Chapter 1

Hunter Gatherers

The world has been a settled agrarian world for a long time. In 9500BC the founder crops of grain were in place and farming set itself up around the areas that these crops would best grow. This led to a trade economy, allowing for exchange between peoples in specialised goods they became skilled at producing. This system was known as barter, being in use for around 6,000 years. But it was limited and eventually currency was introduced. In many places metals and gold were used, although in some places, like China, this was preceded by shells. These highly valued items were used for several millennia.  However, coins followed, probably for ease of use, being replaced eventually by the symbolic paper form of exchange we know today as money. These paper bills were actually I.O.U that could be exchanged by certain traders (who eventually became known as bankers) for the value of gold that it represented. The Gold Standard ended in the 20^th century and was replaced by a Fiat system. Instead of gold, one currency, the United States dollar, was taken as the benchmark  all others being measured up against it. The latest transformation in this process is fast being replaced by numbers on a computer screen; digital currency. Crypt-currencies have been spawned based on a process called a blockchain that measures its value instantaneously against its circulation. Its volatility may decide its fate. This evolving process has created benefits and drawbacks, taking over 11,000 years to become apparent.

Becoming more and more virtual, it has been hard for individuals to link balances in their bank to the reality of what that represents. Each currency is based on some form of planetary resources, finite as they are. They certainly are not virtual. Diminishing resources, overgrowth of population, and devastation of the biosphere have been systematically separated, and continually distanced, from the economic sphere. It is this separation that has created a mindset that is directly responsible for what we all are now faced with. It’s difficult from our current vantage point to contemplate that something seemingly so beneficial could have placed us in a position of pending extinction. Continual growth of wealth in the form of money is possible on paper. But, as life support systems fall one after another around us, bringing us to the brink, we are beginning to see the disparity between the concept and the truth. It is essential, if we are going to arrest this trend, to exit the trance consumerism has induced in us. Everything we experience today is the consequence of a previous choice; places where the road forks.  We must trawl back through our history to find where we lost our way if we ever hope to heal the breech between ourselves and Nature, saving not only the Planet, but our own species. The solutions to all problems are contained within their . When the foundations are balanced, the house stands strong. Built on shaky foundations, our structures will wobble. They becomes vulnerable to stress and the risk of falling. And under stress we are. Finding out what went wrong is the first step to finding a solution to our predicament.

When we think of the agrarian revolution, we think of availability of food and security from the natural variables. Our change from a seasonal diet to a stored one brought about changes to our lifestyle so fundamental as to require the evolution of a new blood type to digest the abundant grains we grew. Grains have been a mixed blessing, but they were essential to maintaining a settled way of life. Everything had to change, not least our thinking, our relationship to each other, with other species and Nature herself. We are only at the beginning of realising how much was lost and the impacts of that.

Previously, we followed the food. We were, in essence, travelers by nature. It intrinsically shaped our whole personality as a species. Our relationship with the lands we passed through, and the inhabitants that shared those spaces with us, of necessity, was one of respect and co-operation. Nature defined the balance. Trusting this being that fed us, we learned the tides, the seasons, the opposites that made life possible. We knew when to stay and when to move. These were the greatest lessons of life. The act of movement precipitated choice. To stagnate was to die. To live we must take a step, define a direction, and pursue it.

The awareness of this imperative gave decisions gravitas. We could move in multiple directions: backwards, forwards, or to the sides. Somehow the original concept of direction was conceived. To stay alive, a hunter/gatherer, must move. When survival is at stake, even the smallest things gain importance and urgency. Walking forward could be dangerous. Choice carries within it risk which is never clear until we’ve acted on it, no matter what that danger is. In some ways the dangers are the same for our modern world: disease, drought, pestilence, torrential rain, or war.  Dealing with risk is the precursor to gaining life skills, then as now. In the modern world we could be walking into a street gang, bumping into someone we don’t want to see, getting hit by a car. But the danger is always there. None of us can avoid the challenge the unknown offers us to grow. Even though the outcome is just as likely good fortune, we still have to experience it to find out. Balance of the so called negative with the positive is the fundamental principle of Nature.

With the experimentation of time and experience, our Ancestors learned the patterns of Nature finding which directions were most likely to provide them with what they needed. They learned the times when the fish were running, when the fruit was on the bushes, when the herds arrived. They found ways of avoiding or befriending other tribes as well as where they were most likely to be found, in much the same way we define our territory now. We have our goat tracks to work, or shops, finding the best times to go. We learn when and where we are likely to bump into our ex, avoiding or take advantage of it. In all these scenario’s we are learning the use of direction.

Our Ancestors compiled masses of information, designed to provide for the tribe’s needs while avoiding the pitfalls. Experience was their teacher, their journeys encompassing generation after generation, tuning into their surroundings, and observing. They were able to see these patterns reflected on the individual as well as on the bigger screen of life.

Learning from the past, they designed ritual ceremony to record knowledge for the generations to come, celebrating their survival. They realised that this knowledge was vital, theirs and ours. Ritual allowed the time and space to deepen into understanding until it was embedded in the psyche.

Somewhere in deep time, our Ancestors stood with no knowledge at all. They had no idea where to find food, what was edible, or how to find unpolluted water. When no one has been there before, everything must be tested out. It is trial and error. In situations like this, our instincts and intuitions are our only skills. In this world, top heavy with intellect, it’s interesting that they survived using the basic skills that all animals have. Interesting also is that, with all our intellect, we are now find ourselves on the edge of extinction. Perhaps we’ve been using the wrong tool.

Imagine having only your gut knowing to rely on? Other beings on the planet trust it and use it seamlessly. We have all experienced it from time to time. In childhood, we had no intellectual understanding of was happening to us, or what to do about it. But our instinct told us to move so move we did. Curiosity is a trait of mammals. We want to know what’s on the other side of the room, the house, the world. Accumulating the skills to get there is essential. First crawling then walking, we stumble imperfectly forward, falling over, stubbing our toe, but not giving up. Each time we repeat the process the skills required become easier to perform. Fewer toes are stubbed. We learn to run. It’s not that we can guarantee everything will stay the same. The obstacles won’t stay in the same place so we can just remember where they were. We become adept at assessing the situations encountered as we master the techniques. It takes courage be a child, to be willing to try something new, because everything is. If the baby is not allowed, or is discouraged from trying things, the adults they become live in fear, having enormous resistance to trying anything they can’t control. The truth is we can control nothing. If we stand paralysed by fear, we cannot survive long. The only chance we have of a life is to make a choice, act on it, learning from the consequences as we go. The knowledge accumulates as the mind records and learns. In this ever-changing world it’s more that we do it than what we do. The consequences will remain unknown until they arrive, no matter how much we attempt to per-empt them. The accumulated skill of our forebears was to see what today’s winds showed us and the smells carried on them.

Until recently the belief was that hunter gatherers spent their entire time gathering food. Research has shown that not to be true. Two or so hours each day was all that was needed because it was the entire community that participated. The rest of their time they spent exploring the world inside and out. As children do. This was the commencement of art, philosophical thought, the use of the opposable thumb in creating tools. An exciting time. They knew a great deal about the journey of exploration, and they knew they depended on it for their survival.

It was this that they memorialised in the ritual that became known by the many names I listed above, depending on the tribal origins. It was a generational teaching tool. Each direction named came to express an important unique life lesson. The essential elements of life were defined as Fire, Earth, Air, and Water aligning with the four states of being, Spirit, Body, Mind and Feelings based on that which they most resembled. Such incredible understanding of what made us. And so ‘working the Medicine Wheel’ became an inner journey of learning, and initiation. It passed onto each new generation the wisdom of experience and all that engendered, gained through longer existence.

Wisdom of lived experience has been lost in the speed of the modern worlds ‘youth culture’. The pace of change that inevitably accompanied our evolution left the wisdom of the Ancients for instant data. There is no time to contemplate. Upcoming generations are left with little respect for the accumulated knowledge of those that lived before. So much is lost in this process, everything must be started from scratch, ‘inventing the wheel’ again and again. As a species, we continually regress to infancy. Without the knowledge of the accumulated ages to fall back on, it is one step forward and three back.

Maybe it was the world wars, destroying so many, that left us in this position. Starting all over in collective trauma, we went down the pathway of self-gratification. Why wouldn’t we?? So many died, as the rest lived under the threat of it. The miasma of collective premature death left us consuming as if our lives depended on it. Like all restrictions, once removed, the pendulum compensates by swinging to the exact opposite. When the war ended, the leash loosening on so many, we rushed out to purchase all we had been deprived of and more. We were encouraged to get the economies going again through debt and repopulation of the missing millions. The message we received was that life is short; ‘live, for tomorrow we die’, ‘have what you want’. Today’s rampant consumerism and its consequential throw-away culture has left the world drowning in disposable rubbish. Corporations developed ‘built in redundancy’ so what we buy today wears out tomorrow. Premature replacement keeps the money flowing. We are the frogs in boiling water, forgetting how to jump out before we are cooked. The temperature is going up hourly.

Even though the 60’s generation saw what the 50’s generation was doing was unhealthy, their attempts were not enough. They saw the writing on the wall, dropped out, building their communities anew, but the desire for comfort buying in the general population was too strong. Much of what they pointed out was true then as it is today: the degradation of the environment, the debt, the pollution, the focused materialism, the push for more wars. They tried to find their way back to ancestral ways, but they couldn’t sustain it. In a disaster of our making, our own Western voice was hidden, so their systematic search for wisdom in other cultures began. Even though it was not their voice, that journey eventually led them to discover the indigenous shamanic cultures of the hunter/gatherer. This wisdom, held largely unbroken for millennia, was a treasure trove. It contained the concept of the journey-as-life-lesson or ‘journeying’ as it has become known. In the greater scheme of things, these seekers were few. They, a threat to the trajectory of the time, became denigrated and laughed at, nothing more than a ‘dirty hippie’. The human race continued down the road it was on. But seeds of possibilities were sown.

Up until 2020 it had been a hundred years since the last great pandemic. Some things have changed. Much hasn’t. War caused the Spanish flu, but consumerism caused the Covid 19’s incubation in the wet markets of Wuhan. There, even wild animals have become essential products. We battle between the concepts of continuing our materialistic obsession and surviving the virus: to isolate and protect ourselves or open up to herd immunity in the hope of saving the economy. It seems we can’t do both. As soon as we isolate and lockdown, easing the viral spread, we throw the economic doors open again and it’s back with a vengeance. But we have become too selfish to learn that people are more important than piles of goods and cruise-ship holidays. We are unwilling to think about the big picture, to learn what we are being shown by this experience. It’s not rocket science. If we insist on continuing down the same road, (that obviously isn’t working), we will not survive long enough to pass any wisdom down to our progeny.

While Covid 19 is showing us this with crystal clarity, we still don’t get it: where we are kind, caring for the whole community, rather than ourselves alone, we thrive. It’s not an ‘us or them’ it’s ‘us and them’. We must think as a species not just as an individual. Our needs must be met to survive, but our real needs and our manufactured ones are vastly different. The corporations use the advertising world to blur that distinction for us. As a result, we are choosing blindly what they want us to. We need to wake up to the consequences that will follow or the journey for the human species will be a short one. We will not destroy the Planet and its natural laws, but we will destroy ourselves. And balance will be restored without us. We need to change the road we’re on before it’s too late.

Life really is a journey. We jump on the conveyor belt of time, keeping moving until it disgorges us at the other end in death. Even if we actively resist life, we are automatically carried down that path. It’s not the trip alone that’s the issue, but the quality of the life lived along its duration. And the wisdom we collect along the way to enrich those that come after us. That is directly related to the choices we make and the actions we take, for they are what fuels the journey.

It’s true that the events we currently encounter in this world, are vastly different to those experienced by our parents and grandparents, even more so from our ancient forebears. Often their wisdom has seemed irrelevant. But history does have a habit of repeating itself if we don’t learn from it. Wisdom, however, is eternal. There have always been ways of finding the path to that wisdom, but they are not found in the lexicon of our modern world. We so badly need them right now. They have been there all along, hidden in plain sight. In the pages that follow, we will seek these Pathfinders out. We will find the Navigators that are still here to show us the way out of this mess. The tools are there. The compass always points to true north, to the truth deep inside us to which we are inextricably enticed. It is the home of the soul. We can find the truth by listening once again to the ancient voices. Maybe, just maybe, to quote Led Zeppelin, “there’s still time to change the road you’re on”.