Almost two months have gone by since my last entry, but that’s because I’ve been thinking things over and trying to get a sense of the larger picture.
When I stumbled on the cycle of visions back in the 1970s, my first question was whether it really existed or if I was imposing a pattern on events where none existed. I finally concluded that the cycle is real — but I’m still wrestling with the problem of how a recurring sequence of cultural changes can repeat over and over with such precision for tens of thousands of years.
Since starting this blog, I’ve come up with a number of plausible hypotheses, several of them based on the latest archaeology and brain research, but no one of them in isolation is sufficient to explain everything. It seems as though the cycle of visions must exist at the confluence of several different aspects of human nature and represent our best attempt to make them all come out even.
Hypothesis #1: Rules-Based Systems
There is a DNA-like duality to the visions. They offer us instruction in how to live our lives and construct our societies, but they also contain within themselves the necessary information to be self-repairing and self-replicating. Every vision strives to maintain its own identity while simultaneously adapting to neighboring visions within its local ecosystem. This creates a kind of cognitive friction that eventually erodes the vision’s integrity and makes it simplest to just junk it and start over with a fresh replacement.
However, that raises a second point, which is that even though the visions may appear at times as an external force that determines our thoughts and actions, they are ultimately something we create ourselves. Every detail represents a hard-won solution to a specific problem that proved effective enough to be incorporated into either one particular vision or the overall structure of the cycle.
