Where in the world do we come from? How did human beings get here at all and become what we are today?
We’ve been exploring that through looking at the intersection of Nonduality and Native spirituality. The twist we’re looking at is using Nonduality enlightenment teachings as a tool for a person to find out who you are without any of your extraneous conditionings. This then puts us in a state where we can understand the native way and participate in that worldview. Who is alive in you? Who are you? Who’s underneath the veil of thought, unaffected by all these extraneous conditionings?
When going to the depths we find out that who we are is the exact same essence that native wisdom is always nurturing. These two things are interconnected. They are not the same, but they overlap. It’s not like two belief systems that believe in the same thing; it’s two totally different worldviews that we can intersect here and now, in the present, in a very interesting way.
So, looking at it from this point of view, where did Humanity come from?
We’ve been talking about language and how language influences our worldview, and we’ve been talking about history and how the kind of history we’ve been told, when looked at from the point of view of a real human being, doesn’t make any sense. How did we get such big heads and brains? This is a big question for anthropologists. They see the fossil record and they’re like, ‘Well, you know, heads started getting bigger and babies started getting born earlier, and women’s hips got wider,’ and, but nobody really talks about what was like to be those first long-ago bipeds. How in the world did that actually happen for the actual people that were evolving? They were very much like us even before our big brain evolved.
Look at chimpanzees running around in the forest; the moms have babies and the babies hold on to the fur and get carried around. Tiny little babies. After a while the little baby’s running around taking care of himself. Human beings go years before they can run around on their own. It’s a big difference. That is a lot of childcare.
I want to tell you something that nobody’s seemed to notice: all that childcare would have had to come from women. Women were there. Women are smaller than men and a human baby is a pretty big load to carry. If you’ve ever raised a baby or been around children, you’ll realize that this is a hard job; raising babies.
Human babies are heavy. One little mother can’t carry a big baby like that for two years. A normal size human baby is 7 lbs. Probably smaller back in the day, but the mothers were too, right? That baby will quickly grow until you’re carrying around 30 pounds. That is a pretty significant amount of weight for one woman to have to carry around. Particularly if you have something else to do, or if you have another child.
What we’re starting to learn from the stories of native wisdom is that lots of people were involved in raising children. Add that reality to the deep time of humans and it makes sense. Logically, we can look back and see that there had to be more going on as we evolved than simply human’s heads getting bigger, women’s hips getting bigger, and babies being born earlier; someone had to be taking care of those babies. It couldn’t be done by one little mother all by herself.
Something that has just always intrigued me is: at what point in this process were carrying devices created? Women around the world will wrap a baby in a shawl, and carry the baby on her back. That makes it much easier to care for an infant. If you have a wrap you can tie up the baby and get some work done. But which came first, the chicken or the egg? Obviously, babies with bigger heads came way, way before wraps were invented. How did they carry those babies?
What must have happened was that the connection between people grew strong enough where everybody in the tribe was helping the mother raise this big-headed, early-born baby. They didn’t have playpens, strollers or bouncy seats. Babies can play in the dirt for sure, but I seriously doubt survival rates would have been any good if sleeping babies were left laying around in a meadow. They would have to be held most the time, and one person simply cannot hold a baby all day long.
Practically thinking, long ago, a mother raising a baby all by herself would have had to regularly put the baby down. Even two people can’t do it, like if it was a mom and a dad with a baby. You have to put the baby down. Babies sleep a lot and the only option for a humanoid to carry a baby would be in their arms. We’re talking almost-naked little pre-humans in the savanna of Africa. There were no baby devices. They had to be held. It’s the only logical answer. Any mother can figure this out.
A mother with a baby that’s growing and dependent for two years wouldn’t survive. Even if the young mother herself was being taken care of, if somebody was bringing her food so she never had to leave, you’d still have to put the baby down. If there’s no place that you safely put the baby down then they had to be carrying the babies all the time.
It only makes sense that these evolving pre-human babies were not put down for any length of time… simply because there was no place to put them down! Once heads started growing and we were being born prematurely we had to be held.
This gives a totally different view or our long evolution.
Now think about the idea we were talking about in the last video, the evolved nest. This is an idea that Darcia Narváez is telling us. It matches what we learn from Aboriginal wisdom in Sand Talk.
Darcia explores this idea in her work at University of Notre Dame, and the book Restoring the Kinship Worldview. She says that for our mental health human beings need to be raised in an amazingly tight carrying nest in order to reach our full potential. If that’s true then then this nest must have evolved a long, long time ago. It solves our chicken or egg problem. The caring nest must have happened first before heads started getting bigger. A large caring community would have had to be in place for babies to start being born earlier and earlier with bigger and bigger heads. Our intelligence is intricately tied to the human tribes ability to create tight communities. Our intelligence is intricately tied to being held by numerous people in a tight community throughout infancy.
More and more we can get a sense of how integral being held as an infant is to creating fully functioning, strong adults… because everything is connected. Evolution didn’t happen in little pieces. It had to be an entire vibrant whole.
It only seems possible that caring communities started first. Maybe even a million years ago. Cooperation between pre-human beings must have started evolving to the point where the babies would be held more and more by more and more people. Once this evolved nest was alive then those big headed, smart babies could survive. We could then get smarter and smarter. Our ideas of how it happened has to include the actual baby. And the baby has to include those who were taking care of her.
I like to read books on anthropology and the science today is saying that human beings are the only animal that shares food. In lots of other species a mother will bring food to a baby. But the growing up process is about that baby learning to get its own food. Once the baby grows up, that’s it. They have to feed themselves and don’t share. Human beings are the only ones that actually bring food back to the whole tribe and share it with everyone.
That is an amazing leap of cooperation… and that is you and me. This is so in baked into who we are. Our families, our communities, even our moral stories are based around sharing food. Think of the simple moral teachings we regularly give to a child. For instance: if you divide a cookie, the person who divides the cookie then offers it to the other person to choose, do they want the bigger half or the little half? That’s basic human morality, right? You don’t divide it in half and then take the big half and give the little half to your brother. Nobody’s allowed to do that. We’re taught this cooperation right from the very beginning.
You’ll notice that as adults, the more you cooperate and give, the more solid and real you feel. It feels good to give because that is how we are baked, that is our main ingredient with each other. We need to start seeing ourselves this way instead of seeing ourselves as a horrible creature who destroys everything and creates war.
We are the most cooperative being on the planet and that’s what makes us tick. We’ve lived on this planet for millions of years where this cooperation wasn’t just with each other. It was with all the other beings, brothers and sisters, in the natural world. It was with the very sky and earth, the mountains and seas, the full awakened cosmos that we saw and move with in every breath. This recent history where cooperation has turned into war is a little flash in the pan, an accidental temporary insanity that has overcome the people.
What we’re trying to do with Nonduality is come back to sanity. The whole practice is about how to drop the insane part of yourself. How to drop this crazy idea that you are an individual person.
This insanity is a thing that has happened very recently, and this is what Nonduality enlightenment teachings drop. Who are you inside? What is the real you like? You’re the one who is driving the vehicle of yourself; all this other stuff rattling through our brains in addicted language is added on. It’s a temporary crust of left-brain thinking that is not necessary.
This is why Nonduality teachings emphasize that you are not your thoughts. That’s what the “Not two” means. Thoughts divide the world into separate things. But you are not those things. The thought processes that seems to dominate your head is not you.
Another way to look at it is that Nonduality is simply saying that something is wrong with the way our brains work. We are somehow broken. Instead of living our lives with a relaxed brain that fits seamlessly into reality, we have a mind that’s constantly, constantly chewing, chewing, chewing, trying to understand, trying to understand, trying to understand. The modern human minds is caught in a loop. I say the reason for this is because our worldview is based on a basic lie that’s not really working for us.
We need to, unravel. We need to step back and go, wait a minute, that is not me, this confusion is not me.
Looking at our current unconsciousness from the point of view of the Native Worldview gives us a real idea of what this natural human being is like. What we can become again.
Read the books I have listed on my Reading List page. Devour them. You’ll find that the native worldview has teachings on how to be a really good human being, how to not get trapped inside this head of selfishness that we all seem to carry around.
As you move forward from this point put yourself in this framework of this deep, deep history of a cooperative, awake humanity. This is what we’re looking to rejoin as we move from our false self to the real.