In this article we will continue our discussion of early humanity, investigating many interesting concepts and viewpoints in regards to their existence that continue to shape our reality today.
As we said in the previous article, early humans were not the dense, stupid caveman types we often stereotype them to be. They had just as brilliant minds as modern man does today, even if they differed in their perceptions and experiences.
It is unfortunate that gender stereotyping of early humanity has tainted our perception of men and women up to this very day. The genders in ancient times were not specialized as many often like to think. They shared in all activities except childbirth. This includes hunting, food gathering, caring for children, building shelters, making clothing and so forth.
The deeply ingrained gender stereotypes of both early and modern humanity are nothing but harmful and false dichotomies that serve to separate, not unify. When we learn to expand our understanding of early humanity, we will be able to expand our understanding of modern humanity as well and we will see there are no false divisions and therefore no need for ignorant and arrogant stereotyping of genders and gender roles.
Early Man, Aging & Long Lives
“In man’s very early history, however, and in your terms for centuries after the “awakening,” as described before, people lived in good health for much longer periods of time—and in certain cases they lived for several centuries.
No one had yet told them that this was impossible, for one thing.
Their sense of wonder in the world, their sense of curiosity, creativity, and the vast areas of fresh mental and physical exploration, kept them alive and strong.
For another thing, however, elders were highly necessary and respected for the information they had acquired about the world.
They were needed. They taught the other generations.
In those times great age was a position of honor that brought along with it new responsibility and activity.
The senses did not fade in their effectiveness, and it is quite possible biologically for all kinds of regenerations of that nature to occur.
Age alone never brought about any loss of physical agility, or of mental ability, or of desire.
In those early days men and women did live to ages that would amaze you today—many living to be several hundred years old.
This was indeed due to the fact that their knowledge and experience was desperately needed.
They were held in veneration, and they cast their knowledge into songs and stories that were memorized throughout the years.
Beside this, however, their energy was utilized in a different fashion than yours is.
They alternated between the waking and dream states, and while asleep they did not age as quickly. Their bodily processes slowed.”1
The Bible and Early Humans with Incredibly Long Lifespans
“Read chapter 5 of Genesis to learn what great ages are given to Adam and nine of his descendants up to Noah, or the time of the Flood.
Did Adam really live for 930 years, or Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, for 912?
(Why isn’t Eve’s age given in the Bible?)
Enoch, the fifth elder listed after Seth, lived for a mere 365 years, but sired Methuselah, who at 969 years is the oldest individual recorded in the Bible.
Methuselah was the father of Lamech (777 years), who was the father of Noah (950 years).
In Genesis 11, the listing of Abraham’s ancestors begins after the Flood with the oldest son of Noah, Shem, living some 600 years.
Generally, Abraham’s forebears didn’t live as long as Adam’s descendants had, although after Shem their ages still ranged from 148 years to 460.
Abraham himself was “only” 175 years old at his death.”2
The Law of One and Early Humans with Incredibly Long Lifespans
“At the beginning of this particular portion of your space/time continuum (the past 75,000 years) the average lifetime was approximately nine hundred of your years.
There is a particular use for this span of life in this density and given the harmonious development of the learning/teachings of this density the life span of the physical complex would remain the same throughout the cycle.
However, Earth developed [inharmonious] vibrations by the second major cycle (50,000 years ago) which shortened the life span dramatically.
The life span at the end of the first major cycle (50,000 years ago) was approximately seven hundred of your years.
The causes of this shortening are always an ineuphonious or inharmonious relational vibration between other-selves (disharmony among people, war, violence, torture, elitism, slavery…etc.).
The lessening of the life span was due primarily to the lack of the building up of positive orientation. [Recall ‘positive’ orientation refers to acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, understanding, empathy and feelings of unity. ‘Negative’ orientation refers to manipulation, control, dishonesty, elitism, violence, selfishness and feelings of separation.]
When there is no progress those conditions which grant progress are gradually lost.
This is one of the difficulties of remaining unpolarized (refusing to make a choice to live the positive path or negative path, but remaining apathetic and ignorant). The chances, shall we say, of progress become steadily less.
The average life span of the Egyptian people during the time of Akhenaten (1300’s BC) was approximately thirty-five to fifty of your years.
There was much, what you would call, disease of a physical complex nature.
The land you know of as Egypt at that time was highly barbarous in its living conditions, as you would call them.
The river which you call Nile was allowed to flood and to recede, thus providing the fertile grounds for the breeding of diseases which may be carried by insects.
Also, the preparation of foodstuffs allowed diseases to form.
Also, there was difficulty in many cases with sources of water and water which was taken caused disease due to the organisms therein.
The root cause of this widespread disease in this particular society was not so much a bellicose action although there were, shall we say, tendencies, but rather the formation of a money system and a very active trading and development of those tendencies towards greed and power; thus, the enslaving of entities by other entities and the misapprehension of the Creator within each entity.”3
Early Man & Their Interconnection with Nature
“Regardless of your histories, early men and women were quite healthy. They had strong teeth and bones.
Early man became aware of the fact that no man was injured without that event first being imagined to one extent or another.
Therefore, imagined healings were utilized, in which a physical illness was imaginatively cured — and in those days the cures worked.
They dealt with the physical world through the purposeful use of the imagination, however, in a way now most difficult to understand.
They realized they were mortal, and must die, but their greater awareness of Framework 2 (metaphysical time/space) allowed them a larger identification, so they understood that death was not only a natural necessity, but also an opportunity for other kinds of experience and development.
They felt their relationship with nature acutely, experiencing it in a far different fashion than you do yours.
They felt that it was the larger expression of their own moods and temperament, the materialization of self-events that were too vast to be contained within the flesh of any one individual or any group of individuals.
They wondered where their thoughts went after they had them, and they imagined that in one way or another those thoughts turned into the birds and rocks, the animals and trees that were themselves ever-changing.
They also felt that they were themselves, however; that as humans [they were] the manifestation of the larger expression of nature that was too splendid to be contained alone within nature’s framework, that nature needed them — that is, men — to give it another kind of voice.
When men spoke they spoke for themselves; yet because they felt so a part of the natural environment they spoke for nature also, and for all of its creatures.
Much is not understood in your interpretations.
In that world men knew that nature was balanced.
Both animals and men must die.
If a man was caught and eaten by animals, as sometimes happened, [his fellows] did not begrudge that animal its prey — at least, not in the deepest of terms.
And when they slayed other animals themselves and ate the heart, for example, it was not only to obtain the animals’ “stout hearts,” or fearlessness; but also the intent was to preserve those characteristics so that through men’s experiences each animal would continue to live to some extent.
Men in those times protected themselves against storms, and yet in the same way they did not begrudge the storm its victims.
They simply changed the alliances of their consciousnesses from the identification of self-within-the-flesh to self-within-the-storm.
Man’s and nature’s intents were largely the same, and understood as such.
Man did not fear the elements in those early times, as is now supposed.”4
Early Man & Their Relationship with Their Own Consciousness
“Some of the experiences known by early man would seem quite foreign to you now. Yet in certain forms they come down through the centuries.
Early man, again, perceived himself as himself, an individual.
He felt that nature expressed for him the vast power of his own emotions.
He projected himself out into nature, into the heavens, and imagined there were great personified forms that later turned into the gods of Olympus, for example.
He was also aware of the life-force within nature’s smallest parts, however, and before sense data became so standardized he perceived his own version of those individualized consciousnesses which much later became the elementals, or small spirits.
But above all he was aware of nature’s source.
He was filled with wonder as his own consciousness ever-newly came into being.
He had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that your own consciousness has now achieved — so when he thought a thought he was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from?
His own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, its changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky.
The relative smoothness of your own consciousness — in those terms, at least — was gained at the expense of certain other experiences, therefore, that were not possible otherwise.
You could not live in your present world of time if your consciousness was as playful, curious, and creative as it was, for [then] time was also experienced far differently.”5
Early Man & Sexual Roles
“There is far greater leeway in the behavior of animals than you understand, for you interpret animal behavior according to your own beliefs.
You interpret the past history of your species in the same manner.
It seems to you that the female always tended to the offspring, for example, nursing them, that she was forced to remain close to home while the male fought off enemies or hunted for food.
The ranging male, therefore, appears to have been much more curious and aggressive.
There was instead a different kind of situation.
Children do not come in litters.
The family of the caveman was a far more “democratic” group than you suppose – men and women working side by side, children learning to hunt with both parents, women stopping to nurse a child along the way, the species standing apart from others because it was not ritualized in sexual behavior.
Except for the fact that males could not bear children, the abilities of the sexes were interchangeable.
The male was usually heavier, a handy physical advantage in some areas – but the woman was lighter and could run faster.
Women were also somewhat lighter because they would bear the additional weight of a child.
Even then, of course, there were variances, for many women are larger than small men.
But the women could hunt as well as the men.
If compassion, kindness, and gentleness were feminine characteristics only, then no male could be kind or compassionate because such feelings would not be biologically possible.
If your individuality was programmed by your biological sex, then it would be literally impossible for you to perform any action that was not sexually programmed.
A woman cannot father a child, nor can a male bear one.
Since you are otherwise free to perform other kinds of activity that you think of as sexually oriented, in those areas the orientation is cultural.
In your terms, the psyche is a repository of characteristics that operate in union, composed of female and male elements.
The human psyche contains such patterns that can be put together in multitudinous ways.
You have categorized human abilities so that it seems that you are men or women, or women and men primarily, and persons secondarily.
Your personhood exists first, however. Your individuality gives meaning to your sex, and not the other way around.”6
Early Man & Family Dynamics
“In direct opposition to current theories about the past, there was far less sexual specialization, say, in the time of caveman than now.
The family was a very cooperative unit.
The basis of early society was cooperation, not competition.
Families grouped together.
There were children of various ages in such a band all the time.
When women were near birth, they performed those chores that could be done in the cave dwellings, or nearby, and also watched other young children; while the women who were not pregnant were off with the males, hunting or gathering food.
If a mother died, the father took over her responsibilities, the qualities of love and affection being quite as alive in him as in the female.
After a woman bore, she nursed the child, taking it with her on food-gathering excursions, or sometimes letting other women in the group nurse the child.
Often after childbirth, women immediately joined the hunting expeditions, and the fathers made clothing from animals’ hides at home.
This allowed the male to rest after prolonged hunting activity, and meant that no adult member of a family became over-exhausted.
The work, then, was interchangeable.
Children began food gathering and hunting as soon as they were able to – females as well as males – led by the older children, going farther away as they progressed in strength.
Qualities of inventiveness, curiosity, ingenuity, could not be delegated to one sex alone.
The species could not have survived such a division.”7
Early Men and Women were Equal, say Scientists
An article was published in The Guardian on May 14, 2015 where scientists from the University College London find that “the earliest human societies are likely to have been founded on enlightened egalitarian principles.”8
It goes on to say that “a study has shown that in contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, men and women tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with. The findings challenge the idea that sexual equality is a recent invention, suggesting that it has been the norm for humans for most of our evolutionary history.”9
Only upon the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, did inequality emerge.
“The equality between the sexes may have been a survival advantage and played an important role in shaping human society and evolution…Sexual equality may have proved an evolutionary advantage for early human societies, as it would have fostered wider-ranging social networks and closer cooperation between unrelated individuals.” 10
Early Man & Beliefs about Conception & Pregnancy
“It is fashionable to believe that early man did not understand the connection between intercourse and birth.
Even the animals, however, understand without words or language the importance of their sexual behavior.
Early man was hardly more ignorant.
The male knew what he was doing even without textbooks that outlined the entire procedure.
The female understood the connections between the child born and the sexual act.
It is the height of idiocy to imagine that because of the time taken in pregnancy, the female could not understand the child’s origin in intercourse.
The body’s knowledge did not need a complicated language.
For that matter, your literal interpretation of childbirth is by some standards a highly limited one.
Historically speaking, early man in his way understood the connections between the human and the earth far better than you do, and used language as he developed it to express first of all this miracle of birth.
For he saw that he constantly replenished his kind, and that all other species were replenished in the same manner.
This unlimited world constantly replenished itself. Children came from women’s’ wombs.
Man was acquainted with death, and many children were stillborn, or were naturally aborted.
This also, however, was in the natural order of things, and was done far more easily then than now.
All flower seeds do not fall on fertile ground and bring forth other flowers.
When innate consciousness merges with proper form, the conditions are right for the birth of a healthy child.
When the conditions are not right, the child does not develop properly. Nature aborts it.
The physical elements return to the earth to become the basis for other life.
While there was no mating period, still there was a close biological relationship between the species and the earth, so that women naturally conceived when situations of climate, food supplies, and other elements were beneficial.
Biologically, the species knew ahead of time when droughts would appear, for example, and it automatically altered its rate of conception to compensate.
Left alone, animal species do the same thing.
In broad terms, early man was struck by the fact that all things seemed to reproduce themselves, and it was this fact that first caught his attention.
Later he used what you think of as myths to explain this abundance.
Yet those myths contained a kind of knowledge that escapes your literal, specific interpretations of sexual events.
Such knowledge resides in the psyche, however.”11
Early Man, Daytime & Nighttime
“It seems only natural that early man carried on all of his main activities in the day, hiding after dark.
As a matter of fact, however, early man was a natural night dweller, and early developed the uses of fire for illumination, carrying on many activities after dark, when many natural predators slept.
He also hunted very well in the dark, cleverly using all of his sense with high accuracy – the result of learning processes that are now quite lost.
In any case, man was not by any means exclusively a daytime creature, and fires within caves extended activities far into the night.
It was agriculture that turned him more into a daytime rhythm, and for some time many beliefs lingered that resulted from earlier nighttime agricultural practices.”12
Early Man & Acting as a Teaching Method
“Early man spontaneously played at acting out the part of other animals. He took the part of a tree, a brook, a rock.
Acting became a teaching method – a way of passing on information.
Man always possessed all of the knowledge he needed. The task was to make it physically available.
Early man did act in a more spontaneous manner, more automatically, in our terms, but not mindlessly.”13
Early Man & Art
“Early artists drew pictures to share the images they saw in their dreams.
In a fashion they practiced dreaming in their sleep, and thus learned also to think in terms of the measurement of physical images, and to move objects around in their minds before they did so physically.
Poetry was an art and a science.
It conveyed quite necessary information about man and the universe.
The same can be said of many cave drawings.
What you had – what you still have, though you are not nearly as aware of it – was an excellent give-and-take between the inner and outer sense.
Through chanting, dancing, playacting, paintings, story-telling, man spontaneously translated inner sense data into physical actualization.
The physical senses only present you with clues as to your own sensitivities.”14
Early Man & the Mobility of Consciousness
“Generally you experience the self as isolated from nature, and primarily enclosed within your skin.
Early man did not feel like an empty shell, and yet self-hood existed for him as much outside of the body as within it.
Consciousness is far more mobile than you realize.
Operationally, you have focused yours primarily with the body.
You like to think in terms of units and definitions, so even when you consider your own consciousness you think of it as “a thing,” or a unit – an invisible something that might be held in invisible hands perhaps.
Instead consciousness is a particular quality of being.
Each portion of “it” contains the whole, so theoretically as far as you are concerned, you can leave your body and be in it simultaneously.
In those early times consciousness was more mobile.
Identity was more democratic.
In a strange fashion this does not mean that individuality was weaker.
Instead it was strong enough to accept within its confines many divergent kinds of experience.
A person, then, looking out into the world of trees, waters and rock, wildlife and vegetation, literally felt that he or she was looking at the larger, materialized, subjective areas of personal self-hood.
To explore that exterior world was to explore the inner one.
Such a person, however, walking through the forest, also felt that he or she was also a portion of the inner life of each rock or tree, materialized. Yet there was no contradiction of identities.
A man might merge his own consciousness with a running stream, traveling in such a way for miles to explore the layout of the land.
To do this he became part water in a kind of identification you can barely understand – but so did the water then become part of the man.
You can imagine atoms and molecules forming objects with little difficulty.
In the same way, however, portions of identified consciousness can also mix and merge, forming alliances.”15
Early Man, Individuality & the Mobility of Consciousness
“Man understood himself to be a separate entity, but one that was connected to all of nature.
The emotional reaches of his subjective life, then, leapt far beyond what you think of as private experience.
Each person participating fully in a storm, for example, still participated in his or her own individual way.
Yet the grandeur of the emotions was allowed full sway, and the seasons of the earth and the world were jointly felt.
The language or the method of communication can best be described as direct cognition.
At that stage no words or even images were needed.
The wind outside and the breath were felt to be one and the same, so that the wind was the earth breathing out the breath that rose from the mouths of the living, spreading out through the earth’s body.
Part of a man went out with his breath – therefore, man’s consciousness could go where the wind traveled.
A man’s consciousness, traveling with the wind, became part of all places.
A man did not so much stand at the shore looking down at the water, as he immersed his consciousness within it.
Man’s initial curiosity did not involve seeing, feeling, or touching the object’s nature as much as it involved a joyful psychic exploration in which he plunged his consciousness, rather than, say, his foot into the stream – though he did both.
In a kind of emotional magnification unknown to you, each person’s private emotions were given an expression and release through nature’s changes – a release that was understood, and taken for granted.
In the most profound of terms, weather conditions and the emotions are still highly related.
The inner conditions cause the exterior climatic changes, though of course it now seems to you that it is the other way around.”16
Early Man, Language & the Mobility of Consciousness
“Love incites the desire to know, explore, and communicate with the beloved; so language began as man tried to express his love for the natural world.
Initially language had nothing to do with words, and indeed verbal language emerged only when man had lost a portion of his love, forgotten some of his identification with nature, so that he no longer understood its voice to be his also.
In those early days man possessed a gargantuan arena for the expression of his emotions.
He did not symbolically rage with the storms, for example, but quite consciously identified with them to such a degree that he and his tribesmen merged with the wind and lightning, and became a part of the storms’ forces.
They felt, and knew as well, that the storms would refresh the land, whatever their fury.
Because of such identification with nature, the death experience, as you understand it, was in no way considered an end.
The mobility of consciousness was a fact of experience.
The self was not considered to be stuck within the skin.
The body was considered more or less like a friendly home or cave, kindly giving the self refuge but not confining it.
The language of love did not initially involve images, either.
Images in the mind, as they are understood, emerged in their present form only when man had again, lost a portion of his love and identification, and forgotten how to identify with an image from its insides, and so began to view it from outside.”17
Early Man “Pulling” in His Consciousness
“In your terms, over a period of time early man pulled his awareness in, so to speak; he no longer identified as he did before, and began to view objects through the object of his own body.
He no longer merged his awareness, so that he learned to look at a tree as one object, where before he would have joined with it, and perhaps viewed his own standing body from the tree’s vantage point.
It was then that mental images became important in usual terms – for he had understood these before, but in a different way, for the inside out.
Now he began to draw and sketch, and to learn how to build images in the mind that were connected to real exterior objects in the presently accepted manner.
Now he walked, not simply for pleasure, but to gain the information he wanted, to cross distances that before his consciousness had freely traveled.
So he needed primitive maps and signs.
Instead of using whole images he used partial ones, fragments of circles or lines, to represent natural objects.
He had always made sounds that communicated emotions, intent, and sheer exuberance.
When he became involved with sketched or drawn images, he began to imitate their form with the shape of his lips.
The “O” was perfect, and represents one of his initial, deliberate sounds of verbalized language.”18
Early Man & the Formation of Culture
“Culture throughout the ages was spread by more than physical means.
Abilities and inventions were not dependent upon human migrations, but those migrations themselves were the result of information given in dreams, telling tribes of men the directions in which better homelands could be found.
The trouble with most ideas concerning evolution is that they are all one-sided – all loaded at man’s end at the expense of the other species.
In a fashion, cultures do not evolve in the kind of straightforward manner that is usually supposed.
Of course, cultures change, but man instantly began to fashion culture, as for example beavers instantly began to form dams.
They did not learn how to form damns through trial and error. They did not for untold centuries build faulty dams. They were born, or created, dam makers.
Man automatically began to form culture.
He did not start with the rudiments of culture, as is thought.
He did not learn through trial and error to think clear thoughts.
He thought quite clearly from the beginning.
He did learn through trial and error various ways of best translating those thoughts into physical action.
The first cultures were as rich as your own.
In your terms, reading and writing were great advantages, but it is also true that in the past the mind was also used to record information, and transmit it with an artistry that you do not now use.
Man did not have to learn by trial and error what plants were beneficial to eat, and what herbs were good for healing.
The knower in him knew, and he acted on the information spontaneously.”19
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- ibid.
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 20, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=20
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- Devlin, Hannah, Early Men and Women were Equal, say Scientists, The Guardian, 14 May 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/14/early-men-women-equal-scientists
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- Roberts, Jane, The Magical Approach, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1995
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
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