OUR WHOLE HISTORY IN A CHART OR HOW WE LOST TOUCH WITH REALITY

COMMONLY KNOWN FACTS ABOUT THE CONSCIOUSNESS EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES THAT ARE COMMONLY IGNORED

SUMMARY of the CHART:

BEFORE THE FALL

AFTER THE FALL

CONTACT (knowledge through direct sensory and extra-sensory experience) is made with the earth.

NONCONTACT with the earth -- mind replaces experience as major source of knowledge.

Religion = music. Direct invocation of the forces of the earth through singing, dancing and drumming, leading to an altered consciousness state.

Religion = words. No longer an individual, personal visionary experience. The sayings of prophets and teachers and revered holy books create a level of mental abstraction above experience.

Societies are tribal with a tribal structure closer to other primates.

Societies develop complex class structures with a wealthy leisure group and a monarch who is often divine.

Focus of spiritual practice centers on cyclic rhythms of nature where there is birth, death and rebirth. Male and female deities both represented, often with differing, equal powers.

Focus of practice shifts through desire to escape cyclic time and become eternal. A male deity is often the Supreme Being of the Universe.

Art is earth-centered and subservient to the natural world: images of sun, moon, animals, humans within nature. Drawings on boulders and cave walls, small carved stones, piled rocks, stone circles.

Art and religion become a tool to glorify man: building colossal burial chambers for monarchs and the wealthy class. And express conquest of nature and earth: huge stones transported, shaped, arranged to make grand edifices. Huge stones carved into images of human-like gods and kings.

Tribes live in villages and fight wars over land rights, water sources, etc.

Emperors and kings wage wars of conquest and dominance. The idea of "empire" is born centered first upon the great civilizations (cities): China, Athens, Rome, Persia, etc. and then upon a mental, religious or political ideology.

STONE AGE

THE FALL

IRON AND BRONZE AGES

MESOLITHIC 25,000BC	NEOLITHIC 10,000BC	PRE-PROPHET ERA 5,000BC - 1000AD	PROPHET ERA 2,000BC - PRESENT
Hunters & gatherers	Farmers & herdsman	Increasingly complex stratified class structures in which obtaining food is no longer the major focus.
Wanderers: follow animals and maturing of food plants	Settle into villages for first time: begin agriculture and domestication of animals	Rise of great "civilizations:" Egypt, Athens, Rome, Mayans, Persians, Chinese, etc.
"Shamanic religion:" much free time between hunts and food gatherings. Everyone was a participant in religious rituals and ceremonies. No priests or intermediaries. Each person knew the true meaning of religion: transcendent ecstasy.	"Priest religion:" No longer a lot of leisure time. Need to tend fields and herd animals. Development of specialization and the introduction of a class of priests who specialize in religious contacts and act as intermediaries for the tribe–shamans, Druids, etc.	Rise of privileged royal class of emperors, kings, Pharaohs often believed to be divine. Immense increase in slavery to build the tombs and burial pyramids of royalty.	Beginnings of democracy and religion for the masses. Christianity spread by Roman soldiers. Division of religion into popular and esoteric: the laws and beliefs that helped maintain society at large and a group of intense practitioners who lived in monasteries and had a higher understanding.
Religious focus: individual personal contact with immediate earth environment, with the earth forces and the sun, moon and stars.	Religious focus: contact with immediate earth environment. Particularly with calendars of the sun's and moon's cycles as expression of powers of the earth.	Religious focus: the aggrandizement of humans in huge monuments. Projection of human power into a pantheon of gods and goddesses that have human form. With Egyptians and Mayans, etc., the religion shifts from the cycle of birth, death and regeneration to a fixation upon death and transformation to the next world. Direct connection to the earth powers is lost.	Religious focus: upon a prophet and his teachings. Moses, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha. The earth is no longer sacred; books are sacred.
Ceremonies focus upon "calling in the animals" for successful hunts –personal relationship to animals.	Ceremonies focus upon the vegetative cycle and fertility. Earth mother central figure. This is the period of those religions known as Goddess religions.	Ceremonies often focus upon the transmutation of royalty to the other-world. Belief that physical body and spirit or soul are linked. Thus need for mummification and limit of "official" religion to upper classes.	Ceremonies based upon holy scriptures and the teachings of prophets. Belief in separation of material & spiritual thereby allowing everyone to enter next world.
Relationship to planet: connection to all living things. Paintings made on rocks and cave walls	Relationship to planet: connection to all living things. Paintings made on rocks and cave walls. Piled stones, stone circles, standing monoliths.	Relationship to planet: man begins to disconnect, to consider humans superior. Huge rocks taken from earth, shaped, carted hundreds of miles, reassembled to make pyramids and temples.	Relationship to planet: Commandments, sacred texts, codes of law that are exclusively human-oriented. The connection to all living things and the sacredness of all life is excluded.
Occasional, or often, warring tribes.	Occasional, or often, warring tribes.	Rise of the idea of "empires:" Alexander the Great and continuing to the present day.	Conquests often associated with an abstraction: a religious, economic or philosophical ideology.
Use of language: Oral tradition; no written language.	Use of language: Oral tradition and the beginnings of written language.	Use of language: Oral tradition replaced by writing.	Use of language: A "holy book(s)" becomes the center of the major religions and writing becomes "sacred."

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