I’ve been reviewing the previous entry and I think the way is finally clear to move forward.

As I suggested there, the transformation vision appears to have gone through a very rudimentary form of the cycle. It was born at a time of crisis when mastery of fire and other basic technologies became essential to human survival. It helped resolve that crisis but then subsided back into supporting the existing order.

The kinship vision was born during a succeeding crisis — say around 400,000 years ago — when our survival was enhanced by peaceful interactions among scattered human groups. But before it too subsided, it formed a strong philosophical bond with the transformation vision. This led to the older vision’s observations of the natural world being organized according to a schema modeled on the male-female dualities of the kinship vision: fire-water, drought-rain, day-night, and so forth.

Around the same time, the human brain was undergoing a final expansion and reconfiguration to meet the cognitive demands of remembering and categorizing large amounts of information. And as it did, it became wired in a radically new way that involved cross-connections and long-distance associations of a sort that were not present in any other member of our family tree.

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