How do the lines in the palm of our hands equate to the hand of the god of this place? 

What is the difference between all of the other primates and humans?

The world is a sacred place – and what is humanity’s role in this sacred place?

But the world wasn’t ready for a man to rule it, what did he have to do to the world in order for it to be ready to be rules?

“…and this is the similarity in their spiritual outlook. Again, it’s commonplace to imagine that an enormous gulf separates East and West in this regard, but the two of them look like twins to me, because they’re both obsessed by the strange idea that people need to be saved.”

In western psychology, there is a noted shift in human consciousness from collective to individual that took place roughly 500 BCE.

The advent of the first “universal“ religions or philosophies also emerged at roughly this time to include early writings and emergence of what would become Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sophistry, Greek Philosophy, Brahmanic-Sanskrit Philosophy, etc.

Why this change in human understanding and how did it lead to a need to be saved? Saved from what?

“Totalitarian agriculture is more than a means of getting what you need to live, it’s the foundation for the most laborious lifestyle ever developed on this planet. This comes as a shock to many listeners, but there isn’t any question about it: No one works harder to stay alive than the people of our culture do.”

So why did the earliest members of our culture choose this lifestyle if it’s so much work?

“…about ten thousand years ago, people began to abandon the foraging life in favor of agriculture.”

“Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world ten thousand years ago, when our particular style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, our style, is one I call totalitarian agriculture, in order to stress the way it subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by the enormous food surpluses generated uniquely by this style of agriculture, a rapid population growth occurred among its practitioners, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated all other lifestyles in its path (including those based on other styles of agriculture). This expansion and obliteration of lifestyles continued without a pause in the millennia that followed, eventually reaching the New World in the fifteenth century and continuing to the present moment…”

http://tainogallery.com/history/lifestyle/

What is the inherent challenge with the historical approach to understanding the human experience?

“In this way human history is reduced to the period exactly corresponding to the history of our culture, with the other ninety-nine-point-seven percent of the human story discarded as a mere prelude.”

“Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time. History and archaeology had put it beyond doubt that agriculture and civilization were just a few thousand years old, but paleontology put it beyond doubt that humanity was millions of years old. Paleontology made it impossible to believe that Man had been born an agriculturalist and a civilization-builder. Paleontology forced us to conclude that Man had been born something else entirely—a forager and a homeless nomad—and this is what had been forgotten in the Great Forgetting.”

When it was discovered- how did the intellectual and scientific community respond?

Step 2 of the great adventure