It is possible to envision protohominids, on the verge of language, having the use of tools,and a potential for concerted action, requiring only a dominant figure to mime an intent to the pack, perhaps in response to a predator attack, perhaps as a plan to hunt food. Cajoling the timid, and the stupid, he would have pointed, shoved, grunted his way to their rapt attention, and then urged them to understand that they could act together. Rythm and repetition would have been an essential part of the communication, the shaking of hand axes in unison, a common dance, arousing endorphins sympathetically, instilling confidence as the hormone mix in their veins became testosterone-enriched by means of movement & verbalization, the prototypical mutual reinforcement group-work, as unready as they had been before, to meet the predator, so they now would imagine victory, in their internal vision-space., and be greater, and so would act.

That this scene, or one very much like it was enacted over and over, is attested to by the Lascaux cave paintings, thought to be a much later-age hunter's initiation and dreaming hall, a practice arena, a mock-hunt, to train & embolden the young, and carry memes from elder to neophyte.

In hunt, or in defense, such melding of many actors into one mind, one force, until a planet became overrun with the species, is a unique accomplishment. The cave paintings tell us clearly, that it was not done with words. It was mimed. It was danced. It was acted, and in the acting, came the growth. I say this ritual berserking is more the hallmark of humanity than language.

I say the Mohammed cartoon riots, as well as the hajj itself, processions at Lourdes and the Vatican, the intifada, political mass rallies, rock concerts, and various world street demonstrations, soccer riots, even, ..all confirm that the phenomenon not only is alive within us, but essential to our communal identity at a depth, and in an internal region, which is wordless, being the earlier developed, and thus the more central human trait.

The many coming together, to move together, to bond, to act as one, to gain confidence, to feel uplift, to experience exaltation, to verbalize or even sing in unison or harmony, to see and admire beloved cohorts, to meet mating partners, to change the very space on which they stand into special ground, sacred ground if you will, is the essence of the truly human, and it does not live in words, or in the analytic part of each participant.

If you've read this far, the meme which I expose to you should now be rising up within you, undeniable as the breath you breathe, or the heart which beats within. Be patient. Let it come at its own pace.
What have I left out? I've explored the common phenomenon, and not detailed a single instance, or what its unique focal ideation might have been. At Lascaux, of course, it was animal pictures.

Let me tell you about an African, (Yoruban) example, having to do with ensemble drumming. An ensemble plays an interlocking beat, which cannot be played by a single musician. (We see its descendent in salsa music.) The desired state is only attained when each of 5 or 6 drummers has occupied the rythmic in-betweens left by the other 4, so that none plays the same beats, but all together play a larger, more complex beat, each player giving up his selfhood to participate in the greater beat. When it clicks, the drummers feel a yearning to continue, and never want to stop. They will play on for hours or days, entering a trance state, and at that point it is said that their god has come. Having played such orishas, I can personally attest to the altered state, the feeling of delight, completeness, and the eerie delusion that the beat itself lives. I am not a Yoruban, and I do not believe in Chango or Babalu Aye, and yet , being human, I can attest, without a doubt, that the potential to experience Chango, or Babalu Aye, is inherent in every human, and stems from the pre-historic phenomena I've described above.

Then what is religion?
Absent discussions of the particular icon focused on, it is a resident ability, more fundamental than speech or logic, an ability to wish to alter reality, and a technique, carried in the human genome, and more trivially in human culture, to methodically alter reality, to attain an increase in racial survivability, an absence of weakening dissent or mundane fear, a complete obliteration of negative ideation, a grandiose fashioning of common dreaming in realtime,
and thus it is the single foundational biologic and cultural platform upon which human culture, human survival, and human civilization are dependent.

I speak not of any organization exploiting these biological hardwirings. Let others who are so inclined do so (and there are many). I bring your attention only to the fact that the coming together, the making of, and then the worship of, a common vision, seen as a living entity, seen as superior to humans, and thus eliciting an inbred upward striving, an inbred hope, and finally a common language and intent on the cultural level, is indispensible to mankind being what mankind claims to be, and cannot be omitted. Its omission or extirpation only momentarily clearing the stage for a closely duplicated re-invention, because the human creature itself, biologically and culturally, is based upon the phenomenon as a species.

History to date, bears me out on this.

After such transcendent experiences, or having heard of such experiences, many will wish to extend them, to never leave them, or to weave fables around their recollection. This instigates what I call the verbal residue of the real experience, and this residue is always, in each and every instance, false. Beginning as simple retellings, these falsehoods eventually grow into substitute ritual entities, not having the power of the first berserking, but more easily reproduced, and more easily exploited. Thus, today, at the endstage of long retellings, exploitations, millennia of encrustation & embellishment, we face the container-organizations which act as arks, as carriers, as repositories of the original experiences, often forgetting entirely their own provenance, and some of which are mere containers of nothing-at-all, or of outright lies.

However, the existence of exploitation merely highlights a second human capability, and speaks nothing at all, in regard to the hardwired Darwinian racial bonding of true worship. Rather than delude listeners that we have now morphed into another species, one not based on such bonding, the ethical researcher will admit the capability is current, and that Darwin's raw notion of evolutionary selection created it, and will create something as yet not seen out of it. Here we enter the realm of Teilhard de Chardin, who saw clearly that evolution's undirected nudgings could only make certain results in certain bounded scenarios, and that, being spherical, the planet must of needs push humans (the berserking, worshiping monkey) closer together.

Teilhard predicted conflict, communication, and adaptation would occur. No thinking person could gainsay the insight. As a Darwinian, Teilhard then predicted the adaptation would involve both biology and culture, and emotion, and re-expression of the original berserk-bonding unique to humanity, resulting in a next evolutionary punctuation in our historical stability- his Omega point.

As a purely secular vision, this view is the most powerful simultaneous extrapolation and interpolation evolutionary thought has yet been given. Hopeful, ethical, accepting of things getting worse before (and in order to) get better, it architectures mere Darwinism upward into a biological, cultural, and spiritual pinnacle unnattainable by Darwin. Its omission from current evolution discussions is not only offensive, and politically motivated, but also stunts the evolution work, dooming it to wither as irrelevant, just as Communism, socialism, and all other negatively-birthed skeptically-conceived ideational schemes die, by not serving the innate species growth-mechanism, the wellspring of all culture, communality, hope, and civilization, the hardwired human biological adaptation of worship.

It was realized only after 250 years that Newtonian 3+ body solutions

of physical mechanics were vastly oversimplified. Chaotic interactions,

not considered because they were uncomputable, were finally looked at,

and it began seeming like the incremental filling-in of all the former

blanks would be the work of the age.



Calculus as such became less needed, as iterative numerical solutions

on computer became cheaper and easier. DNA theory

opened up bodily engineering to real scrutiny for the first

time in history. Universal worldwide communication uncapped

whole societies, and began making premeditated war less viable,

even as highly perfected automation and control enabled the

vision of a workless society, fed by robot-run megafarms,

and the possibility of nuclear, wind, and solar power running

all those new services for almost nothing.



The missing ingredient, was common cause.

Chaotic agendae, once sensible as drivers for individual regions,

were unworkable or distasteful to new neighbors,

once kept ignorant by distance.

Backward-tending absolutist guides, like the old religions,

communism, capitalism, aristocracy, crime and corrupt power-seeking,

seethed together, mutually antagonistic bubbles in a boiling world pot.



Everyone could see everything, but no one could do anything about it.

Frustration abounded, voices grew shrill and paranoid.

No one trusted anyone.

Many never slept.



Those responsible for uplift , new vision, commonality, transcendence,

real solutions, faith, hope, and even charity, scrambled like

rats in each others' dirty trash cans, seeking new indictments

that could turn collection flows their way and thus survive.



No one immune, nothing sacrosanct,

people fled in droves from modernism's tiring drone,

and let their soccer teams speak for them.

"Kill the Bastards" "Get 'em" "Fuck yezz all"



The 2700 freeze-dried gods in Bekins' warehouse couldn't hear

from deep inside their shrinkwrap coffins, so were mute.

Jesus himself, embarrased by his pedophilic helpers,

left the planet for a rest cure elsewhere.

The German Pope, singing "Churchlandt Uber Alles"

on his balcony , canonized Lady Diana & Sir Elton,

leaving Mother Teresa lying in the gutter,

(no star power there.)



Drugs were out, been there, done that, and music by machines

was only half as good as all the wrestling shows,

so counter-culture turned into a gay-muslim aids-victim parade

against the globalists in club of Rome, till lotteries,

and lying contests on vacation islands became religion to us now.

6 billion monkeys with no job, no God, no future dream,

we craved Omega hard, and hunkered down.

.
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I'd not seen any reason to post about this, even though it happened a week before my Wappingers post, below. However, a prominent greenist doyenne has claimed that anyone describing his failed efforts must have a screw loose. To apply requisite tension to HIS bobbling screws, rattling saucily in their bony bolt-holes, I hereby post, in hopes of demonstrating that the efforts of social tinkerers can backfire.

A long term acquaintance had seen for sale, a lovely log cabin home outside of Beacon N.Y., on the west slope of Mt.Beacon, (the single remaining habitat of the perhaps-fictitious eastern red rattler), in fact on Mountain Lane, an uphill extension of Beacon's East Main Street. I drove there early on a Saturday, out of curiosity. Having seen the Fishkill ridgeline from almost every conceivable perspective, I wanted to go up top again, and fancied I might "buy the house out from under" my longterm friend, if the purchase seemed worth it.

Turning up the mountainous streets hugging the ridge, a palpable abandonment and decrepitude became increasingly evident. I have an eye for architectural era, even hidden under renovations, and I made out that most of the tiny frame homes were post civil war, with more than a few eyebrow colonials, which were not built after 1825, and the advent of balloon framing.  So I drove into a living history, of sorts.  (My own home is proudly colonial, with 8" red pine planking, restored windsor chairs, & lots of old wooden/brass/pewter stuff), but encountering these "sister colonials" where they had originally been erected, was no joy.

Far from it, my heart sank at the sadness, the peeling paint, the obvious poverty, the lack of infrastructure, no streetlights, no water culverts, no curbs, no fences, and precious little pavement on the road, which finally became a gravel-only mudway about halfway up the ridge.   About once in each quarter mile, I encountered either a boarded-up house, or an outright burnout,  a sure sign that this was a deeply unhappy hill. I felt the sadness like a psychic visitation , a private grey cloud,  deepening and darkening as I passed the 500 foot elevation,  until it was no longer a carefree Saturday field trip,  but a worm-hole leap into deepest,  cruddiest Appalachia, ...and all of it not a mile from route 9D.

(Beacon itself, has old industrial areas, with a brownfield quality, but with verve, pizzazz, and life among the bricks.)

The ridge has no redeeming joy to it.  It is suicide alley, unadulterated.  Aesthetically, and emotionally, I sympathized a bit with the poor souls who had torched their own rotting homes, (Note Well: I condone no crime, especially arson). Psychically, it cried out for cure, the glowering neighborhood demon of despair & decay needing prophylactic purging, and so , in their own way,  purge they had.  When I finally found the sale house, it was lovely indeed, almost brand new, but totally unbuyable, surrounded as it was on all sides by 1930's type depression scenery. I drove on, stopping for coffee in one of the gentrified storefronts on route 52, feeling like I had just escaped a close run in with the Hatfields, or the McCoys, or both.

Why is this neighborhood so bereft, ruined, so sick, such a welter of sadness, & hopelessness? Why does it lack the joy, the adventuresome feeling of other spaces very close nearby?

Scenic Hudson, incorporated, has purchased the west side of the Fishkill ridge, and is holding development hostage there, to preserve the habitat of a snake reputed to have never existed. (Opponents claim they concocted the story to trump land acquisition by a local gravel quarry).So while Mr. Ned Sullivan hobnobs with the mighty, Beacon ridge turns into a cesspool of abandonment. Well meaning as this strategy of failure might have been at the outset,  local rural America needs no artificial decrepitude imposed by dilletante greenist organizations, playing realestate mogul at the expense of the vitality of the towns they wish to "save".  If being saved means burning my house down out of despair, as more than a dozen homeowners have done on the ridge, then let me be lost.

I never saw any rattlesnakes, by the way.