I don't know why i never thought of this before. Cam you think of any other action, besides biological functions, that you have in common with your neolithic forebears? Is there anything else that connects us to the human story through action as much as the purposeful ingestion of psychedelic substances for whatever purpose or design?

This is of course dependant on a presupposition that people did such things in prehistory.

Well, they did do psychedelics in prehistory. There are those ancient cave paintings in North Africa documenting the whole thing, right?

The only other thing I can think of is music and art. That has been around for a long time.

Sex, drugs, and rock n roll have been around for millennia. It is who we are. A society's freedom can be measured by how tolerant it is to personal choices in these areas. Last time we were batting 3/3 was thousands of years ago.

Oh yes evidently. I think it speaks even more when you weave in it the concept of culture. Nothing will bind people more strongly than a shared experience. All forms of art are creating sub cultures right now are a testamenen to that, they are new forms of religion where the experience of the sacred is replaced by the experience of a cultural object (transcendental object if it's a good brew).

Now what happens when the shared experience at the heart of a culture is the art of concioucness hijacked into your stream of concioucness directly?



It's even more fascinating because psychedelic substances make us perceive the world closely to how our ancestors perceived it - everything is alive and we are the world.

It's a time machine! Now comes the end of time!

Just want to add in, while my experience on psychedelics is limited (lsa-mushies) I do strongly feel that other experiences, such as fasting, heat stress, breathing with cold shock could also bond people.

Remember the first time I showed the Wim Hof to a few of my friends, they were laughing and it was awesome

We did feel like we connected to something deep inside of us too.

What about alcohol? We have evidence of of late stone age jugs being used for fermentation.



How do you know that this is the way our ancestors perceived the world and our place in it? Are you sure that you are not making up some kind of romanticised narrative to suit your own views on your relationship with your surroundings? And if they did see the world in this way, what do you think has happened to change our views?

How about meeting people from different walks of life (or within your community) through other activities besides plopping down and taking some drugs? 'Through action' ..yeah ..action ...doing things with each other. And face to face communication - which would obviously follow the 'action' thing.

Meet person/s, talk, maybe laugh, do things, repeat.

I think that that's much more satisfying in the long run, and can provide just as deep if not deeper of a connection and understanding of one another.

You know ..like ..community, on whatever scale really (scaled to just a couple folk that you could come to know and spend time with, do activities with - all the way up to a group or several groups of people; though in reality it would probably end up being the former I'd think).

*Also wanted to make clear that I deeply respect and appreciate psychedelics, they're incredibly powerful, and have done alot for me in various ways. I think of them anymore as adjuncts, supplementary to what I'd first listed up top. Used from time to time, sparingly. Imo they're secondary.

Btw null, love ya, not directing this at you specifically or anyone, just speaking up in the air here.**

Sex

I believe this to be the case. The only other thing I can think of that really connects us to the deepest, most primal aspect of the self is having sex with someone you really love. The two of these things combined though, I feel is the absolute pinnacle of primal human experience. The shell comes completely off

Sex is good

It's a fierce intuition before everything. But a fierce intuition is most likely how our ancestors perceived reality when rationalistic thought had not taken over the way it has. It was most likely a world of symbols and dreams, inhabited.

We went from living totally in nature (that involves a state of ego dissolution, it is translated in the tendency to anthropomorphism, to make everything "us" ) to living in cities. We went from living inside our own imagination, holding it as something real, where everything is inhabited by spirits and so on, to living ... inside our own imagination, materializing it while denying the reality and value of it (because it's subjective and there's no "proof" mostly), where sadly everything is rather dead-ish (but hey, we chose to live in tombs!)

(I really think someday we should consider that maybe rationalist thinking, while holder of so many great truth and capacity for analysis, is a dead form of though, really not that rich on the sensorial aspect and denying some core, and extremely life-full, part of our psyche. Like a fruit with not so many vitamin. And also shedding a light on the emergence of rational thought in pair to isolation from nature, why did people that lived so physically, that were so grounded, were so imbued with the more hallucinatory parts of the human experience?)

So in a way, I do well hope I have a very romanticized narrative going on ... I don't hold objectivity in such high regards actually, and that is another side effect

Anyway, psychedelics dissolve boundaries, the sensation of oneness is accompanied by a serious dive into the realms of the (divine) imagination and as a result of that those experience have often been associated with more archaic forms of spirituality or eastern religions (which are mostly defined by their ability to carry on shamanistic roots on to modern time). I think it is a very strong pointer to similitude with our ancestor's perception of reality (while remaining widely different because we weren't born in it).

There's also a connection to be made with the primitive aspect of our lives: childhood. Brain plasticity and imagination unbounded ... My theory is that we went from living in a world that was extremely rich in sensations (for all the senses) to a very poor environment (sensory deprivation in a way) and that the effect on our mind is, kinda, us, how we are now. Most people will have touched the soil that birthed them over countless eons only one second in the day that is their life

If there's one thing, the root of all evil then, and one thing to remember from my rambling, it is this: SHOES ARE EVIL.

...

Breathing, sex, cooking, community and all of that definitely work (pretty damn well ^^) but I think there is something special about man eating a piece of nature, and that being somehow very near the core of who we are.

I feel that if you were to do a trip like our ancestors did than yes they would connect us. Most people simply do not trip like that any more. I know most of my journeys can not be compared at least.

I think raising kids could have such an effect as well.

Another thing that could realy connect us to our inner cavemen, though in a more negativd way, would be the experience of primal fear when confronted with the violence mother nature is capable of.

The place where i live is relatively safe: there are no earthquakes or hurricanes, and tornafo's are very rare here. And we don't have grizzlybears, mountainlions, polarbears, saltwstercrocodiles or tigers either. The three most dangerous animals in my area are ticks, adders and vicious dogs. And the last two of them are very rare. The threat of ticks is never accute, and adders aren't aggressive like their american relative the viper.

Yet i stood face two face once with an escaped, mean dog, without it's owner. And that was pretty scary. I definately felt that i had to tap into my inner cavemans "datafile on how to deal with big, scary, apex predators". You realy need to handle yourself in such a situation, because these dogs smell fear, and they like the taste of it. If you act too afraid they'll attack, and if you act to confident they'll attack as well.

People who live in an area with grizzlybears probably laugh at this and think i'm a sissyboy, but i definately felt a bit like a frightened caveman at that moment.

Many great responses to this thread. I would like to add to the growing list.

-Sharing a meal with family and friends
-Any gathering of like minded people always feels primitive in some way to me
-Exploring unknown territories, be it in the mind or out in the natural world
-Connecting with plants and animals
-Camping...camp fires draw me into a caveman feeling

I'll second on buildinag a fire.

Actions to connect to the lineages of the past:
If I was presented a pill with such an effect as a guarantee, I would not be sure if I want that kind of a dive. Maybe if there were investigatory facts to explore in the past.

But to really aim to re-connect to phases of very old without a clear mission, why?
I do feel an oh-yeah response but things got buried under time for a reason. We can't place the recent times decently, let alone poring in unknown elements of the past, is there a guarantee that this would be "good"? I'm just a bit afraid for romanticizing, afraid of overloading a system that is already filled to the brim, can we deal with it if it really happens?

We always feel enthusiastic when traditional limitations get lifted, it feels like solution and extra possibilities, and I concur yet thinking also of a Pandora box. Maybe you just don't like reality as it happened to our ancestors . They were just humans too.

It looks like chickening out to contacting ancestors stuff, but for me it has more to do with trusting in 'time' and that it does what it does, sort of. And also that ancestor's stuff is embedded (dna?) and works out anyway, not needing a peek-with-psychs.

Just some ideas... I don't know really