We will never have any more than faint glimpses back through the layers, clues, discoveries, and stories of our past.
It is like we are back to the campfire in the jungle; the Known and the Unknown. The light of our campfire shows us some of our immediate surroundings in Time and Space, yet beyond that we are squinting and searching the darkness for forms and clues.
While the faint glimmer of the campfire of recorded history only shines a light back a few thousand years into the darkness of the past, One only knows how far back our stories and collective memories reach.
At the faint outer reaches of the written light in the third millennium BC, we see only a few scattered memories and anecdotes, mixed in right on the edge of the deep oral stories and memories arising out of the collective consciousness.
The most ancient coherent texts that humanity has discovered to date are from around the third millennium BC. They are mere fragments and tiny glimpses of what must have been a truly awe inspiring reality. It appears that writing may have independently developed in multiple civilizations, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt between 3100 and 3400 BC, China by 1200 BC, and South America by 500 BC.
Everything before 3,000 BC is generally known as Prehistory. It is entirely devoid of narrative light outside of the sacred stories and oral traditions which have managed to survive and reach us today. Yet we may come to find out that these narrative stories are the source of far more Truth than tiny fragments of writing from millennia ago.
The tiny fragments contain a few concrete words.
The oral traditions contains abstract Patterns Of Action and Wisdom.
One of the specific features of work of the Meta Project is to intentionally research and gather up our Collective Inheritance, which is the knowledge, wisdom, stories, and culture of humanity to date.
That edge of memory, at least in the present cycle, reaches back to a time when there were less than 1 million beings scattered throughout the earth, perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.
We know that around this time, human beings awakened, dramatically transformed, and began to transform the world the around them. It is the approximate start of our current series of remembered events, with only a few scattered memories and stories to sum up the lived experience of millions of people throughout the millennia.
This stage in history is sometimes called the Neolithic Revolution, Formative Stage, or First Agricultural Revolution. This revolution was marked by the introduction (or possibly re-introduction) of agriculture, which led to a profound transformation in the patterning of human culture and settlement.
Without understanding this, we cannot understand the problems we have created, or imagine how we might solve them.
Prior to the start of this cycle in history, it is generally believed that the relatively few people scattered across the world were organized as relatively simple nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures.
These small groups of humans around the world likely migrated with nature and its cycles, constructed temporary shelters, had no discernible permanent villages, and lived in total balance and awe with Nature. One or two million people utterly dependent on the flourishing of their environment for survival likely would have had a negligible impact on their surroundings as they passed through them, let alone the entirely of the Living System.
It was an entirely different place. Small bands of humans, with fresh memories of the terrors and joys of the past alive in their oral traditions, face to face with the sheer power and mystery of the natural and spiritual realms they were learning to navigate.
Beyond 10,000 BC, many of the oral traditions and lineages vanish. Beyond this point, the story of humanity is opaque emergence that quickly dissolves from the viewpoint of millennia into the universal history of Creation and Destruction unfolding over the eons.
Forward to 8.9 Revisiting The Outer Reaches Of Memory
Back to 8.7 The Sixth Stanza
Back to table of contents The Book of Lionsberg