The Biblical myth of Eden and the Fall come up again and again, probably because it’s so ingrained in our cultural consciousness from centuries of Christian domination. In many ways it’s a very useful and rich myth that quite aptly tells the emergence of our modern state of being, however we like to define it.

In the primitivist worldview, all changes come with the arrival of agriculture, the subsequent development of a sedentary society, and a relatively sudden increase in population. The creation of hierarchies, religions, political systems, patriarchy, and domination of others quickly followed suit. The story of the Fall, then, is easily reinterpreted as the mythical moment of departure from hunter-gatherer life and the entrance into agricultural civilization. For instance, Ran Prieur writes:

The Garden of Eden represents the original human condition, a life of ease and plenty, staying in our place and taking what God/Nature gives us. The Fall is our choice to reject this way of living, to take food by force by domesticating plants and animals and storing great surpluses, so that we’re no longer dependent on God/Nature, but have made ourselves into gods.

While from a materialist standpoint I see no reason to object to this interpretation — it’s laid out quite thoroughly in books like Wandering God, as well as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond — I’d prefer a different tack, based in the point of view of the evolution of consciousness.

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I’m still a bit hesitant to accept Wilber’s model of the development of consciousness, because if (mis)interpreted too simplistically, it may in fact implicitly endorse the denigration of “lower” forms of life, and even of other, non-civilized forms of humanity. My impression is that he is against this misinterpretation, but the charge is all too common in primitivist circles — because the tendency to be anthropocentric is all too common in civilization. And Wilber’s model, like all developmental models, is, after all, very directional. It presumes that we came from somewhere (a “prepersonal” state of consciousness) and we are going somewhere (a “transpersonal” state of consciousness). It implies the superiority of the transpersonal over the prepersonal, and has the potential for abuse. So if I am to accept this model, I’d like to understand the value and experience of the prepersonal.

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I consider the arc of human history a macrocosm of an individual person’s growth and development. I’ve described the development of our civilization as a process of spiritual growth; and as we near the decline of the empire of industrial civilization, we enter another stage in the growth process.

This, of course, is not a new idea; people have been talking about a “shift in consciousness” for a long time, in many different ways. But steeped as I have been in the paradigm of primitivism, in which we all exist in a state of “original sin” just for having been born in civilization, the concept of civilization as a developmental stage rather than an unnecessary evil was, if not quite a new idea, still a concept in dire need of revival, for my own sanity.

The primitivist view on the history of civilization might be typified by statements like this:

To me there does not have to be anything learned from civilization — no ultimate result is needed to justify civilization or give its occurrence meaning or purpose or value or any “point” whatsoever … At some future point civilization will no longer exist and humans will once again live for life’s richness rather than struggle to find life’s meaning. For those of us on the path to rewilding … our process mirrors the process of humanity at large — many of us pass through pointlessness to life’s richness along the way.

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I’ve been considering what it means to have a sense of place. More specifically, I’ve been wondering why I don’t feel very connected to my place in the world right now, and I’ve wondered what it means to feel genuinely connected.

Here’s the model I’ve come up with. For want of a better term (I’m sure I’ll come up with one someday), I’ll call this the “Chunk” Model of Psychophysical Space.

I define a “chunk” as a unit of physical space whose boundaries are determined by a variety of psychological factors. In general, a chunk has the characteristic of being relatively continuous and regular. For example, for most people, their house or apartment is a chunk. All of the rooms are connected, you don’t have to change clothes or get your things together or make a grocery list or put on makeup in order to move from one room to another. It’s easy, it flows. You might call a chunk a unit of space in which your energy flows more or less freely and evenly throughout the space.

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In my last post on personal myth, I wrote:

I think my myths are like a suit of armor. They protect me sometimes. But other times, when the night is dark and I’m trapped in slowly rising waters, and the only way out is to dive deep and slip through a crack in the rocks — well, then it’s time to shed the armor, and find new ways to survive, based on the reality that’s present.

It occurs to me that falling under the enchantment of spells — others’, and my own — was exactly what [John Michael] Greer was warning against in the essay I quoted; and I proceeded to pursue the casting of another spell nonetheless. Pretty silly, in hindsight.

There’s still some ambivalence about the use of myths/spells/stories, though.

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I’ve just begun my fifth semester of acupuncture school. In the sixth semester, beginning in May, I will start treating patients.

It’s an exciting time. After just over a year of accumulating and synthesizing bare bits of information, I will finally begin to apply it in a meaningful way. In terms of knowledge and experience, I feel ready to treat patients. Not, of course, that I feel that I’ve mastered the skills or theories I’ve learned; but I feel fairly confident in the basics, and I’m at the point where I need to actually practice in order to learn more and to consolidate what I’ve learned. And I feel well-prepared to do that.

There’s one major hitch: Recruiting patients.

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In one of my recent posts, Myths of My Future, Piers commented,

Maybe the next step in this journey is to cast off those models that you want to look up to (like the cool strong people living off the land), and live without a strong myth (read: illusion/daydream) that gives you illusory faith that what you’re doing is significant. Live without knowing for sure, without a Big Model (or fantasy) in mind, live with fluidity, live with yourself as you are.

To which I responded,

I don’t necessarily want The One Truth to follow. I just want a story, or a set of stories, that makes sense, feels healthy and balanced, and takes me in the direction I want to go.

But, I am now beginning to rethink that strategy, because I’m realizing that my quest for myth may indeed be a search for The One Truth or a Grand Unifying Theory to the meaning of my life. Such a theory would make things very, very simple.

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