Shang rulers claimed power as descendants of Shang-Ti. The rulers became tyrannical, and the Shang dynasty was replaced by the Chou dynasty (1040-223 BCE), which reinvented Shang-Ti as an impersonal Heaven. This was a transitional concept, and thinkers like Lao Tzu completed the transformation by replacing Heaven with the secular concept of Tao, which was “the generative cosmological force that drives the perennial change of earth’s natural process.” > This Tao was at the heart of a cultural framework growing out of the Paleolithic worldview that had survived beneath the Shang’s theocratic power structure. It was neither theology nor anthropomorphism, but saw the Cosmos as fundamentally mysterious, intelligent and self-organizing. Human intelligence was just one particular instance of a more general intelligence that infuses all existence. “Mind” is therefore something we share with animals and landscape and the entire Cosmos. > Mind is not a transcendental identity-center separate from and looking out on reality, as we assume in the West. It is instead woven wholly into the ever-generative tissue of a living and “intelligent” Cosmos. The great Taoist texts - I Ching (13th century BCE) - Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE) ### The transcendental spirit-center The transcendental spirit-center is the prime enabler of - the detached objectivity of modern science, which in turn uses technology to manipulate and exploit - seeing the world as a standing reserve of resources for our exploitation - neoliberal capitalism, which takes individual and human profit as its ultimate values. Neolithic turn brought wealth in the form of land ownership and stored goods, and created class distinctions. The West’s grand machine of metaphysical dualism: - Inside and outside - Subject and object - Mind and body - Human and nature - Language and reality - Spirit and matter - Heaven and earth - Self and cosmos > The West’s “soul” and its cosmology are not at all accurate or self-evident descriptions of reality. They are conjurings that appeared through vicissitudes of human evolution, becoming entrenched because they gave the species a stunning selective advantage. ### Meditation as an ecological practice With meditation, we can learn to see through this illusion. We see that thoughts appear and disappear in the same way that life appears and disappears within the Cosmos, and that we ourselves come from the same generative emptiness as everything else. When our thoughts fall silent, we can inhabit that empty ground. Meditation is a radical ecological practice. > It is a remarkably simple and direct way to heal that wound of consciousness torn from the tissue of existence. And in that healing, things begin to look different. Once mind is empty and silent, perception becomes a particularly spiritual form of ecological practice: awareness, the opening of consciousness, functions as a mirror reflecting the world with perfect clarity, allowing no distinction between inside and outside. Hence, the ten thousand things become the very content of consciousness, become indeed identity itself. This empty-mind mirroring is a celebration of absolute kinship—consciousness become the Cosmos gazing out at itself. > How strange: the Cosmos is perfectly indifferent, but through us it loves the ten thousand things of this world. ### Transformation of the West > We are irremediably post-Neolithic, shaped absolutely by the Neolithic’s instrumentalist human-nature divide. Lucretius and Taoism have a lot in common. Lucretius described nature as a generative mother, and said that change was the fundamental nature of things: creation, destruction and regeneration. He thought that consciousness was made of the same stuff as everything else. He said there was no human meaning to things, and no end or purpose which things progress towards. He said that humans are kindred to other animals, that they possess the same interior lives, and that we have a moral responsibility towards them. He rejected any notion of God who creates or controls reality according to whims and miracles, proposing instead that there is a natural explanation to everything. He believed that there were natural laws that could be understood through observation and reason. The Scientific Revolution slowly worked out the implications of Lucretius’s poem, shifting allegiance from the mythical and mythological towards the empirical and physical. Each successive discovery progressively pushed humans from the center of creation, revealing that we are a small and integral part of a vast Cosmos: - Copernicus proved the earth is not the center of the universe - Darwin showed that the human is part of the animal kingdom - Lyell showed that the earth has a geological life that predates humanity by vast stretches of time - Freud showed that the ego is not the center of identity - Hubble showed that the universe stretches out beyond us for inconceivable distances However, science also fiercely objectifies nature. > It saw ‘nature’ as a mechanistic assemblage of facts that are the object of *analysis* (a violent act of “breaking” something complex into simple elements, from the proto-Indo-European *leu*: “to divide, cut apart”) and knowledge, a resource from which data is mined - another form of that detached and instrumentalist relation to ‘nature’. It was uninterested in investing empirical reality with a compelling poetic or spiritual vision. The British Romantics were the first to imbue nature with qualities of the sacred. They were inspired both by a Lucretius and by Native American cultures - https://www.scribd.com/document/381078608/Romantic-Indians-Native-Americans-British-Literature-And-Transatlantic-Culture-1756-1830 Accounts describing Native American lifeways began appearing in print in the seventeenth century. These accounts challenged European assumptions and introduced new ideas: - Human kinship with the wild - Individual freedom - Social equality (especially for women) - Reason and empirical argument Wordsworth was influenced by the Native American vision of life, beginning to write poems under this influence in 1798. Later, Thoreau and other American intellectuals would take these ideas back to America. # Rough Notes Because of the Neolithic turn, our survival now depends on an instrumental relationship to the Earth. There’s no going back. Zen meditation is the most practical pathway to recover our kinship, through its practice of pristine mind. Alexander von Humboldt - Thought of nature as “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great who animated by the breath of life.” - Breath was a single unifying life-force inherent to the material Cosmos. - Earth was an organic whole, a living web of interrelated life, a “net-like intricate fabric”, a “wonderful web of organic life”. Hinton describes Thoreau’s Journals as the most radical work of the nineteenth century, a record of “an intense and daily mirror-deep attention to the actual immediate world, valuing and celebrating its miraculous presence as sufficient and even ravishing in its every detail.” > In preliterate cultures, language existed only as thought and speech, which move in the same generative way everything else moves: appearing, evolving, disappearing, always to be replaced by new forms. > Primal people experienced no fundamental difference between subjective and objective processes (one of the primary realizations meditation offers). We are more verb than noun, “a weave of immersion”. > Writing seems to defy the fleeting nature of our inner reality, creating the illusion of an immaterial and timeless subjective world, a mental realm of permanence that is separate from the ever-changing world in a way so fundamental it can only be described as ontological. Hence, the illusion of language (coincidental with the “soul”) as an inner realm looking out on the outer realm of empirical reality. > Further reifying this transcendental identity-center (“soul”) alien to earth, words representing the world evolved from pictographic immediacy to alphabetic script, wherein they have an arbitrary and symbolic relationship to the world of things, reinforcing this separation of subjectivity and the world. > This immaterial subjective realm created by alphabetic writing is the illusory spirit-center soul reified in Greek philosophy and Christian theology. In fact, those systems can be described as the philosophical discovery and exploration of that seemingly changeless internal realm that Neolithic lifeways and written language had recently conjured. Discovering Sartre’s La Nausea at the age of 16 was perhaps one of my first introductions to this phenomenological approach. Of inscendence. We can’t solve the ecological crisis by adopting a better set of ideas, because ideas don’t exist in a separate realm of their own. This would be to perpetuate Plato’s transcendental error. Ideas grow out of, and serve, biology. Our unique intelligence allowed us to outcompete every other species on this planet, but only for awhile. It has reached the end of its competitive advantage, however, as Gaia acts to restore balance. > We are in the end wholly unborn through and through. As we move up the archaeological strata of unborn mind, we find that perception, mental states, and ideas are each in their turn imprints of reality, and entangled with it. As Jeremy Lent put it in The Patterning Instinct: > Our modern world is the result of the runaway success of one of the most powerful cognitive patterns in history. # Quotes