1 result for (book:tps4 AND heading:"delet session novemb 14 1977" AND stemmed:civil)
[... 6 paragraphs ...]
There were “modern,” or highly sophisticated civilizations, utilizing some technology, long before the dates given for the invention of writing (about 3100 BC). Writing was invented and reinvented the art lost, then reemerging.
There were languages then long before your earliest evidence of them, and in written form. Your civilization is organized around science and technology, and generally speaking, now, the arts and other schools of knowledge have been largely subsidiary. Long before the time of the Egyptians, now, there were sophisticated societies, utilizing some technologies and advanced in the arts of writing. But these civilizations were not organized around technology, so that the technological advances, while highly sophisticated, were not pursued with the same diligence as in your time, and they were considered novelties—playthings for the wealthy, advanced toys, but not considered in a serious light.
There were several such civilizations, some mainly agriculturally oriented, and in those technology was applied, but generally only for that purpose—to increase agricultural yield. Some were religiously oriented. Some were socially oriented, enjoying a kind of comradeship that would find, for example, television’s impersonal communications a mockery of the give-and-take that they enjoyed in personal contacts.
The evidence of much of the writing, the records and so forth, vanished, for some of these civilizations did indeed have paper, of a kind, and printing presses of a kind. As a result, your evidence shows the much later reemergence of writing on more durable objects.
Unfortunately, the evidence for the existence of modernlike societies does not physically remain, for buildings, for example, were not constructed to last. As people lose the kind of ancestral roots that exist in “less advanced” societies, so many sophisticated civilizations, with rapid overturn of goods and products, with printing presses and writing upon fragile paper, are lost to history.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
I said that your conventional geological ages were faulty, along with your theories of the age of the earth, for it is far older than is supposed. Obviously it has changed geographically—that you know. There were vast civilizations, however, where now there is only the endless expanse of the ocean waves, and ruins that most likely will never be discovered, for they are obliterated in the very life of the planet itself.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
The poles at one time were reversed. The earth has formed and reformed and reformed. The inner psychic organizations always determine the kind of challenges and civilizations that emerge. There have been civilizations devoted mainly to art, in which all other endeavors were considered subsidiary, and the quality of workmanship was everything, no matter what the product. Mass production was inconceivable, because the originality of each piece of art, or furniture, or bowl, held its value in that manner, and the idea of producing a copy of anything would have been considered ludicrous, or considered an act without reason.
Give us a moment.... Beside all of that, there were cultures advanced enough for space travel, before the numbering of your geological ages. But even those did not organize life about technology in the way that you do. In the tangled areas of time, in one way or another, messages were left from one group of civilizations to another, whether they could be read at once, or not for centuries.
[... 16 paragraphs ...]