When I was a child, I often had a sense of a numinous otherness floating somewhere just beyond the limits of awareness, an intimation I found reflected in the fantasy stories I loved -- but not much of anywhere else.
As I reached adolescence, I felt under increasing pressure to
prove my right to grownup status by admitting
that true reality was, by and large, far more like the world depicted
in the
realistic
mid-20th century novels I hated. That sort of concession to an
unpalatable and desolate vision of existence was generally held to mark
the main difference between children and adults back then, and I could not see how I had any legitimate grounds for
holding out against it.
I found the prevailing "realistic" stories of failure, limitation, and occasional compromised success depressing and did my best to avoid them. But I could not refute their conclusions, which seemed to follow inescapably from the scientific knowledge of the time. I was torn between my own perceptions and the norms of society, and I did not know which to trust.
My sense of the numinous might have flickered out altogether if
it had
not been for the Sixties counterculture, which brought with it a far
more
generous sense of the potentials of reality, along with an insistance
that the way we see the world is ultimately a matter of choice. I
eventually made my own choice, which was
to deny that "realism" was a true and
accurate picture of life and to devote myself to finding reasons to
believe in something better.
In some thirty-five years of seeking, I have found many indications that our world may, in fact, be just as magical as the world of my childhood story-books -- or, at the very least, that the wisest and best among us have always lived their lives as though it were so. And it seems that I am not alone in my search, for our culture as a whole has started to lean increasingly in the direction of imagination and the marvellous.
The sketches that follow present examples from a variety of
sources
which support a radically new paradigm of human nature and human
history which is just now in the process of emerging.
The central premise of this new paradigm is that the most significant
elements
in human existence are not the constraints and limitations of the
material world, but rather the imagination, creativity, and capacity
for wonder by which we overcome those limitations and reveal new realms
of possibility.
One of the claims commonly made by twentieth century realists
was that
it is fruitless to look to the actual past for the state of wonder
presented in ancient myths and fairy tales. But what if this
claim was false?
What if ancient peoples inhabited a world vastly more expansive
and filled with possibilities than the imaginally cramped quarters we
tolerate
today? Would that change our view of our own lives? Might
it
cause us to doubt the path we have followed?
The Invention of the Neolithic
As long as prehistoric hunter-gatherers were regarded as simple-minded savages, it was difficult to explain how they could have come up with the radical innovations that marked the onset of the Neolithic, including pottery, metallurgy, and the domestication of plants and animals. The possibility that those innovations might have been developed systematically by people with a particular goal in mind and a profound knowledge of the resources at hand was never even considered. And yet it ought to have been obvious. Who, after all, would know the habits and breeding requirements of animals better than hunters? Who would know the patterns of growth and most favorable conditions for plants better than gatherers? And who would know the useful qualities of rocks and mud better than the people of the Stone Age?
The standard twentieth century story would have us believe that very little happened between the development of agriculture and the rise of civilization -- that it was a time of simple peasant villages, with few interests beyond securing the next harvest and few inventions besides ingenious domestic devices, like the technology of churning butter or spinning flax. However, it is now becoming clear that the period from roughly 7000 to 4000 BC gave rise to one of humanity's greatest intellectual breakthroughs -- the first scientific cosmology.
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Background courtesy of Eos Development