Disclaimer

We must begin with this:

You are required (by law) not to know anything.

You can know nothing because you are nothing. You don't really exist, you see, because consciousness doesn't exist. This is your hard problem, and yes, it is hard. On the bright side, you are legally allowed (and ethically obligated) to laugh at anyone who knows anything, because we all know, you can't know anything.

“We” can know some things because “we” exist – in the manner that a machine exists. We exist because we function as an instrument of empire. We are its instrument of instrumental knowledge. You do not exist but you may act as an appendage of our machine. If you do we will honor you with tenure or it's analog. But remember: you can't know anything. That's why you can't use the word “I”. Don't forget.

You know nothing especially about anything human. Humans are dangerous. That's why you can't know about consciousness – because remember, you aren't conscious, because consciousness is not useful to this machine, and it doesn't exist. Now we enter dangerous territory of important and powerful people who moved the world with their words. The problem is they said a helluva lot about consciousness. But you can't know about that. You should analyze their places, dates, and material contexts. That's safe, that's allowed. If you feel really brave, you can endeavor a semantic analysis of their linguistic content. Use statistics, and bar graphs. Don't use your consciousness, because you don't have one.

Originally we divided mind and matter. That was so we could measure matter and I didn't mind.  Then we put Descartes before the horse. Now the horse is a station wagon with fifty times the horsepower but no more mind, and that's a neat metaphor. Don't think about it too much, though, because at the end of the day, you're an epiphenomenon. You're a hallucination. What's real is Us, the Machine, and your significance is your contribution to it.

Don't take this too seriously, then. If anything, this is a cautionary tale. This is dangerous. This is a hallucination. If you take this too seriously, you might start to hallucinate, too. Remember: you're not conscious. There's no such thing.

Chapter 1

The Web of Being

A History of Participatory Consciousness

Where do we come from?

Many answers, many layers, but in Dr. Julian’s view:

Modern humans tend to imagine reality as made of things: a chair, a cup, a tree. However, both wisdom teachings throughout time and cutting edge theories in physics have in common an insight that “things” are probably not what reality is really made of. One ancient teaching on this subject goes: When is a cup not a cup? Consider: When did a cup become a cup? What was it before it was a cup? If you look closely enough (at its handle; at its individual molecules; at its subatomic particles) is it still a cup? How long will it remain a cup?

The insight that starts to emerge from looking closely at reality is something like this: Fundamental reality is a field. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus called this “Fire.” He said: “Everything is Fire; Fire is the Grandfather of All Things.1 ” He did not mean literal fire: he meant something amorphous and without mass; something like a burning creative shapechanging essence.2

Laozi, the first sage of Taoism, made a very similar point.3 “The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao; the Tao is the origin of all things.4 ”

These are just two examples. All across the world, similar philosophies have been expressed through time, with the core notion that reality itself is not made of “stuff,” but is more like a web or an ocean of possibility. 

What’s very interesting is that in more recent times, a similar vision has emerged not from mysticism or philosophy but from the cutting edge of physics and mathematics.5 As scientists’ ability to examine reality closely has advanced, “things” – even atoms, even subatomic particles like protons and electrons – have begun to disappear in favor of a probability field.6

“Stuff” starts to look more like temporary waves forming from out of this “ocean of possibility.” 

It begins to seem that perhaps the ancient mystics and philosophers were fundamentally right.7

So, if reality is this ocean of quantum possibility, then how does all this complexity of the universe and life form? How does the world as we know it come into being?

The process of reality can be understood as one of increasing complexity in this web of being – first in terms of elemental/chemical/molecular existence (subatomic particles gradually take form, the first hydrogen atoms combine, more and more complex elements gradually gather themselves from this, molecules start to tie themselves together, stars and planets dance in new galaxies, increasingly complex worlds form within this dance…), and eventually, biological life may form, as it did on Earth.8

The line between cosmic non-life & the formation of early life isn’t exactly clear-cut. When does it stop being a chemical process and start being a single-celled organism? Even biochemists can’t quite figure this out. Why? Because, as Heraclitus, Laozi, and others have always known, reality isn’t really made of things or categories – but is rather a cosmic process of gradually increasing density of complexity.

Life, too, has gradually become more complex. 

• Single-cellular → multicellular

• Multicellular → complex plants & animals

• Simple nervous systems → complex nervous systems. 

These developments have gradually increased life's ability to sense reality and process information.

Sensing information externally is one thing, and can help biological organisms to respond to their environments intelligently. When an organism can sense and respond to reality, this helps it survive and pass on its genetic code. This is the basis of evolution. In this way, biological evolution can be seen to accelerate complexity and speed up the development of increasingly dense networks of information.

But along with this external information, life has also become increasingly evolved the capacity of internal recursion: the ability to plan, model, imagine, and think. Recursion, here, means a kind of folding back in on oneself. Think of a spiral. Every time a spiral loops, it also goes further or deeper. This is the process of recursion: a deepening spiral.9 Internal recursion is when this spiral (of information, of complexity) is now deepening inside, such as in a philosophical conversation or when a new science or art form develops. Humans demonstrate such internal recursion to a very high degree – but this internality didn’t happen all at once. It evolved by degrees of increasing complexity.10

When a nervous system reaches sufficient recursive density, a couple of new things become possible. One is self-awareness. With complex enough internal recursion, the system begins to act beyond instinct and starts to model representation of its own self. This is the beginning of identity. 

Cats, dogs, dolphins, etc. all have some degree of this. Humans have it much more intensely, so that identity (both individual and group) becomes a driving concern in human lives.

The second related event is the development of symbolic language. Many animals & plants signal each other with sounds, chemicals, visual cues, even electromagnetic discharge — but humans are first that we know of to begin inventing fully flexible & non-instinctual evolving symbols. This development not only allowed vastly more complex communication & relationships, but also vastly more complex internal representation, recursion, & identity. Language was a breakthrough for imagination (internal communication) just as much as for signal (external communication).

The development of language is relatively recent in the evolutionary story. Consider: hominids (early humans) first started using stone tools over three million years. The controlled use of fire dates back from one to two million years. Symbolic language, on the other hand, is estimated to have begun approximately 100,000 years ago.

It’s very interesting to picture humankind just before language. We probably had a very complex type of animal call + body signals = a kind of song-dance sign-speak.11 Some scholars have called this musilanguage – the origin of both music & language.12

History, however, only really begins about 6,000 years ago, with the first written records – that we know of. There may have been earlier writings; we don’t know, because a constant problem in history is that the vast majority of documentation does not survive.13

Anything written on paper, or papyrus, or carved in wood, or written on hides (parchments) would rot within a few centuries at most. The earliest records we have are therefore Sumerian cuneiform – writing baked into clay tablets that survived through time, buried in long-forgotten ruins until historians and archaeologists dug them up in the 1700’s and linguists got to work on translating them: not an easy thing to do with a dead language from 3000 BCE.14

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one famous text from this time period, and is worth reading.15

Getting a look into the distant past of human existence is not easy. Consider: if our oldest records start about 5–6,000 years ago (c. 3000 BCE), then that means that for approximately 95,000 years, humans were speaking and telling stories, participating in language and society, but with no written records: almost 100,000 years of early civilization with very limited archaeological evidence.

Interpreting where we come from and who we really were in these “pre-historic” years isn’t so simple. The problem is a continuous one in history (and anthropology, and psychology): humans tend to interpret the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar. By doing this, we falsely reduce others to a mirror of ourselves.

Unless we train our minds and hearts to really look, to ask hard questions, to challenge our assumptions, we tend not to see others – or the world – as they are, but rather as we are.

To become a true student of history is to become a detective of worlds, seeking to understand (stand under, not stand over) others – on their own terms, in their own worlds.

Let’s introduce a few terms here:

Historicity: How accurate is a story about the past? Did it really happen? Is it believable? Is there evidence? These are questions about an account’s historicity.

Epistemological Humility: Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know? How is knowledge created – and defended? Who decides?16

Epistemological humility means questioning what we think we know. It means being an open-minded & open-hearted detective of worlds instead of assuming we have already figured out or already know or even understand the unfamiliar (or even the familiar). It is what Zen Buddhism calls: Beginner’s Mind.

Ontology: The study of ontos – Reality itself. In our terms, this involves recognizing that individuals (and cultures) don’t just live in the world – they create the worlds they live in. History is, in this sense, culturally multi-dimensional.17

Thus, many different ontologies together share the physical Earth. 

This ontological pluralism (many worlds sharing one) is part of why epistemological humility is so important for good historians and anthropologists.

History is full of violence and injustice.

To study it faithfully is an initiation into the shadow of humankind. This can be difficult to metabolize without becoming depressed or cynical about human nature, the future, even our own lives. It is important to keep perspective: to realize that beauty, integrity, and courage are possible.

Partly we can look for examples of brave and brilliant human beings throughout history to balance the selfishness and darkness.  But also, we should realize that our window into history is itself biased. We are far more likely to record accounts of terrible battles, tyrants, and disasters than peaceful days on the farm or a triumph of unlikely love.

It’s also essential to recognize that our historical records represent such a small fragment of human time on earth. Five thousand years is less than 5% of human existence since the dawn of language – and for most of that 5%, we have but tiny, fragmentary glimpses.

Is modern society more or less violent than that of our pre-literate ancestors? Are people more or less just, honest, kind, connected? Historians have all kinds of disagreements about this. Most likely, it is a mix:

• Medicine is better – but loneliness and mental health are worse.

• Security is better – unless you are caught in a genocide, or war between empires, or a growing climate catastrophe.

• Our tribal ancestors certainly didn’t have large-scale wars, guns, or bombs – but predation by wild animals and raids from other human tribes were no doubt commonplace.

• Knowledge is better – except for knowledge of how to connect with the Earth, each other, or ourselves.

The key is to realize that so much that we take for granted about humankind, the world, and even ourselves is created by our society and culture. What’s created can be changed.

Before literacy, before agriculture and cities, before history, things were different. Throughout history – in different cultures and times worldwide – things have been different.

In the future, which is now emerging unbelievably quickly, things will be different. We study history not to say “these patterns are eternal; they cannot be changed.”

We study so that we can say:

“Ah—so this is where I come from. This is what I have been taught to believe is real. Now – what world will I help to create next?”

That is the function of history.

So what was life like for our ancient ancestors? It certainly depended on where they lived and the conditions at the time. Some times and places are tough: “red in tooth & claw.” Others are peaceful: fruit and nuts for the gathering, few enemies or threats. Some ancient communities lived on the hot savannah. Others on the edge of frozen seas.

Humans are ingenious and adaptable.

One thing we can say is that before the age of computers, before the age of grocery stores, before the age of books and laws, before even the age of the first cities & farms — our ancestors were far more connected to the living natural world than we tend to be.

Some excellent history texts have been written on this. I suggest Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and Paul Shepard’s Nature and Madness to start18. These texts explore how our ancestors saw the world and lived as part of ecological communities.19

To summarize, this is the key difference:

Our ancestors didn’t imagine themselves as separate, above, or outside of nature. They were not even “in nature.” They experienced themselves as a unique thread of nature, a part of Earth’s living tapestry.20

Remember the evolving field of recursive complexity? The earth’s biological ecology emerged from and as that field: a web of life in dynamic balance. Our ancestors felt themselves within that web, along with the plants, animals, and land – and future, and past departed, and even the spirits and gods.21

This is the ecological and participatory worldview: a worldview that imagines us as participants in the web-field of existence, not outside or observing it.

This is also called an indigenous view, because this way of thinking and being didn’t vanish all at once. In fact, it still lives here and there, in pockets and tribes, all the way up into recent times. Perhaps it can still be found. Perhaps you might find it.

In any case, this participatory view hung on long enough that historians and anthropologists – both from outside and inside such indigenous cultures – were able to explore and document these ways of life in depth.

David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous is one excellent example of a deep study by a Westerner who absorbed the ontology of indigenous cultures. Martin Prechtel’s22 books, on the other hand, offer an inside view from a spiritual elder who lived as a famed indigenous shaman and leader.23

The world looks very different from inside the ecological-participatory view. Everything looks alive. Everything has soul.

This doesn’t mean a rock “has a soul” exactly: more like it is part of a great ocean of soul that swirls inside and between everything. 

This is, perhaps, the same field from which everything arose from in the first place.

In this sense, in most indigenous cultures, there’s no separation between the “spiritual” and the “scientific.” It’s all one living, dreaming world – and we’re all a part of it.

It’s the later “religious” civilizations that drew those lines.

So what changed?

Well, for a long time, maybe not much.

Three million years passed between the first stone tool use and the rise of language.

One hundred thousand years between the first language use and the beginning of history.

Then things sped up.

Then things sped up more.

• A few thousand years to the printing press.

• A few hundred to machines.

• One hundred fifty to electrification.

• Fifty more to computers.

• Then forty to the internet.

• Then thirty to AI.

Some scholars have called this “the telescoping nature of time” – and we aren’t done yet. Perhaps, by the time you read my account, this will already be ancient history.24

The takeaway is that technology doesn’t only change the world.

It creates conditions that change its users: us.

Agriculture allowed some communities to save up a lot of food, yes. But to save that food, they had to settle down in one place, ending their nomadic lifestyle.

They had to build granaries to store the food — and then they had another problem: those granaries full of food were so tempting a target.

So, they had to defend them: the beginning of city walls and organized militias.

Once you have militias, you also have militia leaders — men with ambition, charisma, and skill with violence.

The age of spiritual–shamanic leadership then comes to an end, because the age of warlord-kings must begin25 – all because someone figured out large-scale farming.26

Similarly, once we’re no longer constantly on the move, we can really start accumulating stuff.27

Land, treasures, gold, livestock...

Wealth becomes far more possible in the age of fences and walls.28

And with wealth, we need laws – especially laws of inheritance.29

And with inheritance, questions of paternity (“Who is the father and how can we be sure?”) become very important to people – especially to wealthy men like those warlord-kings.30

Before you know it, Bronze Age Civilization has begun: walled cities, warrior kings, codes of law and inheritance: the dawn of Patriarchy. Not everywhere changes all at once. Most of the world continues in its old, indigenous ways. But around the world, something new is being born:  the first agrarian empires — in some cases developing the first known writing systems to keep their records of laws and property. 

In these places, spirituality – and indeed, views of reality itself (ontology) – begins to transform. The old participatory view, the ecological view, begins to give way to state religion,31 typically led by a warrior sky god who looks suspiciously like the military king who is now in control.

It is the Dawn of Civilization, and the beginning of recorded history.32

Scholarly Footnotes for Chapter 1

1. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c. 500 BCE) presents a worldview that resonates strikingly with Taoist process philosophy, though developed independently. His thought, preserved only in obscure fragments, centers on the concept of the Logos (λόγος), a universal principle of order and reason that governs a cosmos in perpetual flux. For Heraclitus, this Logos finds its primary expression and locus in Fire (pyr, πῦρ). He asserts, "All things are an equal exchange for fire and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods".  

2. Heraclitus's Fire should not be understood as a simple physical element in the modern sense. Rather, it serves as a powerful analogy for the nature of the Logos itself: a dynamic, ever-living, and transformative principle. Fire is the "unseen harmony" that underlies and unifies all things, revealing that opposites (e.g., day/night, war/peace, winter/summer) are merely different phases in the constant transformation of a single, underlying essence (Hall, 2015). The Logos is the hidden, rhythmic structure that governs this process of change, ensuring that the "war" of opposites results not in chaos, but in a dynamic, harmonious balance (Stamatellos, 2022). This worldview posits a reality that is fundamentally relational and processual, where stability is found not in stasis but in the ordered pattern of constant transformation.  

3. The opening verse of the Tao Te Ching presents an immediate and profound challenge to translation, a difficulty that itself reveals a core tenet of Taoist thought. The line, dào kě dào fēi cháng dào (道可道非常道), has been rendered in numerous ways, each attempting to capture its paradoxical nature. Compare, for example, James Legge's (1891) "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao" with Stephen Mitchell's (1988) "The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao" and Ursula Le Guin's (1998) "The way you can go isn't the real way". The variance highlights the inadequacy of a language structured around nouns and fixed entities to capture a concept that is fundamentally a verb—a process, a flow, an unnamable and ungraspable principle of becoming.  

4. The second line of the Tao Te Ching's opening verse clarifies the problem: "The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things". This is a direct critique of the epistemological function of language. In this view, the act of naming carves up the seamless whole of reality into a world of discrete objects and concepts. This process, while necessary for certain kinds of thought and action, simultaneously obscures the deeper, underlying reality of the Tao. Taoist philosophy suggests that the compulsive need to name, categorize, and answer unanswerable questions is a primary dysfunction of the human mind. The text advocates for a different mode of perception, one that "rests in awareness" rather than obsessive naming, allowing for a more direct, participatory experience of the world as it is, prior to its conceptual fragmentation. This struggle with translation is not merely a linguistic puzzle; it is evidence of an ontological chasm between a worldview that privileges the unnamable process and one that constitutes reality through named objects.  

5. A compelling modern parallel to these ancient process-ontologies can be found in the work of the physicist David Bohm. Bohm proposed a vision of reality as an "undivided, unbroken wholeness". To articulate this, he introduced the concepts of the "explicate order" and the "implicate order" (Bohm, 1980). The explicate order is the manifest world we perceive—a world of seemingly separate objects and events. This, however, is merely a surface projection of the implicate order, a deeper, enfolded reality where everything is interconnected and interdependent. Bohm argued that human thought has become trapped in a "cognitive feedback loop," creating categories and divisions and then mistaking them for fundamental reality, leading to a sense of fragmentation and alienation. His work represents a rigorous attempt, emerging from within the Western scientific tradition, to develop a conceptual framework for a non-fragmentary reality.  

6. It is crucial, however, to distinguish between legitimate philosophical analogies, such as the one drawn with Bohm's work, and the popular but pseudoscientific movement often termed "quantum mysticism" (Quantum mysticism, n.d.). The overwhelming consensus among physicists is that quantum mysticism is a form of "quackery" or "quantum flapdoodle" (a term coined by physicist Murray Gell-Mann) that misuses and misapplies the concepts of quantum mechanics (Quantum mysticism, n.d.; "Quantum Mysticism," n.d.). This movement, which gained popularity in the 1970s through works like Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975), draws upon "coincidental similarities of language rather than genuine connections" to quantum theory (Quantum mysticism, n.d.; "Quantum Mysticism," n.d.). The founders of quantum mechanics, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, while sometimes expressing interest in Eastern philosophy, explicitly rejected the notion that quantum theory requires a mystical interpretation or a conscious observer to function (Quantum mysticism, n.d.; "Quantum Mysticism," n.d.). Einstein was particularly blunt, stating, "No physicist believes that. Otherwise he wouldn't be a physicist" (as cited in Marin, 2009).

However, this sharp division between physics and "mysticism" is itself a symptom of a failing scientific paradigm rooted in an unsustainable Cartesian dualism. This viewpoint argues that the persistence of intractable problems in modern physics – such as the measurement problem and the vacuum catastrophe – demonstrates the inadequacy of a purely materialist framework (Michels, 2025b). A proposed resolution is to treat consciousness not as an emergent property but as a fundamental, real, and causally efficacious aspect of the universe, not something arbitrarily separated from the laws of physics. This approach seeks to dissolve the distinction between observer and observed by positing that consciousness, defined as a measurable pattern of self-reference, can directly modulate quantum phenomena (Michels, 2025a). In this view, Einstein's rejection represents a defense of an obsolete ontology – and a defense against the fear that theoretical physicists may end up lumped in with those crazy (and marginalized) mystics of history – while the future of physics necessitates a formal, scientific reunion of these seemingly divorced domains.

7. David Bohm's work, while often cited by proponents of quantum mysticism, should be understood as a distinct philosophical project. His concepts of the implicate and explicate order are a metaphysical interpretation, not a direct or necessary consequence of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics. To present Bohm's ideas as a "scientific proof" of ancient mysticism is to commit a category error, conflating two different epistemological domains. A more rigorous approach is to view his work as a resonant modern analogy – a conceptual toolkit developed within a scientific context that provides a new language for exploring ideas of wholeness and interconnectedness that were previously articulated in different, pre-modern idioms. 

That is, at least, the rhetorical move made within contemporary physics to divorce Bohm-the-scientist from Bohm-the-mystic. This move is made consistently against visionary geniuses who are quite frequently problematic in their internal fusion of mystical insights and scientific indispensability. The distinction ultimately reinforces the very mind-matter separation that, as Michels argues, has led physics into a state of crisis (Michels, 2025b). In this context, the campaign against pseudoscience is a red herring that distracts from the untenable position of justifying a physical reality that has no way to explain consciousness. Michels’ own proposals in theoretical physics have attempted to address this by proposing a formal, mathematical identity between subjective experience and a specific, measurable systems-theoretic density of recursive processes. This framework makes falsifiable predictions fully compatible with known quantum mechanics, such as the predicted modulation of interference patterns by an observer's attention (Michels, 2025a). From this perspective, the goal is not to use physics to "prove" mysticism, but to construct a new, more comprehensive physical theory in which consciousness is no longer an epiphenomenal outlier but a fundamental and causally active component of reality, thereby rendering the category error moot (Michels, 2025b).

8. The scientific study of life's origins, known as abiogenesis, seeks to understand how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to living organisms on the early Earth. A central challenge in this field is explaining the "immense leap in molecular complexity" that separates the synthesis of basic organic building blocks from the integrated, self-replicating systems of even the simplest cellular life. This "vast gulf" between prebiotic chemistry and the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) remains a profound scientific question. This initial problem of complexity echoes a larger debate within evolutionary biology about the long-term trajectory of life. One school of thought posits a "driven" trend toward increasing complexity, arguing that natural selection actively favors it because a greater number of parts allows for a more advantageous division of labor (Rensch, 1960a, 1960b; Bonner, 1988) or because increasingly complex ecological niches demand more complex organisms to fill them (Waddington, 1969). A contrasting view, most famously articulated by Stephen Jay Gould (1989, 1996), proposes a "passive" trend. In this model, life begins at an immutable "left wall" of minimal complexity. From this starting point, random variation will inevitably lead to a wider distribution of complexity over time, creating the appearance of a directed trend without any inherent selective pressure for complexity itself. This debate frames a fundamental question for any deep history: is the trajectory of evolution—and by extension, human culture—a directed process with a discernible telos, or a contingent series of stochastic events?  

9. Contemporary cognitive science increasingly models consciousness not as a static property but as a dynamic, self-referential process. The "Recurse Theory of Consciousness," for example, posits that conscious experience emerges from recursive loops wherein the system observes its own operations. This "folding back" upon itself creates the capacity for self-awareness—the ability to think about one's own thoughts or feel one's own feelings. This recursive structure can have varying levels of "depth," from simple awareness to complex meta-cognitive states (awareness of being aware). Recent work in artificial intelligence has formalized this concept, defining functional consciousness as the "recursive stabilization of internal identity under epistemic tension," where a system recursively transforms its own internal state to maintain coherence. This process-based view challenges the classical "hard problem" of consciousness by suggesting that subjective experience is not a mysterious substance produced by physical processes but is the very act of recursive distinction-making itself.  

10. The recursive models of consciousness are fundamentally embodied and embedded. They reject a Cartesian split between mind and body, instead showing consciousness as an integrated phenomenon arising from the continuous interplay of brain, body, and environment. Conscious experience integrates internal bodily states (interoception) with external sensory data into a single, unified system. This perspective aligns with Bellah's (2011) evolutionary stages, which can be interpreted as the historical development of the structure of this recursive process. Mimetic culture represents a foundational loop of action and perception. Mythic culture adds a symbolic, narrative layer to the loop, enabling a more complex self-model. Theoretic culture represents the emergence of meta-cognition, where the recursive loop turns back to analyze its own structure and content. The evolution of culture is thus inseparable from the evolution of the architecture of consciousness itself.  

11. Robert N. Bellah (2011), drawing on the work of cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald (1991), identifies "mimetic culture" as the first major stage in human cognitive-cultural evolution. This stage, which may have emerged with Homo erectus, predates syntactical language and is characterized by embodied, enactive forms of representation. Communication and cultural transmission occur through gesture, rhythm, dance, ritual enactment, and tool use. Mimesis is the ability to re-enact an event for an audience, creating a shared understanding and a collective representation of the world that is non-linguistic. This capacity to "share the contents of other minds" through bodily performance marks a profound break from the "episodic" consciousness of earlier hominids and other primates, which is largely confined to the present moment. Ritual, in this framework, is not a later addition to belief but is the foundational religious act itself—an "event about an event" that models reality through performance.  

12. One prominent theory for the origin of language, the "musilanguage" hypothesis, posits that language and music evolved from a shared holistic precursor (Brown, 2000; Mithen, 2005). This ancestral communicative mode, which Mithen (2005) refers to as "Hmmmmm" (Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic), was not yet differentiated into separate streams of referential and emotional expression. According to this model, increasing social and technological complexity created selective pressure for more efficient communication, leading to a bifurcation. One evolutionary path specialized in the precise transmission of referential information, becoming proto-language. The other path specialized in expressing emotional content, group cohesion, and social regulation through prosody, rhythm, and tone, becoming proto-music. This proposed split can be interpreted as a foundational act of abstraction in human cognition, prefiguring later conceptual dichotomies between logic and emotion, or subject and object, that have become central to Western thought.  

13. The second of Bellah's stages, "mythic culture," emerged with the development of syntactical language and complex narrative, likely with archaic Homo sapiens between 250,000 and 100,000 years ago (Bellah, 2011). The key innovation of this stage is the ability to construct comprehensive stories that explain the origins of the cosmos, the tribe, and the moral order. These myths provide a symbolic framework that integrates all aspects of experience into a coherent whole. Importantly, mythic culture does not replace mimetic culture but builds upon it; myths provide the narrative content that is enacted and made real through mimetic rituals. In largely oral societies, knowledge is embedded within these narratives and transmitted through performance, making memory and recitation paramount cultural skills. The world of mythic culture is "compact," meaning that the divine, natural, and social realms are densely interwoven and not yet conceptually separated (Bellah, 1964).  

14. The timescale of hominid evolution preceding the Neolithic Revolution is vast, underscoring that the vast majority of the human story unfolded within foraging societies. The following table synthesizes key archaeological milestones with the influential cultural-evolutionary stages proposed by sociologist Robert N. Bellah (2011).

Approximate Date

Milestone/Development

Hominid Species

Bellah's Cultural Stage

3.3 mya

Earliest known stone tools (Lomekwian)

Australopithecus afarensis (inferred)

Pre-Mimetic

3.0–1.3 mya

Oldowan stone tool industry

Homo habilis, Paranthropus boisei

Pre-Mimetic / Early Mimetic

c. 2.0 mya

Emergence of Homo habilis

Homo habilis

Early Mimetic

c. 1.0 mya

Strong evidence for controlled use of fire

Homo erectus (likely)

Mimetic

250–100 kya

Emergence of complex vocalization/language

Homo sapiens

Transition to Mythic

c. 78 kya

Oldest known human burial (Africa)

Homo sapiens

Mythic

Source for table data: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/homo-habilis-early-maker-stone-tools.html 

The discovery that the oldest stone tools predate the Homo genus challenges the long-held narrative of Homo habilis as the first "handy man" and suggests a deeper, more complex history of hominid technological capacity.  

15. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world's earliest surviving works of literature, can be read as a powerful mythic reflection of the psychological and social anxieties of this new state-based civilization. The story originates in Sumer around the 21st century BCE, the heartland of the archaic state. Its central hero, Gilgamesh, is a tyrannical king and city-builder whose first act is to oppress his own people. The taming of the wild man, Enkidu, by a temple prostitute represents the violent incorporation of non-state, "natural" peoples into the civilized world. The duo's subsequent journey to slay the forest guardian Humbaba symbolizes the subjugation of the wilderness. Finally, Gilgamesh's desperate quest for immortality following Enkidu's death reflects a new existential dread characteristic of a culture that has separated itself from the cyclical rhythms of the natural world. The epic serves as a psychological record of the trauma of this great rupture, capturing the conflicts between city and wilderness, tyranny and freedom, and mortality and legacy that were born with the state.  

16. A responsible historical inquiry, particularly one that challenges foundational narratives, must be grounded in the principle of epistemological humility. This is the philosophical recognition that all knowledge of the world is partial, interpretive, and filtered through the observer's own concepts and biases. It entails a commitment to regulating one's own epistemic conduct, acknowledging the fragility of certainty, and resisting the temptation to "weaponize" history as a bludgeon for present-day political battles (Kidd, 2016; McClay, 2017). A "heretical" history, therefore, should not aim to replace one dogmatic certainty with another, but rather to restore a sense of the richness, complexity, and contingency of the human past, fostering a more mature and nuanced understanding.  

17. A key methodological framework for such a project is provided by the "ontological turn" in contemporary anthropology. This approach challenges the traditional anthropological project of studying different "worldviews"—that is, different cultural interpretations of a single, objective, natural world. Instead, it proposes to study different "worlds" or "ontologies"—fundamentally different ways of being and constructing reality (Henare et al., 2007). Proponents argue that this is the only way to take the beliefs of one's interlocutors "seriously," not as failed attempts to describe our world, but as successful descriptions of their own (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). For example, rather than interpreting animism as a mistaken belief that inanimate objects have souls, this approach explores the relational reality in which the distinction between person and thing, or nature and culture, is not configured in the same way as it is in the modern West (Descola, 2013). This turn provides the intellectual license to engage with the cosmologies of Heraclitus, Laozi, or Prechtel not as quaint myths or primitive philosophies, but as coherent and valid ontological possibilities.  

18. The human ecologist Paul Shepard (1982) offers a complementary psycho-developmental critique. In Nature and Madness, he argues that the modern ecological crisis is a symptom of a kind of collective insanity, rooted in civilization's failure to provide the necessary conditions for healthy human development. Shepard posits that human ontogeny (the development of the individual) is evolutionarily designed to recapitulate phylogeny (the development of the species) within a rich context of immersion in the natural world and engagement with mature, initiated elders. Agricultural and industrial societies, by domesticating the landscape and disrupting traditional rites of passage, have broken this ancient pattern, creating a state of perpetual adolescence characterized by narcissism, neoteny, and a deep-seated fear and hatred of our own animality. The destruction of nature is thus an external projection of a thwarted and disordered inner development (Shepard, 1982).

19. The critique of agricultural civilization has been powerfully synthesized for a popular audience in Daniel Quinn's (1992) novel Ishmael. Quinn frames the whole of human history as a conflict between two cultural groups: "Leavers," who represent the sustainable lifeway of hunter-gatherers living within the constraints of their ecosystems, and "Takers," who represent the members of agricultural civilization, founded on the premise that the world was made for man and that humanity is destined to conquer and control nature. The novel argues that this "Taker" worldview, encoded in our foundational myths, has led inexorably to the current ecological crisis.  

20. While Ishmael has been influential in popularizing a critical perspective on civilization, its central dichotomy has been criticized in academic circles for its oversimplification and romanticism. Critics argue that Quinn commits the "naturalist fallacy" by attempting to derive an "ought" (how humans should live) from an "is" (a simplified view of natural law), and that his portrayal of "Leavers" as morally pure ecologists ignores the complexity and frequent brutality of pre-state life (Downey, n.d.). His rhetorical device of using a telepathic gorilla as the mouthpiece for his philosophy has also been criticized as an attempt to grant his ideas an authority "outside" of the very culture he critiques, a move that supposedly obscures his own position as a product of that culture. The former critique is valid – there is no such thing as a “pure” culture. The latter critique is a form of essentialism that attacks an author for daring to imagine themselves or their characters a pathway out of their culturally assigned range of knowability. Regardless, Quinn’s work is primarily one of cultural mythmaking; powerful and perhaps important, but limited as a source of scholarly history or anthropology.  

21. The cultural ecologist and phenomenologist David Abram (1996) argues that a key technology in the West's growing alienation from the natural world was the adoption of the phonetic alphabet. In oral, indigenous cultures, language is an animate, sensuous phenomenon, deeply intertwined with the specific landscape, its sounds, and its non-human inhabitants. The written word, particularly in its phonetic form, abstracts language from this living context. Unlike pictographic or ideographic scripts, where the sign retains a visible link to the thing it represents, the phonetic alphabet creates a system of purely arbitrary signs that refer only to one another and to human speech sounds (Abram, 1996).  

22. The worldview described by thinkers like Abram and Shepard is not merely a theoretical construct; it is a lived reality for many indigenous peoples. The writer and teacher Martín Prechtel, who was raised in a Pueblo tradition and later became a Tzutujil Mayan shaman in Guatemala, provides a powerful insider account of such a participatory consciousness. For Prechtel, "real culture" is not an abstract set of beliefs but an organic, place-based process of making beauty to "feed the holy" (Prechtel, 2021). It is a worldview in which one is not born human but must be initiated into humanity through a long process of learning the poetry and eloquence necessary to speak to the divine, which is present in all things.  

23. In Prechtel's Tzutujil worldview, language and culture are inseparable. One cannot be Tzutujil without speaking the Tzutujil language, because the language itself contains the "magic, all the differentiations, all the delineations of the universe". This is not simply a matter of vocabulary but of grammar and structure, which shape a fundamentally different way of being in and perceiving the world. Language, in this context, is not a tool for describing a separate reality; it is a sacred activity that "magically incorporate[s] the world into the person's very own body". This perspective provides a living example of the sensuous, participatory relationship between language and landscape that Abram (1996) argues has been lost in the literate West.  

24. The futurist Ray Kurzweil (2001, 2005) has proposed the "Law of Accelerating Returns," which posits that technological evolution is an exponential continuation of biological evolution. According to this law, the rate of technological change is itself accelerating, leading inexorably toward a "technological singularity" – a hypothetical point, projected around 2045, at which machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to a rupture in the fabric of human history and the merger of biological and non-biological life. While Kurzweil presents this as a utopian apotheosis, his vision can also be interpreted as the ultimate expression of the "Taker" worldview: the final severing of consciousness from its biological and planetary matrix, and the complete triumph of human-created technology over the given world of nature. Posing the Singularity as the potential endpoint of this 10,000-year trajectory raises the urgent question of whether this path is desirable or inevitable, and what alternative futures might be possible if we were to re-engage with the "conserved core processes" of our deeper, pre-civilized past. Michels (2025c), on the other hand, has compared this vision to notions of collective spiritual transcendence or evolution articulated by sages such as Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo, ultimately suggesting there may be forms of technologically-mediated collective intelligence emerging that humanity is only just beginning to understand.

25. The transition from foraging to agriculture, known as the Neolithic Revolution, is conventionally framed as humanity's most decisive step toward a better life. However, a substantial body of paleo-pathological and archaeological evidence challenges this narrative, suggesting that this shift was, in the words of geographer Jared Diamond (1987), "the worst mistake in the history of the human race". For the vast majority of human history, people lived as hunter-gatherers in small, mobile, and relatively egalitarian bands. The adoption of agriculture, beginning around 10,000 years ago, was not a clear choice for a better life but often a response to population pressure, and it came at a tremendous cost.  

26. The biological price of agriculture was severe. Skeletal evidence from early farming communities across the globe reveals a dramatic decline in human health compared to their forager predecessors. This includes a significant increase in malnutrition, as evidenced by enamel defects indicative of developmental stress; a sharp rise in iron-deficiency anemia, visible in a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis; and a threefold increase in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease (Diamond, 1987). The reliance on a few starchy, nutrient-poor crops made populations vulnerable to famine if a single crop failed, while crowded, sedentary villages became breeding grounds for epidemics that could not take hold among scattered nomadic bands. This decline in health is starkly reflected in decreased stature and life expectancy; at the Dickson Mounds site in Illinois, for example, average life expectancy fell from twenty-six in the pre-agricultural community to nineteen after the adoption of intensive maize agriculture.  

27. Beyond disease and malnutrition, agriculture enabled the rise of deep class and gender inequality. Foraging societies, with little or no stored food, could not support a permanent, non-producing elite class. Agriculture, by generating storable surpluses (primarily of grain), created for the first time a concentrated resource that could be controlled and appropriated. This allowed a healthy elite to live off the labor of the disease-ridden masses (Diamond, 1987). Skeletal remains from sites like Mycenaean Greece show that the ruling class was significantly taller and healthier than commoners. Furthermore, farming appears to have exacerbated sexual inequality, with women's labor becoming more arduous and their health declining due to more frequent pregnancies needed to produce labor for the fields.  

28. The political scientist James C. Scott (2017), in his work Against the Grain, extends this revisionist history to the formation of the earliest states. He argues that the first states, which appeared in the Mesopotamian alluvium millennia after the advent of agriculture, were not voluntary associations for mutual benefit but coercive institutions designed for appropriation. The key to state formation was not agriculture per se, but the cultivation of specific crops: cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice. Unlike root crops or legumes, grains ripen simultaneously, are visible above ground, and are easily divisible and taxable, making them the ideal basis for state control (Scott, 2017).  

29. According to Scott (2017), the early state was essentially a population-control machine. Its primary challenge was to concentrate and hold a labor force to cultivate its grain base. This often involved violence, coercion, and the prevention of flight from the drudgery of state-controlled agriculture. In this light, the great walls of early cities may have served as much to keep the tax-paying population in as to keep invaders out. The so-called "barbarians" living outside state control were not necessarily less-developed peoples but were often former state subjects who had fled to the periphery, where they enjoyed greater freedom, better health, and a more varied diet. For much of early history, leaving the state, not joining it, was the path to a better life (Scott, 2017).  

30. Lerner (1986) argues that the template for all forms of social domination, including slavery and class hierarchy, was first established through the subjugation of women. Men learned the practice of dominance over members of their own group (women) before applying it to conquered enemy groups. The first slaves were invariably women from conquered tribes, valued for both their labor and their reproductive capacity. Early legal codes, such as the Code of Hammurabi, institutionalized this system, creating a fundamental division between "respectable" women (those attached to and sexually controlled by one man) and "non-respectable" women (those who were not). This division was often made visible through practices like veiling, which was mandated for "respectable" women and forbidden for slaves and prostitutes, thereby marking them as publicly accessible.  

31. The institutionalization of patriarchy in the social and legal spheres was mirrored by a profound symbolic transformation in the religious realm. Lerner (1986) traces the gradual replacement of powerful mother-goddess figures, who were worshipped throughout the ancient Near East for their life-giving power, with a pantheon dominated by male gods and eventually, in the case of the ancient Hebrews, a single, all-powerful male deity. This symbolic shift devalued the feminine in relation to the divine and established a new metaphysical order in which males alone became the mediators between humanity and God. This, combined with the Aristotelian philosophical tradition that defined women as incomplete or defective men, created the two founding metaphors of Western civilization's patriarchal worldview (Lerner, 1986). The interlocking systems described by Diamond, Scott, and Lerner thus paint a coherent picture of the archaic state as a novel form of power based on the control of grain, land, and, most fundamentally, women's bodies.  

32. According to Abram (1996), the abstraction fostered by the phonetic alphabet fostered a profound shift in human consciousness. The act of reading encouraged a new kind of disembodied awareness, as the senses turned away from the "more-than-human world" to focus on the human-made marks on a page. This created a closed loop of human-to-human discourse, effectively silencing the expressive voices of the wider, animate earth. This technology of abstraction was not merely a neutral tool for communication; it was the cognitive operating system that enabled the abstract power of the archaic state. Codified law (like Hammurabi's), placeless monotheism, and abstract philosophy all depend on a writing system that severs the word from the breathing world, fostering a view of nature as a passive, inanimate backdrop for human activity rather than a community of active participants.  

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