Yet perhaps the collective memories before this time contain some of the most important secrets. Things we ought to pay attention to if we are to flourish and not suffer in the coming era.
The earliest memories the oral traditions contain reach back and vividly depict a time of Chaos and destruction, out of which the present era emerged or (re)emerged.
While that time of chaos and destruction is regarded by most of the Western world as the present beginning of civilization, some indigenous cultures around the world retain memories of previous “worlds” which arose and were destroyed. These are generally not interpreted to be literal “worlds”, but phases of human life on earth before its current manifestation.
In nearly every case, the basic story is that humanity grew corrupt, evil, and exploitative and was destroyed by Chaos as a consequence of their actions.
Those could be purely myth, and / or they could be hiding a deeper Reality that we would be Wise to rediscover.
It may be that we will never know whether these memories passed down through the millennia are “true” in the sense of factual historical facts and events.
However we might be wise to regard them as True in the archetypical sense. We might be wise to regard them as True in the sense of accurately articulating the universal Patterns of human behavior and its consequences.
In this sense, the distilled Wisdom that grandparents have thought it wise to save and transmit over thousands of years, stripped of all the irrelevant facts that cloud the central Moral of the Story, may be the most “True” things that we know, because they have lasted the longest and been tested by the most grandparents.
At every stage of human history, we would have been wiser to follow the total aggregated wisdom of grandparents, rather than the whims of whatever new thing we thought we had discovered at the time, or whatever impulses we decided to chase.
Forward to 8.10 A Few Ancient Memories
Back to 8.8 When We Awakened And Transformed
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