Ancestor Related Quotes

Time felt slower when we do nothing but wait.

Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals – although a case could be made for the dolphins – because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.

If you like it, you'll find a way to justify it. But if you don't , you'll find ways to falsify it.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.

People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to adhere to my ancestors' traditions and mutilate my daughters? To agree to be humiliated and powerless? To watch passively as my countrymen abuse women and slaughter each other in pointless disputes? When I came to a new culture, where I saw for the first time that human relations could be different, would it have been self-love to see that as a foreign cult, which Muslims are forbidden to practice?

Hamilton had a complaint. "Why did you have to tell the cops I'm your boyfriend? That's gross, Amy. We're related!" Amy was disgusted. "We had a common ancestor, like, five hundred years ago. Besides, if they think we're together, we only have to come up with one story, and I can do all the talking." "Hey, I got an early acceptance to Notre Dame," Hamilton said defensively. "I can talk." "Of course you can," Amy soothed. "It's what you say that might get us into trouble.

Class never runs scared. It is sure-footed and confident. It can handle anything that comes along. Class has a sense of humor. It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations. Class never makes excuses. It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes. Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices. Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money. Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it. Class is real. It can’t be faked. Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down. Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse. Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself. If you have class, you’ve got it made. If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.

But first, I want the pleasure of telling you that you are fired. I fire you. I fire you and all your relatives. I fire your ancestors and your descendants. I fire the very air you breathe and the ground you walk upon.

When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,” I replace the word “white” with “disappear.” Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other” in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse. It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.

To the loyal and to the blood-lovers, in the good families and in the fiery dynasties, life is family and family is life. It is the same people who give advice and their vices to live well who turn out to be the ones who give resource and reason to live long.

Hate Poem I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! Fore! I hate you. The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging from under by third toenail, left foot, hates you. The history of this keychain hates you. My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases hates you. The goldfish of my genius hates you. My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors. A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious symbol of how I hate you. My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate. My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate. My pleasant “good morning”: hate. You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head under your arm? Hate. The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit practices it. My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning to night hate you. Layers of hate, a parfait. Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate, I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one individually and at leisure. My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity of my hate, which can never have enough of you, Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.

If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved or affected by those events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. And it's as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn't matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay. And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind. Opening out at last; out, out, out And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky. All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.

I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by 'arisch'. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.

The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. For one thing, we have relatively good records for the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there is no mention anywhere in any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home. And how could such a thing even be imagined? Joesph returns to Bethlehem because his ancestor David was born there. But David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to imagine that everyone in the Roman Empire was required to return to the homes of their ancestors from a thousand years earlier? If we had a new worldwide census today and each of us had to return to the towns of our ancestors a thousand years back—where would you go? Can you imagine the total disruption of human life that this kind of universal exodus would require? And can you imagine that such a project would never be mentioned in any of the newspapers? There is not a single reference to any such census in any ancient source, apart from Luke. Why then does Luke say there was such a census? The answer may seem obvious to you. He wanted Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knew he came from Nazareth ... there is a prophecy in the Old Testament book of Micah that a savior would come from Bethlehem. What were these Gospel writer to do with the fact that it was widely known that Jesus came from Nazareth? They had to come up with a narrative that explained how he came from Nazareth, in Galilee, a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, but was born in Bethlehem, the home of King David, royal ancestor of the Messiah.

Changes is the mother of time. Absence of changes makes no time.

A third layer of nativeness was composed of those whom others thought directly descended, even the tiniest fraction of their genes, from the human beings who had been brought from Africa centuries ago as slaves. While this layer of nativeness was not vast in proportion of the rest, it had vast importance, for society had been shaped in reaction to it. An unspeakable violence had occurred in relation to it, and yet it endured, fertile, a stratum of soil that perhaps made possible all future transplanted soils.

When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly pursed lips and rigid carriage: I had discovered the weight of white people in the world. I saw that this had been for my ancestors and now would be for me an awful thing to live with and that the bitterness which had helped to kill my father could also kill me.

It's just old black-and-whites,' she had said, flicking her wrist in the way one might dismiss a pile of junk mail. 'Relatives nobody remembers.' 'No,' I said, running to the box. 'Don't throw them out. I'll keep them.' I may not have known the names of the majority of the ancestors pictured inside, but it felt like a betrayal to send their memories to the landfill. I couldn't bear the thought.

You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain’t that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I’m not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is.

Mr. Wu, is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority? That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America— And on the other hand neither do you feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups. That while your community’s experience in the United States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels, including but not limited to: immigration quotas, actual federal legislation expressly excluding people who look like you from entering the country. Legislation that was in effect for almost a century. Antimiscegenation laws. Discriminatory housing policies. Alien land laws and restrictive covenants. Violation of civil liberties including internment. That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent. That the wrongs committed against your ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America. And whether or not that quantification, whether accurate or not, because of all of this you feel on some level that you maybe can’t even quite verbalize, out of shame or embarrassment, that the validity and volume of your complaints must be calibrated appropriately, must be in proportion to the aggregate suffering of your people. Your oppression is second-class.

Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.

Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents!

We are all a complete mixture;yet at the same time,we are all related.Each gene can trace its own journey to a different common ancestor.This is a quite extraordinary legacy that we all have inherited from the people who lived before us.Our genes did not just appear when we were born.They have been carried to us by millions of individual lives over thousands of generations.

Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button. In inventing tools and weapons, in contriving civilization, we have disinhibited the controls - sometimes thoughtlessly and inadvertently, but sometimes with cool premeditation. If the beasts who are our nearest relatives engaged recklessly in … mass murder they would have rendered themselves extinct. If our non-human ancestors did it, we would not be here.

My mother’s family is passionate about visiting and cleaning the graves of their deceased. Once a year, the Peeks and the Nolens would gather to clean the tombstones and plant flowers at the grave sites of their people. Once, in Piedmont, when I was a little boy, I was helping to clean a grave of an ancestor of my grandfather named Jerry Mire Peek. When I asked my cousin Clyde whom this unknown relation was named after, he said, “He was named after the prophet Jerry Mire.

Remnants is an extraordinary gift…a kind of Rosetta Stone of the African American woman’s soul – all the ‘remnants,’ the bits and pieces Rosemarie carefully saved, remembered, nurtured, in her ancestors, relatives and self coming together in this extremely useful compendium of wisdom, of sureness and insight that we will be able to use for generations to come.

But plant personhood itself is a concept as old as human culture. As we've already learned, Native philosophies from all corners of the globe often understand plants as relatives, or ancestors, or otherwise persons in their own right. It's not that plants are human, but that humans are just one kind of person, as are animals. Personhood means one has agency and volition, and the right to exist for their own sake.

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system.

I ask the ladies what we lose with each generation. They seem to agree: usually language goes first, then memories of relatives and grandparents, then traditions, then longing for home, then a sense of identity. What do we have left? A wedding ritual, a few old photos? For me, what is left is our connection to food. Our food traditions are the last thing we hold on to. They are not just recipes; they are a connection to the nameless ancestors who gave us our DNA. That's why our traditional foods are so important. The stories, the memories, the movements that have been performed for generations - without them, we lose our direction.

The many meanings of 'evolution' are frequently exploited by Darwinists to distract their critics. Eugenie Scott recommends: 'Define evolution as an issue of the history of the planet: as the way we try to understand change through time. The present is different from the past. Evolution happened, there is no debate within science as to whether it happened, and so on... I have used this approach at the college level.' Of course, no college student—indeed, no grade-school dropout— doubts that 'the present is different from the past.' Once Scott gets them nodding in agreement, she gradually introduces them to 'The Big Idea' that all species—including monkeys and humans—are related through descent from a common ancestor... This tactic is called 'equivocation'—changing the meaning of a term in the middle of an argument.

Even if we ourselves are not personally scandalized by the notion of other animals as close relatives, even if our age has accommodated to the idea, the passionate resistance of so many of us, in so many epochs and cultures, and by so many distinguished scholars, must say something important about us. What can we learn about ourselves from an apparent error so widespread, propagated by so many leading philosophers and scientists, both ancient and modern, with such assurance and self-satisfaction? One of several possible answers: A sharp distinction between humans and "animals" is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them--without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. With untroubled consciences, we can render whole species extinct--for our perceived short-term benefit, or even through simple carelessness. Their loss is of little import: Those beings, we tell ourselves, are not like us. An unbridgeable gap gas thus a practical role to play beyond the mere stroking of human egos. Darwin's formulation of this answer was: "Animals whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equals.

The Satrap will cede you to Chalced, or sell you to New Traders without even a moment of consideration. He doesn’t care, Althea. Not about his honor, or his ancestor’s pledge or the people of Bingtown. He doesn’t even care about the citizens of Jamaillia. He is so engrossed in himself, he cannot perceive anything except as it relates to him.

This insight was that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic (German-related languages) and Celtic all traced their origin back to a common ancestor.

began to follow all of my thoughts and was surprised how many didn’t belong to me. And how many had threads to ancestors, relatives, strangers, even plants, elements, and animals.

The notes one of my uncles (who had the same kind of curiosity in collecting family anecdotes) once put into my hands, furnished me with several particulars relating to our ancestors.

Joseph sighed. “I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just … very different.” “Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.

No sane paleontologist would ever claim that he or she had discovered "The Ancestor." Think about it this way: What is the chance that while walking through any random cemetery on our planet I would discover an actual ancestor of mine? Diminishingly small. What I would discover is that all people buried in these cemeteries-- no mater whether that cemetery is in China, Botswana, or Italy-- are related to me to different degrees. I can find this out by looking at their DNA with many of the forensic techniques in use in crime labs today. I'd see that some of the denizens of the cemeteries are distantly related to me, others are related more closely. This tree would be a very powerful window into my past and my family history. It would also have a practical application because I could use this tree to understand my predilection to get certain diseases and other facts of my biology. The same is true when we infer relationship among species.

With this approach, we found that at least some Neanderthal-related genetic material came into the ancestors of present-day non-Africans eighty-six thousand to thirty-seven thousand years ago.20

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to retie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened herself she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room.

Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number. In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.

Not knowing the DNA we carry in our bodies, hearts, and minds. does not negate it. We are an accumulation of many people, even more so when unaware of it. Once aware, we can choose what to carry and what to relegate to history.

When we’re still young, many of us are determined to be different from our parents. We say we’ll never make our children suffer. But when we grow up we tend to behave just like our parents, and we make others suffer because, like our ancestors, we don’t know how to handle the energies we’ve inherited. We’ve received many positive and negative seeds from our parents and ancestors. They transmitted their habit to us because they didn’t know how to transform it.

All modern humans are related to what scientists call "Mitochondrial Eve." This refers to our common matrilineal ancestor. She lived approximately 200,000 years ago and depending on how you estimate the length of a generation, we are only 5,000 to 10,000 generations from one another. To put it another way, each of us is a cousin of one another at most 10,000 times removed. And yes, Mitochondrial Eve lived in Africa, so, in a very real way, we are all Africans.

The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a somewhat confusing organization—as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

The crucial importance of human expectations has far-reaching implications for understanding the history of happiness. If happiness depended only on objective conditions such as wealth, health and social relations, it would have been relatively easy to investigate its history. The finding that it depends on subjective expectations makes the task of historians far harder. We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillisers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure, and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

Like it or not,we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.” Nikanj smoothed its head tentacles. “It’s safer for your people to overcome the feeling on an individual basis than as members of a large group. That’s why we’ve handled this the way we have.

Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.

Thirdly. It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions.

The relative complexity of modern society offers the further benefit of convincing the youth that their parents are idiots, that all of their ancestors were uncivilized morons, and that their heritage is rooted inextricably in primitive and immoral thinking. This encourages the youth to reject their parents, their ancestors, their traditions, and wisdom in favor of the arbitrary demands and assertions of the establishment.

Divine creator, father, mother, son as one . . . If I, my family, relatives, and ancestors have offended you, your family, relatives, and ancestors in thoughts, words, deeds, and actions from the beginning of our creation to the present, we ask your forgiveness. . . . Let this cleanse, purify, release, cut all the negative memories, blocks, energies, and vibrations and transmute these unwanted energies to pure light. . . . And it is done.

To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.

I later read a survey about Southerners' knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor. This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them. But Alabaman's seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King's famous speech. "I have a dream," he said, of an Alabama where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world. Do you not hear the words of God (Blessed and Almighty is He!): ‘Fight them until there is no more persecution, and worship is devoted to God’?” Where possible, this fight would be gradualist and peaceful. Toward non-Muslims, so long as they did not oppose the movement and paid it adequate respect, the early Muslim Brotherhood counseled “protection,” “moderation and deep-rooted equity.” Foreigners were to be treated with “peacefulness and sympathy, so long as they behave with rectitude and sincerity.” Therefore, it was “pure fantasy” to suggest that the implementation of “Islamic institutions in our modern life would create estrangement between us and the Western nations.

In 1913, an old woman died in a village of the canton of Putzig (Prussia). The deaths of seven family members followed soon after, and it was declared that the deceased had not found rest and was drawing her relatives to her. Feeling himself going into a decline, one of the old woman's sons asked for advice from those around him. He was told to exhume the cadaver, decapitate it, and place the head between the feet. He followed this advice, and shortly afterward he said he was feeling much better.

Tyson emails back: “I’m going to tell you the same thing that I told Henry Louis Gates” (Gates had asked Tyson to appear on his show Finding Your Roots): My philosophy of root-finding may be unorthodox. I just don’t care. And that’s not a passive, but active absence of caring. In the tree of life, any two people in the world share a common ancestor—depending only on how far back you look. So the line we draw to establish family and heritage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of achieving, I don’t look to family lineage, I look to all human beings. That’s the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Gandhi and MLK, the bravery of Joan of Arc, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. Couldn’t care less if I were a descendant of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the valorous or cowardly. My life is what I make of it.

Darwin’s transcendantly democratic insight that all humans are descended from the same non-human ancestors, that we are all members of one family, is inevitably distorted when viewed with the impaired vision of a civilization permeated by racism. White supremacists seized on the notion that people with high abundances of melanin in their skin must be closer to our primate relatives than bleached people. Opponents of bigotry, perhaps fearing that there might be a grain of truth in this nonsense, were just as happy not to dwell on our relatedness to the apes. But both points of view are located on the same continuum: the selective application of the primate connection to the veldt and the ghetto, but never, ever, perish the thought, to the boardroom or the military academy or, God forbid, to the Senate chamber or the House of Lords, to Buckingham Palace or Pennsylvania Avenue. This is where the racism comes in, not in the inescapable recognition that, for better or worse, we humans are just a small twig on the vast and many-branched tree of life.

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.

One of the biggest shifts in the last decade of anthropology, one of the discoveries in the field that has changed everything, is the realization that we evolved as cooperative breeders. Bringing up kids in a nuclear family is a novelty, a blip on the screen of human family life. We never did child rearing alone, isolated and shut off from others, or with just one other person, the child’s father. It is arduous and anomalous and it’s not the way it “should” be. Indeed, for as long as we have been, we have relied on other females—kin and the kindly disposed—to help us raise our offspring. Mostly we lived as Nisa did—in rangy, multifamily bands that looked out for one another, took care of one another, and raised one another’s children. You still see it in parts of the Caribbean today, where any adult in a small town can tell any kid to toe the line, and does, and the kids listen. Or in Hawaii, where kids and parents alike depend on hanai relationships—aunties and uncles, indispensible honorary relations who take a real interest in an unrelated child’s well-being and education. No, it wasn’t fire or hunting or the heterosexual dyad that gave us a leg up, anthropologists now largely concur; it was our female Homo ancestors holding and handling and caring for and even nursing the babies of other females. That is in large part why Homo sapiens flourished and flourish still, while other early hominins and prehominins bit the dust. This shared history of interdependence, of tending and caring, might explain the unique capacity women have for deep friendship with other women. We have counted on one another for child care, sanity, and survival literally forever. The loss of your child weighs heavily on me in this web of connectedness, because he or she is a little bit my own.

The first is that the relationships among all forms of matter are ones of kinship; everything that exists is, in a fairly literal sense, related to everything else. The stone that is the ancestor Raukawa is also, in its own right, an ancestor, being part of the same continuum of creation as the man and the ancestral hero. The second is that the mechanism of creation for everything in the world—not just humans, animals, and gods but even things that we would describe as inorganic, like sand and stones—is a form of sexual reproduction. Creation in traditional Polynesian myths is, fundamentally, a matter of procreation.

It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions. When we peruse the first histories of all nations, we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at present. Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page, in proportion as we advance nearer the enlightened ages, we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvelous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.

Grandparents For many peoples of black Africa, ancestors are the spirits that live in the tree beside your house or in the cow grazing in the field. The great-grandfather of your great-great-grandfather is now that stream snaking down the mountainside. Your ancestor could also be any spirit that decides to accompany you on your voyage through the world, even if he or she was never a relative or an acquaintance. The family has no borders, explains Soboufu Somé of the Dagara people: “Our children have many mothers and many fathers. As many as they wish.” And the ancestral spirits, the ones that help you make your way, are the many grandparents that each of you has. As many as you wish.

The theoretical perspective of worldmaking and the concrete task of climate justice both force us to contend with the immense scale of injustice and thus the immense scale of the struggle for justice. It may well be outside of any generation’s ability to win outright. But if we choose to relate to the world as ancestors, we can prevent this realization from overwhelming us into political paralysis. Many of the things that we do every day link us with countless people who have come before us and—if we succeed at preventing the worst climate outcomes—countless people who will come after us. We can do the spiritual work to act from this knowledge and faith right now. The world depends on it.

Vulcan is long gone, almost completely forgotten. It may seem today to be merely a curiosity, just another mistake our ancestors made, about which we now know better. But the issue of what to do with failure in science was tricky right at the start of the Scientific Revolution, and it remains so now. We may—we do—know more than the folks back then. But we are not thus somehow immune to the habits of mind, the leaps of imagination, or the capacity for error that they possessed. Vulcan’s biography is one of the human capacity to both discover and self-deceive. It offers a glimpse of how hard it is to make sense of the natural world, and how difficult it is for any of us to unlearn the things we think are so, but aren’t.

The distinctiveness that we have so assiduously ascribed to ourselves as humans is, in reality, an accident of history. Imagine, for instance, how much more distinct we could have claimed our species to be had all the great apes become extinct before we began pondering our position in the world of nature. If vervet monkeys were our closet relatives, humans would indeed appear to stand separate. Equally, if the species of hominid that links us to our common ancestor with the African apes had not become extinct, the gap between us and chimpanzees would be closed all the way. Gradations between human and ape would be present at every step, and our revered distinctiveness would vanish. It is simply a contingent fact of history that certain species did become extinct during the past five million years, leaving us to compare ourselves with the African apes as our closest living relatives. And it is a sobering fact of current history that the comparison between humans and apes may soon become virtually artificial, as each species of ape faces extinction in its natural populations. If this happens, it means we will lose the opportunity to learn about ourselves from our nearest living relatives, just at the time that we have indeed recognized them as our relatives. It also means that we will have frittered away our one remaining chance to allow our sibling species to live the way of life for which they, and we, co-evolved across the millennia.

Scientists know your DNA reflects the genetic legacy of your parents, their parents, and your ancestors. It’s possible that it also reflects their emotional experiences. As researchers learn more about our DNA, maybe we’ll find that our cells have encoded the traumas of our ancestors. Experiments in mice have shown that aversion to certain smells is passed down to the offspring after the parental mice were trained to avoid a certain smell by being shocked every time they smelled it.8 While we know that a family history of heart disease may mean close relatives share genes and genetic markers, if we look back, we can often see in family stories hearts that are broken, conflicted, and prevented from loving fully. In my family, people tend to die of heart disease prematurely. My maternal

Our northern brethren buried their dead, were skilled toolmakers, kept fires going, and took care of the infirm just like early humans. The fossil record shows survival into adulthood of individuals afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis of the limbs, or the inability to chew. Going by exotic names such as Shanidar I, Romito 2, the Windover Boy, and the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, our ancestors supported individuals who contributed little to society. Survival of the weak, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and others who posed a burden is seen by paleontologists as a milestone in the evolution of compassion. This communitarian heritage is crucial in relation to this book’s theme, since it suggests that morality predates current civilizations and religions by at least a hundred millennia.

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him. Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

Where would the would-be “purists” draw the line between native and alien elements? This whole planet was altered by the hand of man. A birder who scorned the alien Sky Larks might stand on San Juan and salute the native eagles . . . but some of those eagles had been released here; and they were living on an unnaturally high population of rabbits, from another continent, introduced here. The rabbits, in turn, were probably feeding on alien plants from other lands that were naturalized here — if the San Juan roadsides were anything like all the other roadsides in North America. And we birders of European descent were introduced here also, a few generations back. Even my Native American friends of the night before could claim to be “native” in only a relative sense; their ancestors had come across the Bering land bridge from Asia. None of us is native here.

I do wonder if you will find anything in the Bib. Nat.? You may be put on the wrong track, by finding a curious little book on abolishing passports, of all things, by the émigré’s son, Louis-Mathurin Busson du Maurier, who wrote it about 1835 or later, I believe. Or, you may get an even more muddling line by finding a book written by someone called Louis du Maurier, who was nothing to do with us at all, but lived years before, or an Aubéry du Maurier of that same family; they are nothing to do with the Bussons. It was these people that put my poor Trilby grandfather on the wrong track, in the last century. He heard about them, and of course thought they were ancestors. I’ve been into it all, and they are no relations, so don’t be sidetracked by these people. The chap you want is Robert Mathurin Busson (may have du Maurier tacked on, or may not), who emigrated in 1789,

Cordelia – “Why so rough?” Aral – “It’s very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn’t been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse.” “Mostly human,” added Peoter tartly. “Poor?” Asked Cordelia bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?” “It’s not of course,” answered Vorkosigan. “Then how can anyone get their schooling?” Cordelia “They don’t.” Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand, how do they get their jobs?” “A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta colony?” “Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?” Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” He said in wonder. “It’s the first article in the constitution! ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’” “Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren’t economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls.” “No air conditioning?” “No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here.” “I suppose so. You people don’t really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?” “What help?” Vorkosigan was growing grim. “If they’re sick they either get well or die.” “Die if we’re lucking” muttered Veoter. “You’re not joking.” She stared back and forth between the pair of them. “Why, think of all the geniuses you must missing!” “I doubt we must be missing very many from the Caravanceri.” Said Peoter dryly. “Why not? They have the same genetic compliment as you.” Cordelia pointed out the – to her -obvious. The Count went rigid. “My dear girl, they most certainly do not. My family has been Vor for nine generations.” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “How do you know if you didn’t have the gene-typing until 80 years ago?” Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip. “Besides,” she pointed out reasonably, “If you Vor got around half as much as those histories I’ve been reading imply. 90% of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father’s side. Vorkosigan bit his napkin absently. His eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman and muttered, “Cordelia, you really can’t sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It’s a mortal insult here.” “Where should I sit? Oh I’ll never understand.

The conduct of affairs, for the Rationalist, is a matter of solving problems, and in this no man can hope to be successful whose reason has become inflexible by surrender to habit or is clouded by the fumes of tradition. In this activity the character which the Rationalist claims for himself is the character of the engineer, whose mind (it is supposed) is controlled throughout by appropriate technique and whose first step is to dismiss from his attention everything not directly related to his specific intentions. The assimilation of politics to engineering is, indeed, what may be called the myth of rationalist politics. And it is, of course, a recurring theme in the literature of Rationalism. The politics it inspires may be called the politics of the felt need; for the Rationalist, politics are always charged with the feeling of the moment. He waits upon circumstance to provide him with his problems, but rejects its aid in their solution. That anything should be allowed to stand between a society and the satisfaction of the felt needs of each moment in its history must appear to the Rationalist a piece of mysticism and nonsense. And his politics are, in fact, the rational solution of those practical conundrums which the recognition of the sovereignty of the felt need perpetually creates in the life of a society. Thus, political life is resolved into a succession of crises, each to be surmounted by the application of "reason." Each generation, indeed, each administration, should see unrolled before it the blank sheet of infinite possibility. And if by chance this tablula vasa has been defaced by the irrational scribblings of tradition-ridden ancestors, then the first task of the Rationalist must be to scrub it clean; as Voltaire remarked, the only way to have good laws is to burn all existing laws and start afresh.

In the last year, ancestral DNA had become popular with people curious about their genealogy and, though this was much less publicized, as a tool for finding unidentified criminals. Many in law enforcement were wary. There were quality-assurance issues. Privacy issues. Holes knew DNA. Knew it well. In his opinion, ancestral DNA was a tool, not a certainty. He had a Y-DNA profile generated from the EAR’s DNA, which means he isolated the EAR’s paternal lineage. The Y-DNA profile could be input into certain genealogical websites, the kind that people use to find first cousins and the like. You input a set of markers from your Y-DNA profile, anywhere from 12 to 111, and a list of matches is returned, surnames of families with whom you might share a common ancestor. Almost always the matches are at a genetic distance of 1 from you, which doesn’t mean much, relative-seeking-wise. You’re looking for the elusive 0—a close match.

In Erikson’s words: “A meaningful old age…serves the need for that integrated heritage which gives indispensable perspective on the life cycle. Strength here takes the form of that detached yet active concern with life bounded with death, which we call wisdom…” The notion of integrity connotes the ability to tie together, to relate to others outside oneself. Erikson thought that the perspective of an older person is based on a new definition of identity, which could be summarized in the sentence “I am what survives me.” If toward the end of life I conclude that nothing of myself is likely to survive, despair is likely to take over. But if I have identified with some more enduring entities, my survival will provide a sense of connection, of continuity, that keeps despair at bay. If I love my grandchildren, or the work I have accomplished, or the causes I have championed, then I am bound to feel a part of the future even after personal death. Jonas Salk calls this attitude “being a good ancestor.

Gibbon and Hume, the great British historians, who were contemporaries of Franklin, express in their autobiographies the same feeling about the propriety of just self-praise. And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions. The notes one of my uncles (who had the same kind of curiosity in collecting family anecdotes) once put into my hands, furnished me with several particulars relating to our ancestors. From these notes I learned that the family had lived in the same village, Ecton, in Northamptonshire, [5] for three

O Krishna, what satisfaction could we find in killing Dhritarashtra's sons? We would become sinners by slaying these men, even though they are evil. The sons of Dhritarashtra are related to us: therefore, we should not kill them. How can we gain happiness by kiling members of our own family? Though they are overpowered by greed and see no evil in destroying families or injuring friends, we see these evils. Why shouldn't we turn away from this sin? When a family declines, ancient traditions are destroyed. With them are lost the spiritual foundations for life, and the family loses its sense of unity. Where there is no sense of unity, the women of the family become corrupt; and with the corruption of its women, society is plunged into chaos. Social chaos is hell for the family and for those who have destroyed the family as well. It disrupts the process of spiritual evolution begun by our ancestors. The timeless spiritual foundations of family and society would be destroyed by these terrible deeds, which violate the unity of life.

Time seemed to stop, and the Lakota phrase mitakuye oyasin—we are all related—came to me, and in that moment I understood what those words meant. I inhabited them, as images, thoughts, and memories arose amidst the old vehicles. I saw my mother, gone but still with me, my father, who’d died too soon, and my sister, who I’d loved like my own life. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends. They appeared before me, all of my relations, my ancestors, Native and white, who’d loved and struggled, hunted and gathered, worked and played; they’d stood on this continent, looking up at these stars and these planets. It was daylight, but I could see the stars now, all of them, surrounding me, lighting the air, their brilliance shining and radiating off the monoliths. And then it was dark, a black-hole sky. But I looked down and saw that the stars—every one of them—were now in my hands, lighting up my veins, my muscles, my bones. I stood there, alone with my ancestors, and listened to them. Finally I turned away. As I walked back to my life, the words my mother used to say finally came to me. Wakan Tanka nici un. May the Creator guide you.

Mandana Misra was a great scholar and authority on the Vedas and Mimasa. He led a householder’s life (grihastha), with his scholar-philosopher wife, Ubhaya Bharati, in the town of Mahishi, in what is present-day northern Bihar. Husband and wife would have great debates on the veracity of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and other philosophical works. Scholars from all over Bharatavarsha came to debate and understand the Shastras with them. It is said that even the parrots in Mandana’s home debated the divinity, or its lack, in the Vedas and Upanishads. Mandana was a staunch believer in rituals. One day, while he was performing Pitru Karma (rituals for deceased ancestors), Adi Shankaracharya arrived at his home and demanded a debate on Advaita. Mandana was angry at the rude intrusion and asked the Acharya whether he was not aware, as a Brahmin, that it was inauspicious to come to another Brahmin’s home uninvited when Pitru Karma was being done? In reply, Adi Shankara asked Mandana whether he was sure of the value of such rituals. This enraged Mandana and the other Brahmins present. Thus began one of the most celebrated debates in Hindu thought. It raged for weeks between the two great scholars. As the only other person of equal intellect to Shankara and Mandana was Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya Bharati, she was appointed the adjudicator. Among other things, Shankara convinced Mandana that the rituals for the dead had little value to the dead. Mandana became Adi Shankara’s disciple (and later the first Shankaracharya of the Sringeri Math in Karnataka). When the priest related this story to me, I was shocked. He was not giving me the answer I had expected. Annoyed, I asked him what he meant by the story if Adi Shankara himself said such rituals were of no use to the dead. The priest replied, “Son, the story has not ended.” And he continued... A few years later, Adi Shankara was compiling the rituals for the dead, to standardize them for people across Bharatavarsha. Mandana, upset with his Guru’s action, asked Adi Shankara why he was involved with such a useless thing. After all, the Guru had convinced him of the uselessness of such rituals (Lord Krishna also mentions the inferiority of Vedic sacrifice to other paths, in the Gita. Pitru karma has no vedic base either). Why then was the Jagad Guru taking such a retrograde step? Adi Shankaracharya smiled at his disciple and answered, “The rituals are not for the dead but for the loved ones left behind.

I must at this point reiterate my strong objection to being asked to fill in forms in which I have to tick a box labelling my 'race' or 'ethnicity', and voice my strong support for Lewontin's statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination. To tie a racial label to somebody is informative in the sense that it tells you more than one thing about them. It might reduce your uncertainty about the colour of their hair, the colour of their skin, the straightness of their hair, the shape of their eye, the shape of their nose and how tall they are. But there is no reason to suppose that it tells you anything about how well-qualified they are for a job. And even in the unlikely event that it did reduce your statistical uncertainty about their likely suitability for some particular job, it would still be wicked to use racial labels as a basis for discrimination when hiring somebody. Choose on the basis of ability, and if, having done so, you end up with an all-black sprinting team, so be it. You have not practised racial discrimination in arriving at this conclusion

But if it is true that people have known for thousands of years what it takes to become free and in control of one’s life, why haven’t we made more progress in this direction? Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.

The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.

Just as a man has two parents, and four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents, and sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on until when, say, forty generations are calculated the numbers of ancestors run into many millions — so it is with the number of causes behind even the most trifling event or phenomena, such as the passage of a tiny speck of soot before your eye. It is not an easy matter to trace the bit of soot back to the early period of the world's history when it formed a part of a massive tree-trunk, which was afterward converted into coal, and so on, until as the speck of soot it now passes before your vision on its way to other adventures. And a mighty chain of events, causes and effects, brought it to its present condition, and the latter is but one of the chain of events which will go to produce other events hundreds of years from now. One of the series of events arising from the tiny bit of soot was the writing of these lines, which caused the typesetter to perform certain work; the proofreader to do likewise; and which will arouse certain thoughts in your mind, and that of others, which in turn will affect others, and so on, and on, and on, beyond the ability of man to think further and all from the passage of a tiny bit of soot, all of which shows the relativity and association of things, and the further fact that "there is no great; there is no small; in the mind that causeth all.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark.

Did you want to be buried there?” Fitzroy shook his head convulsively. “No. I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered. You’ll see that done, if I die before you?” “Of course,” Cliopher said, forbearing any protests or the grief that rose up in his throat at the mere thought. “Of course.” “Of course,” Fitzroy repeated, not quite sarcastically, and stared, dry-eyed, at the bones of his distant relative. “I suppose you’d want to be taken to the Island of the Dead? Someone pointed it out—To lie with your ancestors? In the manner of your people?” Cliopher was about to say of course, but there was a note in Fitzroy’s voice— And he recalled the stories that the Sea-Witch sent her birds down to fetch the spirits of those lost at sea, to return them home. The Sea-Witch had given him the garnet that still rattled in the efela the Grandmother (The Old Woman Who Lives in the Deeps, the in-gatherer of all life, in the end) had named Kiofa’a. Cliopher carried the mirimiri of Ani, to give to Vou’a to take to his fanoa. Vou’a was his great-uncle’s husband. He would not be lost, though he did not follow the traditions of his people. “If I die first,” he said, “cremate me and keep the ashes until—until—until they can be scattered with yours. So you can be free but you don’t have to be—alone—we can sail with the Ancestors together—” Fitzroy said, “Kip.” His voice was not the serene one, but fighting for equanimity. “I will not be lost, and neither will you,” Cliopher replied fiercely. “The Sea-Witch likes me. The Old Woman Who Lives in the Deeps likes me. Your ancestors have not forgotten you.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the universe was increasingly thought of as a natural system separate from God. God was thus removed from nature, creating a thorough “disenchantment of nature.”8Separated from the universe, God came increasingly to be thought of as only “out there.” The dominance of supernatural theism in modern Western Christianity has had serious consequences. When “out there” is emphasized and separated from “right here,” God’s relation to the world is distorted, and the notion of God becomes harder and harder to accept. “Out there” means something different for us than it meant when our premodern ancestors used this language. For them, “up there” or “out there” was not very far away. They thought of the universe as small with the earth at its center; the sun, moon, planets, and stars were mounted on a dome not very far above the earth. It is difficult to know how literally they took this language, but the basic notion of a small universe was shared by all. In that context, thinking of God as “our Father who art in heaven” did not make God very far away. But for us, “up there” or “out there” is very far away. If God is only “out there,” as supernatural theism suggests, then God is very distant, not intimately close. God becomes remote, absent. And the difference between a remote and absent God and “no God” is slender. So common is supernatural theism in our time that many people think its concept of God is the only meaning the word “God” can have. For them, believing in God means believing in a personlike being “out there.” Not believing this means not believing in God.

Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as a mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires. Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time—and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and

I must at this point reiterate my strong objection to being asked to fill in forms in which I have to tick a box labelling my 'race' or 'ethnicity', and voice my strong support for Lewontin's statement that racial classification can be actively destructive of social and human relations - especially when people use racial classification as a way of treating people differently, whether through negative or positive discrimination. To tie a racial label to somebody is informative in the sense that it tells you more than one thing about them. It might reduce your uncertainty about the colour of their hair, the colour of their skin, the straightness of their hair, the shape of their eye, the shape of their nose and how tall they are. But there is no reason to suppose that it tells you anything about how well-qualified they are for a job. And even in the unlikely event that it did reduce your statistical uncertainty about their likely suitability for some particular job, it would still be wicked to use racial labels as a basis for discrimination when hiring somebody. Choose on the basis of ability, and if, having done so, you end up with an all-black sprinting team, so be it. You have not practised racial discrimination in arriving at this conclusion... Discriminating against individuals purely on the basis of a group to which they belong is, I am inclined to think, always evil. There is near-universal agreement today that the apartheid laws of South Africa were evil. Positive discrimination in favour of 'minority' students on American campuses can fairly, in my opinion, be attacked on the same grounds as apartheid. Both treat people as representative of groups rather than as individuals in their own right. Positive discrimination is sometimes justified as redressing centuries of injustice. But how can it be just to pay back a single individual today for the wrongs done by long-dead members of a plural group to which he belongs?

A few hundred million years later, some of these eukaryotes developed a novel adaptation: they stayed together after cell division to form multicellular organisms in which every cell had exactly the same genes. These are the three-boat septuplets in my example. Once again, competition is suppressed (because each cell can only reproduce if the organism reproduces, via its sperm or egg cells). A group of cells becomes an individual, able to divide labor among the cells (which specialize into limbs and organs). A powerful new kind of vehicle appears, and in a short span of time the world is covered with plants, animals, and fungi.37 It’s another major transition. Major transitions are rare. The biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry count just eight clear examples over the last 4 billion years (the last of which is human societies).38 But these transitions are among the most important events in biological history, and they are examples of multilevel selection at work. It’s the same story over and over again: Whenever a way is found to suppress free riding so that individual units can cooperate, work as a team, and divide labor, selection at the lower level becomes less important, selection at the higher level becomes more powerful, and that higher-level selection favors the most cohesive superorganisms.39 (A superorganism is an organism made out of smaller organisms.) As these superorganisms proliferate, they begin to compete with each other, and to evolve for greater success in that competition. This competition among superorganisms is one form of group selection.40 There is variation among the groups, and the fittest groups pass on their traits to future generations of groups. Major transitions may be rare, but when they happen, the Earth often changes.41 Just look at what happened more than 100 million years ago when some wasps developed the trick of dividing labor between a queen (who lays all the eggs) and several kinds of workers who maintain the nest and bring back food to share. This trick was discovered by the early hymenoptera (members of the order that includes wasps, which gave rise to bees and ants) and it was discovered independently several dozen other times (by the ancestors of termites, naked mole rats, and some species of shrimp, aphids, beetles, and spiders).42 In each case, the free rider problem was surmounted and selfish genes began to craft relatively selfless group members who together constituted a supremely selfish group.

Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders―and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands―parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion―shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development―the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself―is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that:―the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

Given that at all times, so long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of human beings (racial groups, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many followers in relation to the small number of those issuing orders - and taking into consideration also that so far nothing has been better and longer practised and cultivated among human beings than obedience, we can reasonably assume that typically now the need for obedience is inborn in each individual, as a sort of formal conscience which states "You are to do something or other without conditions, and leave aside something else without conditions," in short, "Thou shalt." This need seeks to satisfy itself and to fill its form with some content. Depending on its strength, impatience, and tension, it seizes on something, without being very particular, like a coarse appetite, and accepts what someone or other issuing commands - parents, teachers, laws, class biases, public opinion - shouts in people's ears. The curiously limitation of human development - the way it hesitates, takes so long, often regresses, and turns around on itself - is based on the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is passed on best and at the expense of the art of commanding. If we imagine this instinct at some point striding right to its ultimate excess, then there would finally be a total lack of commanders and independent people, or they would suffer inside from a bad conscience and find it necessary first to prepare a deception for themselves in order to be able to command, as if they, too, were only obeying orders. This condition is what, in fact, exists nowadays in Europe: I call it the moral hypocrisy of those in command. They don't know how to protect themselves from their bad conscience except by behaving as if they were carrying out older or higher orders (from ancestors, the constitution, rights, law, or even God), or they even borrow herd maxims from the herd way of thinking, for example, as "the first servant of their people" or as "tools of the common good." On the other hand, the herd man in Europe today makes himself appear as if he is the single kind of human being allowed, and he glorifies those characteristics of his thanks to which he is tame, good natured, and useful to the herd, as the really human virtues, that is, public spiritedness, wishing everyone well, consideration, diligence, moderation, modesty, forbearance, and pity. For those cases, however, where people believe they cannot do without a leader and bell wether, they make attempt after attempt to replace the commander by adding together collections of clever herd people All the representative constitutional assemblies, for example, have this origin. But for all that, what a blissful relief, what a release from a pressure which is growing unbearable is the appearance of an absolute commander for these European herd animals. The effect which the appearance of Napoleon made was the most recent major evidence for that: - the history of the effect of Napoleon is almost the history of the higher happiness which this entire century derived from its most valuable men and moments.

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends. In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are able to see that the contents of literature, art, music—even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics—are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them. In the arts, in philosophy, in religion men are trying—doubtless, without complete success—to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality. Since the time of Galileo, scientists have admitted, sometimes explicitly but much more often by implication, that they are incompetent to discuss such matters. The scientific picture of the world is what it is because men of science combine this incompetence with certain special competences. They have no right to claim that this product of incompetence and specialization is a complete picture of reality. As a matter of historical fact, however, this claim has constantly been made. The successive steps in the process of identifying an arbitrary abstraction from reality with reality itself have been described, very fully and lucidly, in Burtt’s excellent “Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science"; and it is therefore unnecessary for me to develop the theme any further. All that I need add is the fact that, in recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one—the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed—and the belief often caused them considerable distress—that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience. The masses, on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today’s scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

The Tale of Human Evolution The subject most often brought up by advocates of the theory of evolution is the subject of the origin of man. The Darwinist claim holds that modern man evolved from ape-like creatures. During this alleged evolutionary process, which is supposed to have started 4-5 million years ago, some "transitional forms" between modern man and his ancestors are supposed to have existed. According to this completely imaginary scenario, four basic "categories" are listed: 1. Australopithecus 2. Homo habilis 3. Homo erectus 4. Homo sapiens Evolutionists call man's so-called first ape-like ancestors Australopithecus, which means "South African ape." These living beings are actually nothing but an old ape species that has become extinct. Extensive research done on various Australopithecus specimens by two world famous anatomists from England and the USA, namely, Lord Solly Zuckerman and Prof. Charles Oxnard, shows that these apes belonged to an ordinary ape species that became extinct and bore no resemblance to humans. Evolutionists classify the next stage of human evolution as "homo," that is "man." According to their claim, the living beings in the Homo series are more developed than Australopithecus. Evolutionists devise a fanciful evolution scheme by arranging different fossils of these creatures in a particular order. This scheme is imaginary because it has never been proved that there is an evolutionary relation between these different classes. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century's most important evolutionists, contends in his book One Long Argument that "particularly historical [puzzles] such as the origin of life or of Homo sapiens, are extremely difficult and may even resist a final, satisfying explanation." By outlining the link chain as Australopithecus > Homo habilis > Homo erectus > Homo sapiens, evolutionists imply that each of these species is one another's ancestor. However, recent findings of paleoanthropologists have revealed that Australopithecus, Homo habilis, and Homo erectus lived at different parts of the world at the same time. Moreover, a certain segment of humans classified as Homo erectus have lived up until very modern times. Homo sapiens neandarthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (modern man) co-existed in the same region. This situation apparently indicates the invalidity of the claim that they are ancestors of one another. Stephen Jay Gould explained this deadlock of the theory of evolution although he was himself one of the leading advocates of evolution in the twentieth century: What has become of our ladder if there are three coexisting lineages of hominids (A. africanus, the robust australopithecines, and H. habilis), none clearly derived from another? Moreover, none of the three display any evolutionary trends during their tenure on earth. Put briefly, the scenario of human evolution, which is "upheld" with the help of various drawings of some "half ape, half human" creatures appearing in the media and course books, that is, frankly, by means of propaganda, is nothing but a tale with no scientific foundation. Lord Solly Zuckerman, one of the most famous and respected scientists in the U.K., who carried out research on this subject for years and studied Australopithecus fossils for 15 years, finally concluded, despite being an evolutionist himself, that there is, in fact, no such family tree branching out from ape-like creatures to man.

Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in connection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories: (I) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires, expelling 'evil' and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return of the dead); (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the ensuing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, 'death' corresponds to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic expression of the end of a mode of being the mode of ignorance and of the child's irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term 'culture,' comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during initiation. All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated-in the present instance, without the child's dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time. But the first time, the thing-this class of objects, this animal, this particular behavior-did not exist: when, in the beginning, this object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing. Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares: birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos), rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a member of the modern societies conceives death). These images and symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination, with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other valuations of initiatory death-for example, joining the company of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits. For archaic thought, then, man is made-he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model.