If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa. ― John Hemingway
This post looks at the evolutionary magic of how consciousness became twice born over thousands of years in Africa. Twice born through our need to communicate by using the symbolic nature of language to describe our experience of life. Creating a flow of attention + awareness towards the reality of the world that differs from any other creature on the planet, as we learned to overlay the momentary (millisecond) nature of perceptual events with names.
Creating thousands of names for our human experience and many names for the same experience. A pattern still replicated all over the planet as people grow into the experience of being human. The blog/book represents my decades long journey to develop a whole life perspective on the experience of being and belief.
Following an intuition that many ancient sayings and stories allude to a need for illusion transcending perceptual wisdom. After spending most of my life confusing my intellectual ability to master information with my intuitive sense of insight and understanding. An intuitive ability that inexplicably involves both my body and my mind in that way implied by the not-two meaning of non-duality.
Inexplicable in the way I’ve looked at this photo of an African mother and her child and the punch line from a long forgotten song has leapt to mind, "how long has this been going on?" And I’m uninspired by the way psychologists explain this experience as an ear-worm. I mean, how did Ella Fitzgerald’s voice singing that song appear in my head when I looked at this photo and thought about humanity’s universal experience?
How was that song created within my conscious mind at one particular moment of time? When I was thinking about the best way to explain the twice born experience of consciousness. How do such experiences happen and is it realistic to call them perceptual events?
Is there more to our body-mind experiences and life in this solar system than we can comprehend? Why did I have experiences of a being turning in space and why is it so hard to talk about such things? Honestly, whenever I try to talk about my abnormal, for want of a better word, experiences with other people, their looks of suspicion signal danger.
So I learned to hold my tongue and follow Joseph Campbell’s advice about reading many books, hoping to understand the heavenly rapture our wisest ancestors seemed to have experienced. Following my intuition about a universal experience that can usher in a Messianic Age in our world today. Which, considering how a war in Europe is undermining global stability, probably feels totally unjustifiable and irrational?
Yet, as we have been exploring throughout this blog/book, what is rationality? Does every human being experience reality-wise illusions because we reify reality? Has a twice born experience of consciousness repeated the same developmental pattern in every human life since our emergence in Africa? Can we look into the eyes of our family pets or the eyes of newly born humans and say there is no consciousness there?
Can we honestly say that the universal experience of learning to speak a language is not an experience of consciousness becoming twice born? And do human adults both forget and ignore the universal experience of conception, birth, and infancy? Doesn’t every human being on the planet share these experiences of conception, birth and infancy on our journey to becoming an adult?
Are 21st-century adults guilty of ignoring the mounting evidence of our origins in Africa for the sake of maintaining cultural beliefs that have passed their used by date? Beliefs that, by enlarge, we do not discover or create for ourselves, but learn from our parents and institutionalized systems of education. While historically, both written and orally speaking, has every true wisdom seeker followed the path of a rigorous self-cross-examination of their personal experience of belief? And is it not true that everything in this world, like food and life, has it’s used by date?
Did ancient wisdom seekers develop meditation practices that explore the illusory qualities of our human beliefs? Is our adult-level consciousness held prisoner by illusory beliefs, regardless of our skin color, cultural or societal creeds, and regardless of our scientific or religious inclinations? And as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave seems to suggest, is there one meditation practice that can manifest a universally genuine sense of being, belief and purpose?
Does Our African Unconscious: The Black Origins of Mysticism and Psychology by Edward Bruce Bynum complement and add to the matter with things perspective of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World? Especially the perspective on humanity’s origins discussed in the section titled: PSYCHONEUROLOGY AND THE SOLAR LOGOS (pp.. 184-185) Kindle edition.
A section I read with a profound feeling of synchronization about what is happening in our world today. I felt a curious sense of synchronicity as I watched a brutal attack on the freedom of being and belief unfolding in Ukraine. As Bynum’s book brought the most enlightening read I’ve experienced in a long-time, after a year practicing an imbibe form of Cosmos inhabiting meditation fermented the question below.
“Could we learn to inhabit the cosmos the way our wisest ancestors did, with an experienced understanding of the inhibiting role of our brain’s frontal lobes?” By contemplating how our conscious sense of being and belief developed from infancy and mimics the way humanity’s conscious sense of reality developed in Africa? And how our personal history mimics the history of all humanity, in the way we satisfy a subconscious drive for attachment, both physically and psychologically?
Can you accept as true the growing evidence that our human anatomy has not changed at all for at least 30 to 40,000 years? Or that our adaptive human behaviors are more about ritual than rationality, like the ritual of a 78,000-year-old burial discovered in Kenya. As we continue our contemplation of the symbolic nature of human languages? While meditating upon the communication aspect of the symbolic positioning of a child’s body?
Do you agree with the suggestion of anthropologists working at Panga ya Saidi that the arrangement of the body in a fetal position is symbolic of a womb? Symbolic also of our human expression of loss, the agonizingly felt loss of a much loved infant that upon rediscovery transcends the thousands of years since the event took place.
Imagine being an anthropologist doing this painstaking work of rediscovery and steadfastly resurrecting the reality of the past. Steadily revealing the way our ancestors felt and behaved on such overwhelmingly sad and solemn occasions. Why are sites like this considered sacred by the first inhabitants of lands all over our earth? Does a mindful sense of that burial scene create an embodied mind sense of the suggestion that the positioning of this infant’s body is a symbolic form of communication about life, love, and loss?
And when did humans first begin to use the spoken form of communication we all take for granted today? Is it true that despite the way men seem to feel that they create history, it's actually women who literally give birth to history and teach a mother tongue? Please watch a video about Humanity’s Twice Born form of Consciousness:
The video uses footage from the Australian TV series DNA Nation and the Studio Canal movie BE’BE’S to ask perceptual wisdom questions such as: Who are we? What are we? What is consciousness? What is human consciousness? A twice born experience? As old as humankind? The twice born experience of every human being?
Was Africa where humanity was born? Where humankind first developed spoken language? Is learning to speak how our consciousness becomes twice born? Is learning to speak how every human being develops beliefs? No matter where we live or the language we speak?
Is science shedding light on our human origins and the origins of speech? Is the way we humans learn to speak an adaptive behavior unchanged for thousands of years? Does mother Africa contain the fossil records of the first humans to speak? With a maternal record of humanity’s DNA and a maternal record of speech?
Are women, especially mothers, the primary care givers of humanity? Are mothers the primary teachers of speech? Do you remember when and how you learned to speak? Do you remember your first thought and spoken word? Are spoken words first of all, thoughts? Or the ideas that begin to form our mind, when we first begin to speak?
What is human consciousness before we begin to speak? Is the adaptive way we learn to speak how consciousness becomes twice born?
Does the idea of a Mitochondrial Eve mother of all living humans today feel true when we look at the geological history of continental drift? Is research into the unseen nature of our human condition steadily creating an understanding of the role traumatic experience may have played in the evolution of our brain? As reported in this article about scientists observing how memory forms within a living brain and ongoing research here.
And considering the role images and sound play in our increasingly globalized world, where the internet is leveling the playing field of access to information, like Breakthroughs in Neuroscience and Other Biology. Is the daily reality of being human and holding beliefs a complicated process or a simple one, as people like Socrates seem to suggest? Do we fool ourselves into believing that projecting names onto our continuous experience are truthful definitions of our reality?
Do human beliefs about meaning and life’s purpose have a use by date, just like food and every one of our lives does? Is it possible to create a global synthesis of being and beliefs that can recapture a lost sense of cosmic meaning and purpose? Is that what the current era of globalization is really about if we were to embrace mother nature’s wisdom of death and rebirth?
Can every human being alive today learn to embody the purpose and meaning of life and the reason for humanity’s creation? Is this what ongoing revelations about the historical reality of the past and revelations about our non-conscious motivation are bringing into the present? Is humanity moving through a historical era our ancestors understood because they were more in touch with reality than we are today?
And if we contemplate the idea that our ancestors had a better grasp of reality than we do, like the womb-like nature of a little girl’s burial in Kenya? Should we look to similar expressions of a time transcending grasp of creation in the creations of our ancestors? The creation of perfect structures and perfect stories, designed to impress and inspire people to work for the future, for example? An idea that inspired me to spend time in Greece and Egypt on my way back to Kenya.
And I’ve felt a resonant sense of time and place when walking out of the airport in Mombasa on three separate occasions, yet, just as I can’t explain the embodied magic of Ella Fitzgerald’s amazing voice appearing in my mind, I can’t explain internal experiences using my externally focused vocabulary of commonsense. My vernacular (spoken by ordinary people) sense of reality.
Nor can I explain why I’ve started reading Muata Ashby’s book THE KEMETIC TREE OF LIFE: Newly Revealed Ancient Egyptian Cosmology Mysticism 4 times and felt the impulse to stop. Only when I experienced being in Egypt was I able to read this contribution to rediscovering the illusion transcending wisdom of our ancestors. As I continue my meditating for the purpose of embodiment efforts to understand the purpose of ancient wisdom sayings and stories.
Our Social & Solar Reality
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change;
until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds. ― R. D. Laing
In a month, my mind conceives as June, during an experience of time named a year and numbered 2022, my desire for perceptual wisdom continued. And after writing the previous section during March, April and early May, I spent 10 days in Greece and three weeks in Egypt, pursuing my need to comprehend how ancient wisdom seekers understood the reality of our solar system. Pondering how wise philosophers and a grassroots experience of Ubuntu informed the creation of humanity’s first civilizations.
R. D. Laing’s intuitive thoughts about our human failings and this image of worship from ancient Egypt seem to encompass the problem of experiencing perceptual wisdom. For me, it brings the riddle of the ancient proverb about wisdom being more excellent for those who see the sun full circle. As, I suspect, the era of Akhenaten’s religious revolution did for Egypt's creation story of Ra. Which I think professor Brian Cox compliments in The Sun: God Star
Because this BBC2 television series introduces episode 1 with these salient words about life and meaning: “Since the first star lit up the universe, they have been engines of creation. Professor Brian Cox reveals how, ultimately, stars brought life and meaning to the universe.” And just like the symbolic positioning of the child’s body, thousands of years before, Akhenaten dedicated a symbolically meaningful scene from daily life to the Aten - (sun disk). Signifying to my mind the lived experience of meaning and the roots of our religious, scientific, and spiritual beliefs.
Just as the simplicity of Ubuntu philosophy’s, “I am because you are and we are because they were” explained the roots of humanity’s beliefs on my return to Africa. As I continued to torment myself with ideas of how to make the past, present, so other people can confirm it with their own experience. How to experience the illusion transcending perceptual wisdom of "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity."
The universal sharing of mother earth as our home and father sun as the primary source of every human life, as signified in the pictorial tribute to the Aten and the seven last words of Jesus. And just as we experience the way a picture is worth a thousand words, can we experience how this tribute to the Aten speaks for thousands of generations?
For example, can we make the past present with the universal experience that underpins all philosophical, religious, scientific, and spiritual beliefs? To develop an embodied understanding of how rivers of cultural beliefs flowed out of Africa with humanity’s journey to the present? Can we move beyond assumptions of a world populated by us and them, by experiencing the personal meaning of salvation?
Could we develop an embodied understanding of perceptual wisdom sayings and symbolic images by comprehending the salvation signified in the golden image above and the seven last sayings of Jesus? Just as every culture is facing levels of catastrophe all over the world right now.
The threats of pandemic diseases, fire, flood, famine, climate change, and war, which many people experience and use the word Biblical to define. A word google describes in two interesting ways: 1. relating to or contained in the Bible."the biblical account of creation" 2. resembling the language or style of the Bible. “there is a biblical cadence in the last words he utters”
What on Earth? “The biblical account of creation?” “There is a biblical cadence in the last words he utters?” How can we make sense of humanity’s 21st-century experience of catastrophe with an embodied experience of the Bible’s salvation wisdom? Or an embodied experience of Akhenaten’s religious revolution, and the 7 last sayings of Jesus? Should we explore the idea that the Bible delivers human history in a metaphorical form, for example?
That there are puzzling words of wisdom designed to make people question their culturally inherited beliefs? Like these words from the biblical account of creation; “and God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness?” (Genesis 1:26) Or “and God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them?” (Genesis 1:27) Or “Jehovah God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever?” (Genesis 3:22).
Who wrote these words and why write “let us make man in our image, after our likeness?” Why write “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever?” Were these words dictated by a supernatural being named God, as many people believe? Or are such words inspired by perceptual wisdom experiences and written by people who rigorously self-cross-examined their experience of being and belief?
And was the personal trail of self-cross-examination behind the biblical account of creation and religious revolutions in Egypt and Israel? Does any sincere and successful trail of self-cross-examination revolve around the twice born nature of being and belief? What experiences did our wisest ancestors put themselves through to attain the perceptual wisdom that informed humanity’s first civilizations and cultural beliefs that have lasted for thousands of years?
Questions that inspired my trip to Egypt after reading the book Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, by James K. Hoffmeier. A book I read after noticing the synchronous nature of how Easter Sunday in Sydney coincided with a full-moon descending towards the Western horizon as the sun rose over the horizon of the East. An experience that happened only days after filming another North—South axis example of my intuitions about the symbolic and historical power of Jesus on the cross at Bondi Beach.
Traveling to Egypt to film sunrise at the temples of Abu Simbel and contemplate the reason for their construction. Then doing the same thing at the temples of Karnak and Luxor, to piece salvation wisdom’s mystery puzzle together. Trying to experience the past as the immediacy of the present and develop more depth of insight and understanding about the twice born nature of being and belief. Looking for more ways to show people how well-informed and adaptive realizations can change our sense of reality and bring matter, mind’s and hearts together.
Still driven by the ancient proverbs, mind-bending advice about wisdom being more excellent for those who see the sun. While experiencing the massive presence of the Great Pyramid of Giza, with its extraordinary 4-directions alignment once topped with gold, affirmed my sense of the need for illusion transcending perceptual wisdom.
Still curious about to how to transform R. D. Laing’s intuitive comment on the failings of my everyday consciousness into a more embodied and more adaptive realization. I believe this will be the fate of humanity’s generation alpha as they change the course of history through a perceptual revolution that will sweep the planet like the lived experience of dawn.
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