A Winter's Walk into the Ancient Past

On a winter morning’s walk at the foot of the snowcapped Sierra Nevadas in California’s Owen’s Valley, host Shawn Berry ponders how we may have experienced our consciousness as it began to come into being. This episode of First Nature considers the human development of self-awareness and how our ancestors might have experimented with the use of sound and rhythm to communicate this burgeoning inner, solo adventure while also developing the fundamental elements of ritual and ceremony as a strategy to maintain community cohesion, as the rise of the individuated self pulled at the communal seams.

Meanwhile, the backdrop of the mountains keeps Earth in the dialogue. Through expressions of admiration and blessing for the majestic peaks of the Sierras and Inyo Mountains, the importance of a reciprocated relationship with the planet is brought to the forefront as an offering to deal with our present human dilemma. How might each of us come into a more authentic, "right-relationship" with nature as our ancient ancestors had lived, treating all aspects of it with the same reverence we reserve for human life?

Music in this episode by:

Red Centre Blues, by Brendan Gallagher
Listen to Overtones, by ArtEffectAudio
Drums Battle, by Alban Gogh
Soft Coming Spring by Syouki Takahashi

First Nature theme song by Shawn Berry
Podcast Artwork by Shawn Berry

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

I'm at a property. I'm at a property called 3 Creeks just south of Big Pine, California. It's just before 8 AM, and I'm walking down a fire road that cuts west towards the foothills. Here, the Sierra, Nevada's are right on top of the foothills, and there's snow all the way down. Maybe to 3000 feet. And from from where I'm at in the chaparral where there's no snow to where the snow line starts, just where the foothills end. Feels like maybe a flight of stairs. This road cuts due west, so my view is filled with the mountains. Massive mountains. Snow covered all the way from north to south, feeling my view. This gray slate and snowy white. Can't speak for everybody, but I can say that it's really hard to focus on any of my problems when my entire reality is filled with such incredible incredible majesty. I was just listening to an album by Byron Metcalfe and Jennifer Grace called Sacraments. And, it's a very meditative tribal drum rattle and vocalizations. It just got me to thinking about humans, us, me, you, everyone we know, and what are predicaments we find ourselves in in this day and age. And that music was really speaking to me because it's just evoking something really, really, comforting, something very stable deep inside me. Intellectually, I know that my ancestors played drums, rattled rattles, chanted and sung, danced. I know yours did too. This is the piece that always just keeps me stunned because I know it in my head, but it's so hard to feel the gravitas, the reality of it, which is your people, my people, we're doing that for 1000 of years, 1000 and 1000 and 1000 of years gathering, maybe even daily. Playing drum, rattling rattles, chanting, singing, dancing, praying, communing, not just with each other, but with the land itself, All the animals, the birds, the fishes, and the insects, and the clouds, and the fruits on the trees and the thorns on the bushes. I think we were just learning how to commune with ourself in that era. This journey of self that we've been on for a long, long, long time. Thinking about how the universe, the cosmos, this planet, everything on this planet moves in cycles. Everything strives for balance. And in order to stay in balance, it needs to stay in motion kinda like a spinning top. Also, kinda like a pendulum. No clock old clocks only tell time well or at all. If the pendulum keeps moving back and forth, the pendulum stops, time stops, the cycle stops. So cycles of time, is what's really intriguing me right now and knowing that in our human developments and, again, this isn't targeted towards the evolutionist mindset nor towards the creator mindset nor towards any spiritual belief or religiosity or scientific purview. It's really seeing it in myself, this arc of development, knowing that I am not the same thinker and feeler and ideator that I was when I was 5 or 6 years old. And in the same way, on bigger scales of time, we are not the same thinking, feeling, ideating humans we were when we are only 50 or 6000 years old. According to science, if you're into science, humans, homosapiens, been around for at least 350,000 years, perhaps longer, up to 500,000 in some say. You'll hear me say this a lot because that fact keeps me in awe. It keeps me mystified, and I find that's where most of my reconciliation comes from around my personal issues and dilemmas, concerns, and worries. If I can stay in the awe and the mystery and the inspiration of knowing that I can never know everything. And it's okay as long as the awe and mystery and inspiration is there. I can be comfortable with it. So bigger cycles of time. If we go back, I don't know, all the way back to, let's say, it's 350,000 years. And prior to homosapiens, there was, well, not even prior to, at the same time that we were walking around as homosapiens, there are also several several other hominids walking around that looks, you know, not too unlike us. We weren't the only 2 legged, ambulating, thinking creature out there. Most of you know about the Neanderthals. They were contemporary with us as well as several others. And we found artifacts. Right? So dig down deep enough or in the right area, you pull up these old tools. Arrowheads, pottery shards, remains of old fires that were burnt night after night, month after month, year after year, generation after generation. And I think about those simplest tools, the stone scrapers. Those are what most archaeologists consider the first human tools. And if you Google or look up pictures of stone scrapers, ancient stone scrapers, You might think they're reaching a bit because they don't look like much. You know, to the eye of the untrained, you'd never think that someone actually tried to shape that stone. It's a pretty rudimentary looking shape. Compared to the kind of sharp edges we can make today with all our technology. So if you think about the mind, the thinking, feeling, ideating mind that whose best exemplary work was these rudimentary shaped stones that indoor in their thinking, in their understanding of what they could do to make something useful to the best they could was that all the way up to today where we have lasers that can cut microns through some of the hardest materials in the world in elegant shapes that the hand could never do, I think we can see a trajectory of development, not just intellectual, but emotional, mental. Right? You can't blow a balloon up on just one side. My feeling is that if one thing is expanding and growing within an organism, All aspects of that organism are also expanding and growing. So all this to illustrate this idea that at some point in our our sense of self, our self consciousness, There's very likely a point where as homo sapiens, we didn't have much of it. We didn't even have language for a long, long, long time. And if you look at some of the other early artifacts of how we are living, it's pretty clear that we were simple creatures. We had simple thoughts, simple goals, simple communication. And that we heavily relied on each other to get through the day. But at some point, as we developed over eons and eons, 1,000, thousands of years, thousands, tens of thousands, Literally, 100 of 1000 of years. Somewhere in that time scale, something started to turn on within us. Some something organized in our DNA that started to express different chemical bonds that our brain attached themselves to, our brain cells attached to or took in. I don't know how it all works. But something within our physical organism changed, evolved. And that's the science side of it. Then there's the invisible side of it. Some call it spiritual. Some call it psychological. But that aspect that we can't see or touch or define or prove. That found the right conditions within those new molecular genetic expressions that are happening slowly, slowly, slowly over time to express this other side of humans. What makes, you know, humble sapiens human humanity. And what would that have looked like over time? Like, if we take our 350,000 years of invisible internal development based on our evolving genetic capacity and watched us start to come to terms with this sense of self and this need to express to our fellow humans, hey. I'm having some interesting stuff go on in this thing I'm just gonna call my mind because I don't know what else to call it. I can't show it to you. You can't show me yours. We're looking at the same thing, but I'm having a totally different experience than you are. And I wanna find some way to express that and share that so we can stay connected because we've been so connected as a species for so long. And now this internal separate experience that's continuing to develop is starting to make me feel more separate, and that's a little scary. Starting to feel more apart, and I don't wanna feel apart. We only have gotten things done. We've only survived this long because we always stay together. We always thought as one. We always did things together so that we could all survive. So just try to imagine what that would look like over 1000 of years, conversations that could never be finished once they were started because life was too short. Language wasn't efficient enough. But if you could compress that all that time down into, you know, a a movie or a play or a good book, which I tried to write. So we'll see what you think. How would it how would we be able to watch that or looked at it look at that or read that and really acknowledge, like, yeah, it must've been something like that. I don't think it's possible, honestly. We have to get such a super objective out and above ourselves that, I don't know if we're there yet, developmentally, even with all the amazing thinking, feeling, and ideating we have today. But I wanna go back to a certain juncture in that timeline of when that was starting to happen, when I don't know. That first human woke up one day and felt just a little off, felt just a little separate, heard something like a voice inside themselves somewhere. Or I don't even know what would that first shade of self awareness, self consciousness look like. And how would they go about even trying to share with the rest of the humans around them of, hey. Anyone else feeling that? So I'm sure at some point, even prior to that happening, just because we were a group oriented species, a very social creatures. It's quite likely that we were banging on things, making noise. I'm sure that the sound of rhythm, once we discovered that was something we could make, probably on some rudimentary level, felt really comfortable, reassuring. You know, rhythm is something akin to reliability. Right? If you if you're hearing a rhythm, you come to expect you can sorta what's the word? You can predict the next beat. Right? And then you you can actually get in flow with it. So think of, like So think about how that would you know, once this consciousness started to kinda so once this consciousness started to come alive and we had this orientation towards making sound, making rhythm, doing it together. I could see where it could slowly become this journey of understanding what is happening within us. What is this emerging sense of self? And knowing that without the language to really communicate it or any way to write down records to share with the next generation or generations beyond what our experience was to build on. There had to be something we could do in the moment, in our own individual lifespan that would help just, you know, communicate it to each other in some way that was reassuring and kinda kept us all on the same page. And I wonder I wonder if, you know, the drum. So I wonder in those early days when this sense of consciousness was just starting to, like, stir within us. So we couldn't really understand what it was or how to express it, but we had these these things we were doing to help us stay comfortable with, you know, feeling if we had some kind of understanding of what was coming next. Rhythm. Just a simple idea of rhythm. If you bend that rock and I get in time with banging this rock with you, then it's like we're synced up. We have this a little bit of a predictive nature of staying in rhythm with each other. That's really comfortable. We all wanna know what the future is. But then taking into account this idea of our consciousness arising and that these first early tools, the drum, the rattle, the dancing, chanting, eventually singing, harmonics, voice attenuation, that all this became ways of first just expressing something that was happening inside us, you know, just to demonstrate that I have a different experience than this person. Everybody dances a little differently. Everybody has a different voice. Someone's gonna chant a certain way, and people will follow that chant for a while, then someone else will bring a different chant, and people will follow that chant for a while. So this idea of unique expression started to arise, and utilizing drumming and rattling and singing became this way to just stay synced up amidst our wildly expanding, differentiating internal experiences due to the arising of our self consciousness and awareness. Right? So that's what I'm thinking about, and out of that comes ritual. Right? These things we do. So the way I like to think about ceremony, ceremony is like a one time thing to express an internal change. You do it. You perform it one time to, to confirm that something internally has changed. Right? You're finding a way to physically express externally what's changed within you internally, your perspective, your outlook, your reality, And then people around you can witness that and confirm it. Okay? Because we can't show each other our internal process. It's not a thing. It's not a person, place, or, you know, object. Person, place, or thing. Yeah. It's not a person, place, or thing. It's this, you know, not material idea. So other people witnessing express that our interior world is different has changed in a way that has never changed before. That's why they can ceremony a unique one time expression of, like, something's changed permanently. And then ritual becomes these ways of affirming and reminding ourselves of what's changed. So thinking of these early, early drum circles and rattling and dancing and chanting and all of this just going through this arising of self consciousness and and a self awareness. Again, just independently in our own little worlds, but using these tools that became a practice with each other to stay connected amidst it and how eventually those became even more formalized. Right? So certain rhythms and certain chants and vocalizations, came to represent something for everyone. For instance, you know, as we began to recognize how things were changing internally within us, how we had sort of a self voice and recognized something about that we're an individuated, self aware being, that capacity to recognize a sense of sentience with ourselves would also be available to then look out on the world with. So then it's not just you know, it's not just seeing mountains and rocks and trees and seeing ourselves as just another in, you know, inanimate object. It's actually starting to see ourselves as animate and then being able to look out at everything else as animate as well. So bringing in ritual and ceremony to process the arrival the arrival of our interior animus and awakening and and consciousness and awareness, and also being able to gift that outwards to everything else, to to recognize it and everything else. I think that's one of the most amazing gifts that the the rising of our humanity within the species of our homo sapiens has brought to this planet to be able to see the animacy, see the sentience, and the process of how that came to be. So I think. I like that story. That's the story that keeps me inspired and intrigued and mystified because it's it's available and accessible anytime. Now I say part of the downside of today of having that interior self awareness, that self consciousness is that it's, you know, the pendulum. So if you get back to the pendulum, like, we started all the way to the one side, the high end of the one swing where that we didn't have any of that. Right? No consciousness, nowhere. There's no sense of sentience on this planet. Somewhere down the middle, we came aware of, like, wow. We're a thing with the sentience and an intimacy, and so is everything else. And then getting to where we are now where humans are very focused on humans. We're very focused on ourselves and our awareness and how that's you know, we're We've come to a place where we're not really recognizing it. It's all for us now. We're not really projecting it outward so much. And we can see the results of that just on the results of, you know, how our industries and technologies have really moved out of sync with the way the rest of the planet operates. And we're in a little bit of trouble, if you haven't been reading the news. So I do feel that there's a call. There's a call to return back to, you know, whatever we've gained from studying ourselves and spending time with refining and clarifying our our self awareness and this gift of consciousness. Okay. Class is over. Right? It's time to take it back out into the world and gift it back to the world, gift it back to everything else. Imagine if we treated everything else the way that we treat ourselves with the same respect and dignity and, basic human rights and, desire to see things grow and expand. And, you know, humans always wanna have a good experience. So wouldn't it be wonderful if we were able to hold that same that same standard for everything outside ourselves to make sure that the birds, the animals, the insects all had the same care and comfort that we have, that we give ourselves. And then even extending that to the trees and the plants and the bushes and all the the the flora of the world. So imagine looking, you know, and some people do. Some people are really great for their plants. But really having that same kind of care, extending that same care we consider a human trait and gifting it to the adamancy of the plants. And then extending it even further and, you know, as I finish up this walk, looking across now to the east side at the Inyo Mountains who are not quite as they're a little older, little less snow capped, little less, exciting to look at, but I'm gonna extend right now the same love and attention and blessing upon them as I was looking at the Sierras that are now behind me. Like, I can do that as a human. I can take that same aware of sentience and awareness and and love and emotion and feeling and all that expansion, that balloon expansion of everything I've expanded within my human experience and projected outwards and just give it to everything else. And that's what I'm doing right now. I'm looking at the, and I'm saying, wow. You're still so amazing. Actually like the more serene, more stable, more wise feeling that I get from looking at the INEOS compared to looking at the Sierras. I look at the Sierras, and it's super exciting, and it sounds a little daunting. Like, I think about going up to the Sierras, and I get a little little tickle in my tummy. I'm like, You might mess up up there, and, it won't go well. And then I look at the, and I feel like, yeah, you can mess up there too, and it probably wouldn't go well. But, it just seems a little gentler and kindler kinder. A little it just seems a little gentler and kinder to, you know, human misstep. That's my feeling. I'm not gonna go test it out today on either side, but I'm really enjoying this dialogue with the mountains and the rocks under my feet and the bushes to my sides. And I hope you enjoyed this share. Thanks for listening.