Try to imagine the evolution, the organic blossoming of human interaction from families and clans through the vast spaces of time we call the Paleolithic age, the old stone age. How shifting, changeable, and insecure Life must have been for proto-humans ever so gradually lifting themselves free of the animal world!

  Language was key. All primates live in communities. However, we humans were the most flexible, the most adaptable, and above all the most communicative of apes. Undoubtedly there were many variations, after all nature loves to experiment, but millennia after millennia the smartest, the most adaptable and communicative would have had the advantage. Life back then would have been crude, rude, and violent. With that in mind, the cold truth is we moderns won out by exterminating all challengers. 

  All part of the game and all part of Nature you might say. I’m talking one hundred to five hundred thousand years ago. 

  All Oneness, …but there were stirrings of something else. 

  Language is something apart. It is something we hold in our heads, in the frontal lobes of our ever expanding brains. 

  With language and its concomitant, ideas, we leave behind the Garden, innocence, and Oneness with Nature. 

  Civilization, humankind’s greatest association, is built upon language and ideas, which are humankind’s edge over the rest of Nature. But know, with every advance of civilization has come further separation from the lost Oneness with Nature. 

  Poetry and Myth were early channels back to the Oneness, early consolations for our lost innocence. Then with the advent of the City and civilization came high art and religions, which are other, more sophisticated though more tenuous umbilical cords back. 

  But over time, and especially today, it being such a natural process, the City has lifted itself entirely free from Nature and feeds voraciously upon it. It does so by pulling humans into its language and conceptual gravitational field and separating each one of us from what vestigial connection with Nature might have remained. Eventually it leaves us without any connection back to Nature whatsoever, nor a religion as consolation. 

  That is where we are today. 

  Only emptiness, ideas, questions, and yearnings for that lost something remains, that forgotten Oneness.  

  It is absolutely crucial to remember though, somewhere buried beneath the City, its language and ideas…

  Lies Oneness.