-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 99-10-17 04:08:02 EDT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Hey Das,, Just how do you think man got here then?
> I think Sitchen's idea of aliens is the most probable..so what do ya say
Good, fundamental question, of some importance to "Conspiracy Theory" in
general, and especially important in our attempts to understand ancient
"mystery cults" and "secret societies," which have their counterparts among
the Ruling Class even today.
Myself, I don't know ... But I note one recurring element in the lore of
almost all ancient cultures, back to the very oldest we know of, and it's
this -- "culture" (or the basis of everything that became Civilization) came
to The Indigenous People from OUTSIDE, brought to them by some group of
FOREIGNERS who in effect INVADED their land, conquering, domesticating and
"enlightening" them with their SUPERIOR acumen.
As time went on, these "foreigners" become glamorized as SO "superior" as to
be thought of as descendants of the "gods," if not indeed "gods" themselves.
Now, we
have a bit of a problem here, if, as we note, the allegedly oldest Near
Eastern culture began in the invasion of the Tigris and Euphrates delta by
Sumerians, who believed
their SUMERIAN culture was a product of their "gods" arriving from ELSEWHERE
in
the Persian Gulf area, from "Dilmun," a Garden-of-Eden-type place. How far
back do
we go in this infinite regress, the "oldest" culture itself born of OUTSIDE
intervention?
(Overlooking for the moment the very important fact that SETTLED human
communities, not yet too large or "urbanized," have existed going back to AT
LEAST 40,000 BC!)
The easy way out is to postulate an "Atlantean" High Civilization that
perished in the
defrosting of the Ice Age ca. 10,000 BC, but which transmitted its heritage
to others.
Too easy, because again we have the "infinite regress" problem, only situated
now in
a new context, leaving us to ask WHO brought "culture" to the earliest
"Atlanteans"?
Either Homo sapiens has a kind of innate "capacity" for Civilization,
realized unaided, just as our brains are pre-wired for language --relatively
unique in the animnal world--
or Civilization came to Homo Sapiens from "beyond," much as Sitchin has
described.
I find great appeal in the extraterrestrial hypothesis, which would SEEM to
explain the near-universal archetype of "culture" coming from OUTSIDE
ordinary human beings,
but I've not given up looking for ALTERNATIVE explanations of the same
"metaphor" -- of which there are at least a couple which are too seldom
discussed at length ...
One is that these "beings from Beyond" originated in human SUBJECTIVE
experience, in "shamanic" circumstances like the Australian aboriginal
Dreamtime, wherein early man's embryonic intellectual capacities --abstract
IDEAS, for example-- could manifest to him in a SYMBOLIC form,
semi-independent of the perceiver's ego because from, in effect, his "higher"
self, not yet realized or converted into controllable thought patterns, i.e.,
"reduced" to abstraction. The use of psychedelics might account in part for
this ... A shaman-leader who was "possessed" by one of these "entities"
arising from his own unconscious mind, who behaved as an "oracle" or "medium"
of such a sub-personality,
would naturally cause others more ordinary to believe in the OBJECTIVE
PHYSICAL existence of such entities, "somewhere," at "some time," in some
World BEYOND ...
I'd bet good money that the kind of "tribal" communities evident everywhere
in non-
urbanized societies outside the "mainstream" leading to "Civilization," with
their "totemic" systems and with "shamans" as "priests," are what preceded
the earliest known form of social organization in Egypt and in Sumer -- a
loose-knit collection of urban centers, each of them devoted to a different
deity, the pattern of the whole --the relationships between them-- apparently
modelled after some "cosmological" order --
simply a more sophisticated evolution of the older totemic clan-and-phratry
system.
I for one do NOT believe that the "advances" found "fully developed" in the
oldest known age of Egypt and Sumer --after thousands of years of social life
about which we know little (from the absence of WRITTEN records, which DEFINE
our idea of "Civilization")
during which time hundreds of generations of systematically pursued
development, ORALLY preserved, COULD have occurred-- suddenly just "appeared
out of nowhere," without precedents. The CAPACITY for "Civilization"
certainly existed, in potential, in
the most primitive of human societies, as far back as 40,000 BC or even
earlier, just
given an opportunity -- and the development of agriculture, and of craft
specialties born of a larger population made POSSIBLE by agriculture and the
domestication of cattle,
resulting in a more "orderly" and "stable" relationship to the environment,
permitting OBSERVATION of natural laws and REFLECTION on their wider
significance, offered
exactly that opportunity. Take astronomy, for example. It "pops up," "out
of nowhere,"
according to our chauvinistic interpreters of historical progress. But we
have strong
evidence that as early as 40,000 BC, human beings observed the recurring
cycle of the sun/moon in ECLIPSES and RECORDED its pattern, by carving it on
reindeer antlers
so it could be remembered -- in effect, "writing down" a simple mathematical
formula!
A semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer economy (the rule for thousands of years) is
not very
conducive to contemplation, experiment, craft and joint technological
enterprises -- but a SETTLED and CONTROLLED lifestyle, with a larger
population permitted more leisure,
IS -- and I believe that is what "accelerated" the realization of man's
INNATE potential.
The ancients revered "discoverers" and "inventors" of certain milestones of
Civilization
among their distant ancestors, in the course of time finally viewing them as
"gods" due to their transmission of Intelligence from the realm BEYOND to
this world "below," and not so illogically, they imagined that there must be
a whole "dimension" of Intelligence
populated by godlike beings (and/or demonic beings) MORE evolved than they
knew ...
The difference between "science" and "mythology" is only a difference in
LANGUAGE -- one uses de-personalized ABSTRACT mathematical formulae aided by
writing while the other "personifies" concepts CONCRETELY, finding its
"symbols" in the natural world.
Who is to say that, as we go back in time, one is less "intellectual" than
the other?
No wonder, then, that Enlightened Ones such as the Buddha (in Ch'an/Zen
Buddhism)
urged human beings --blinded by "maya," a product of man's ARTIFICIAL
Civilization,
Nature corralled and subordinated to orderly, stable structures under human
WILL--
to return to a state of "mind"-less, un-conditioned Nature, becoming "like
children" in a
blinders-off RE-perception of, and communion with, the Reality that PRECEDED
them.
Everything we could possible "know" already exists IN POTENTIAL in us,
"hard-wired" into our brains and possibly imbedded in our very DNA, as the
blueprint for the evolution of ALL life on the planet, now finally made
"intelligible" in us language-using primates ...
Maybe "aliens" are simply projected and personified symbols of our own
evolutionary
destiny, emerging from our unconscious minds to beckon us to move on,
"Beyond" ...
Or maybe they're our "Shadow," projections of our "Dark Side," dramatizing
just how INhuman a rational-scientific intelligence devoid of natural
mammalian COMPASSION can be, if allowed to evolve out of step with every
other aspect of life upon our planet ..
At any rate, I doubt very much that we were "created" by aliens or "gods" in
the way Sitchin has portrayed them. If we WERE, we have some thorny problems
to deal with, since that makes us virtually "cattle" herded, bred, and
butchered (by remote control, using human intermediaries) by a species to
whom we're one-down on the food chain, as insignificant to them as
invertebrates (insects) are to mammals. The more so when you consider ONE
peculiarity of the "Sumerian" mythology which Sitchin has failed to indicate
but which R. A. Boulay in his "Flying Serpents and Dragons" considers: the
"Nefilim" or "Annunaki" are (circumstantially) described as being NOT "warm
and fuzzy" long-white-bearded FATHERLY beings, but as inscrutable,
coldblooded REPTILES ...
Be careful of what you ask for when praying to Something higher on the
FOOD-chain.
Just kidding ... I hope!
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