1 result for (book:notp AND session:777 AND stemmed:man)
5/29 (17%)
visual
language
merged
animal
cognition
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
Whatever your language, you perceive trees, mountains, people, oceans. You never see a man merge with a tree, for example. This would be considered an hallucinatory image. Your visual data are learned and interpreted so that they appear as the only possible results of those data. Inner vision can confound you, because in your mind you often see images quite clearly that you would dismiss if your eyes were open. In the terms of which we are speaking, however, the young species utilized what I have called the “inner senses” to a far greater degree than you do. Visually, early man did not perceive the physical world in the way that seems natural to you.
You will have to give us time… (Pause, one of many.) When a man’s consciousness, for example, blended with that of a tree, those data became “visual” for others to perceive. When a man’s consciousness merged with an animal’s, that blending became visual data also.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
A man, wondering what a tree was like, became one, and let his own consciousness flow into the tree. Man’s consciousness mixed and merged with other kinds of consciousness with the great curiosity of love. A child did not simply look at an animal, but let its consciousness merge with the animal’s, and so to some extent the animal looked out through the child’s eyes.
(Long pause.) In ways most difficult to explain, man “absorbed” an animal’s spirit before he killed it, so that the spirit of the animal merged with his own. In using the animal’s flesh, then, the hunter believed that he was giving the animal a new focus of existence. He could draw on the animal’s strength, and the animal could join in human consciousness. Nature and spirit therefore were one.
(A two-minute pause at 10:22. The last paragraph of material may give clues to human behavior today: Man kills animals — and eats them — for reasons he’s consciously forgotten. His killing today would be based on at least intuitive understanding…. One wonders whether the same reasoning might apply when man kills man….)
[... 17 paragraphs ...]
