Tao Lesson 65 & a gestalt change

Tao Te Ching 65

In ancient times,
Those who followed the Way
Didn’t offer people knowledge thereof,
But kindly kept them from enlightenment,
To keep them in a state of simplicity,
with the humility to realise how very little they actually know.
Why is it so hard to rule?
Because people are so clever.
When they know that they do not know,
people can find their own way.
The reason it is difficult for the people to leave in peace
Is because of too much knowledge.
Those who seek to rule a country by knowledge
Are the nation’s curse.
Not using cunning to rule a country
is good fortune for that country.
The simplest pattern is the clearest.
Content with an ordinary life.
To know these principles is to possess
A rule and a measure.
To keep the rule and the measure
Constantly in your mind is Mystical Virtue,
Deep and mysterious, it leads all things to return
Back to Great Harmony.

Should hallucinogens, meditation, Yogic and Tantric exercises, sensory deprivation, extended periods of limited language utilization with no verbal communication, or perhaps total immersion in completely different cultures or even other avenues be able to unlock and open up otherwise only poorly (at best) accessed areas of the brain (opening doors of perception of the many mansions in our father’s house), then what was shut off must have been so resultant of some cause (evolutionary or otherwise). Maybe that reason has to do with a modern human proclivity for assholery.
Suppose 10,000 years ago life on Earth for humans became dangerously unstable, due to climate change, magnetic polarity change, large predator migrations, disease, meteors, earth-crust volatility and instability. Then for some the typically greater strength of community cooperation might have become evolutionarily eclipsed by need for smaller, more flexible groupings, greater diversity, more experimentation as it were, more individualism, spontaneity and self-reliance. Exit goodness.
Ants, bees, termites, rats, lions and surely others (Synalpheus regalis snapping shrimp, and maybe dwarf mongooses - but the list is small) live in groups that have (usually if not always) one or more members that do nothing towards procuring food. I once found a huge Norwegian rat living under a pile of OSB and ply-board, in a small pit to the center of the bottom board, surrounded by presents brought by smaller rodents, perhaps of more than a single species. The big rat clearly couldn’t have left his haven under the boards. It ran up a small tree; I went for my pistol, inside my house. Got back and it was still there in the tree! I shot and killed it, far less concerned with its mystical position than with Hinta virus, Bubonic plague, and an instinctual feeling of how ugly it was (looked like a small possum). Clearly it held great sway over its littler helpers, which surely derived some benefit from the association.
Anyway, we know the Tao Te Jing to antedate 500 BCE, at least in parts. Suppose section 65 harks back to memories of a difficult time, about 10,000 years BCE, when rooms in at least some human brains had, for whatever reason, to be closed off. People with the closed sections became uncooperative, mean-spirited, back-stabbing assholes with certain evolutionary advantages. Maybe the studied ‘The Art of War’ more than the Tao.
I find it fascinating that there is just that small spectrum of species with guiding sage-Gods that don’t have to do the work that others must do. Also that what we used to call schizophrenic multiple personality disorder, one’s female (or male) side, the child inside, one’s gay side, the lizard brain (medulla amygdala) and also our capacity to develop false memories, demonstrate a segmented brain, with parts closed off. Sometimes bits leak through, as warnings, perhaps, or to facilitate acceptance among others not of the temperament of one’s usual associates, or clue one as to another’s motives...

Anyway, the sage adviser, let’s say Dennis Rodman or Kanye West, self-chosen and self-advanced, assists the leader – and here we can similarly posit Donald Trump – for the benefit of society, the nation, the populace, the general good. OK, so maybe we don’t have real sages or leaders, even rulers, anymore, or at least visible ones. And maybe, just maybe, society and the Tao isn’t as egalitarian as it should be. Are male lions and rats really the role models we are looking for? Well, in any case, who governs best governs least.

The advent of humanity can be seen to have occurred millions of years ago; for the most part a peaceable creature, no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids, mere survival tended to be of paramount importance. For about 10,000 years mankind has been pretty much as until quite recently (for the last 105 years our insanity has quite exploded), but for many times that amount of time, while being biologically the same, everything else about humanity was quite different.
Homo sapiens have existed upward of 500,000 years, but the term Middle Paleolithic is intended to cover the time between the first emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens(roughly 250,000 years ago) and the emergence of full behavioral modernity (roughly 50,000 years ago). Close precursors existed almost through the full of the millions of years of the last full Ice Age. Homo sapiens appear in Southwest Asia around 100,000 years ago and elsewhere in the Old World by 60,000-40,000 years ago. By 115,000 years ago, early modern humans had expanded their range to South Africa and into Southwest Asia (Israel) shortly after 100,000 years ago. There is no reliable evidence of modern humans elsewhere in the Old World until 60,000-40,000 years ago, during a short temperate period in the midst of the last ice age.
Before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans lived in a profoundly different ways. Human life was sustained by hunting and gathering rather than by animal husbandry and agriculture; towns and kingdoms were undreamed of; no one made a living as a potter or a basket maker or a metalworker. Trade was informal and only occasional; commerce unimaginable as a means of livelihood. For a dozen times the time separating us from the making of the Sphinx or Hanging Gardens of Babylon, human brains were physically as now but used quite differently than are those operating in modern society.
There weren’t weapons of war, only ones for hunting. There weren’t specialized classes for whom the dangers and difficulties of hunting were limited, restricted, controlled for the convenience and safety of those who rarely participated… Leaders, healers, crazies or other abnormal folk there surely were, but all had to participate in all that they could. Survival depended on it, although survival was likely hardly as difficult as it is usually imagined to have been. Hunting was a challenge, of course, but success in the hunt brought time for rest and relaxation. Human hunters of the Stone Age may well have hunted the mammoth to extinction, but they didn’t do this with awareness of doing so, unlike the way farmers currently hunt coyotes and wolves, simply to get rid of them. Mesolithic hunters may well have hunted the giant elk to extinction, but they didn’t do it from callous indifference, the way ivory hunters slaughter elephants. They couldn’t possibly have guessed how many animals remained far, far from where they hunted. If ancient foragers hunted any species to extinction, it certainly wasn’t because they wanted to wipe out their own food supply!
About 13,000 years ago, more than three-fourths of the large Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, the dire wolf, giant bears and beaver, American camels, horses and lions, died out. Scientists have debated for years over the cause of the extinction, with both of the major hypotheses — human over-hunting and climate change — insufficient to account for the mega die-off. Recent research suggests that an extraterrestrial object, possibly a comet, about 3 miles wide, may have exploded over southern Canada, nearly wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as mega-fauna like mastodons and mammoths.

For the 30,000+ years that biologically modern man occupied the Eurasian continent before agriculture, one finds no evidence of jobs or private wealth, little social diversity, little if any evidence of torture or other injustices. The spiritual was hardly walled off, as it has since become. Spirituality included everything, and the mind, the brain, may well have been open to much that we have mostly closed off (ability to perceive tensions and blockages, auras, magnetic currents or whatever guides birds and fish on migrations, better awareness of our lesser senses, pheromones and how best to deal with ‘psychic wounds’… perception of transcendent patterns, connectivity and influence, awareness of and improved over brain and heart interactivity, anticipation and foresight…)
Noticing patterns in animal behavior was essential, as was anticipating weather changes and when and where what would be available. Language may have been more lyrical, musical, and as beyond definition as the tones of laughter. We think we need civilization, but they did, and still do, successfully make and raise babies. They carried little as they traveled, trusting to their successful socialization to help them find and make what they needed. Bitter animosities can’t have been other than rare. Some joke that prostitution was the first profession, but it requires pay, which requires ‘surplus’ and that assumes storage, the advent of which occurred with agriculture. If farming wasn’t the first profession, then surely lying was, but lying is only operative in competitive societies, not ones that depend entirely on co-operation. Farming requires seed storage, which could also lead to temptation to theft, but surely the first sown fields were but a part-time occupation, one which soon led to interest in protecting fields, so you can see how quickly ‘civilization’ (settled, agriculturally-based communities, somewhat competitive) involved rather ugly activity: the root of social differentiation.
In the totalitarian agriculture that followed the arrival of warmer weather, though, it’s generally been policy to wipe out undesired species as much as possible.
The central idea of the Agricultural Revolution is that about 10,000 years ago, people began to abandon foraging for agriculture. This isn’t quite right: first, it implies that agriculture is basically just one thing (the way that foraging is basically just one thing), and second, it implies that this one thing was embraced by people everywhere at more or less the same time. Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world 10,000 years ago, when our current style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, mono-culture or totalitarian agriculture, subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by enormous food surpluses generated, a rapid population growth occurred, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated other lifestyles (including those based on other styles of agriculture).
But totalitarian agriculture is the foundation for the most laborious lifestyle known. This comes as a shock to many, but truly, no one works harder to stay alive than modern people do.
The important point is that a cultural continuity exists among co-operative hunter-gatherer peoples that extends back to the beginning of our kind. Homo habilis was born satisfied to share with any with whom he had a comprehensible relationship. He followed customs similar to those followed today by the Yanamamo of Brazil and the Bushmen of the Kalahari – and hundreds of other aboriginal peoples in undeveloped areas all over the world. But agriculturally-based society has taken the rule of the world into its own hands.

About 10,000 BCE the end of the most recent glaciations occurred; sea levels rose abruptly, with massive inland flooding due to glacier melt. The most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” began about 110,000 years ago, reached peak conditions some 18,000 years ago then gave way to our inter-glacial Holocene epoch 11,700 years ago. Ice Age climate was much colder and drier than it is today; since most of the water on Earth’s surface was ice, there was little precipitation - rainfall was about half of what it is today. During peak periods with most of the water frozen, global average temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees C (9 to 18 degrees F) below today’s temperature norms.
By 9500 evidence shows harvesting, though not necessarily cultivation, of wild grasses in Asia Minor. In Europe there was permanent ecological change. The savanna-dwelling reindeer, bison, and Paleolithic hunters withdrew to the sub-Arctic, leaving the rest to forest animals like deer, aurochs, and Mesolithic foragers. The climate in many areas (Asia, Middle East and Americas) improved and humans began leaving their nomadic life to settle down. They started domesticating animals and cultivating pulses and cereals, beginning to produce food in a systematic way rather than to find all their food in the wild. Having fire, spears, bow and arrows, flint knives, a few stone tools, but no wheel or metal work, they made primitive rope out of animal sinew, skins, hair, and vines, lived in small communities with populations of no more than a few dozen, and built shelters out of animal hide, sod, grass, and stone. Fireplaces were open pits. Much of their time would have been spent either searching for food or preparing it, but there was free time too.
The coming of agrarian societies was almost certainly connected to the waning of the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, the period beginning at about 15,000 years ago when glaciers shrank and both sea levels and global temperatures rose. In several parts of the Northern Hemisphere rainfall increased significantly. This period lasted 5,000 to 7,000 years. Rising seas drowned low-lying coastal areas (like the Sunda Shelf) and land bridges that had previously connected regions separated by water today. Land bridges now under water included spans between Siberia and Alaska, Australia and Papua New Guinea, and Britain and continental Europe.
One consequence of this ‘great thaw’ was the dividing of the world into three distinct zones, whose human populations, as well as other land-bound animals and plants, had very limited contact with one another. These zones were 1) Africa, Asia, and Europe combined; 2) the Americas; and 3) Australia.
A second consequence of the great thaw was that across much of the Northern Hemisphere, warmer, rainier, ice-free conditions permitted forests, meadow-lands, and small animal populations to flourish. With natural bounty so great, some folk began to settling, staying in one place all or part of the year. They became sedentary, rather than moving from camp to camp. For example, in the relatively well-watered part of Southwest Asia we call the Fertile Crescent, groups began sometime between 8,000 and 113,000 BCE to found tiny settlements from which they collected from the then plentiful wild grain and other edible plants and animals. They eventually began protecting wild grain from weeds, birds and even drought, then started broadcasting edible plant seeds onto new ground to increase yields. They began selecting and planting seed from individual plants that seemed more desirable due to size and taste, more and more learning more and more about how to control and manipulate the reproduction of plants, and about how better to harvest, store, and cook than they had with wild foods. Systematic domestication was under way, and the idea of control gained important favor!
Eventually, plant-growing and animal-raising communities became ‘co-dependent’ with their domesticates - humans came to rely on these genetically altered species to survive. In turn, domesticated plants and animals were so changed that they would thrive only if humans took care of them. For example, the maize, or corn, that we see in fields today can no longer reproduce without human help. And as humans controlled their domesticates, a small number of people began to control domesticated humans. The great advantage of co-dependency was that a community could rely fairly predictably on a given area of land to produce sufficient yields of hardy, tasty food, and even surplus. Populations of both humans and their domesticates grew accordingly. But co-dependency was a kind of trap: a farming community, which had to huddle together in a crowded village and labor long hours in the fields, couldn’t return to a foraging way of life - even when faced with calamity. And calamities did occur, from storms, flooding , new diseases from living in denser communities with buildup of waste and rubbish.
Also, there was no longer the wide variety of food that hunter-gatherers had enjoyed. Grain is notoriously bad for your teeth and deficient in some essential nutrients. Children were weaned early and fed on grain instead of mother’s milk, enabling mothers to have children once every 1.5 years. Child mortality soared but agrarian society still grew.
Underwater erosion from turbidity currents, earthquakes, mountain landslides, floods, eruptions and severe weather certainly continued to challenge communities, but perhaps not as much as threats from other human communities, especially after domestication of the horse, about 4000 BCE, in the steppe lands north of the Black Sea from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Greed became ascendant, and doors to awareness closed.
When people became no longer happy to share, free to roam, confident in nature’s bounty and robust in and of health and confidence, some forms of mental activity closed off in compensation for the new forms of patience, concentration, discipline and toleration required, forms quite different from those of the hunt. Social differentiation, guarding of storage, and anxiety over pestilence and weather led to self-doubts, social tensions and conflicts, to focus anathema to full open-mindedness, and the petty emotions that dominate out political and economic reality even now.
Maybe should our differences become more valued than resented, our minds can begin to open again.

It may possibly have been with the changes from ancient to modern ways that the germs and viruses that killed so many Caribbean Islanders just after Spaniards first arrived there began to inhabit humans, but maybe that’s just my imagination. Could not closing down mental activity out of self-protective fear, to focus on roots of self-interested fears, have also opened the way to microbiotic parasitic infections?
Humans were, of course, well adapted to our previous mode of existence. But the inherent injustices of ‘civilization’ we remain poorly adapted to (as perhaps it should be.
Settled, village folk have longer memories about petty feelings than do ancient-style ones with their ‘wow be here now’ gestalt of immediacy and laissez-faire. For the former, saving face is very important; for the latter, you’re pretty much as good as your last haul. We think of hillbillies holding grudges, but it’s really more of a small-town thing that extends to communities within sprawling metropolises. For the nomad, old grudges tend to be counter-productive, counter-intuitive and just plain cumbersome. Remember, they can carry but little baggage. Until recently, for the more modern, stuff had a tendency to accumulate. Suddenly, for the last couple of decades, we find we can’t afford even the space for a bunch of junk, and now even worthless intellectual baggage is beginning to get discarded. I hope we’ll begin to notice, again, important things we’ve forgotten about, and no longer look for beauty and wonder only in museums. Or internet presentations!

The Tao Te Jing, composed while Europeans were still barbarians, has long been of great interest to me, and I've much appreciated wisdom I've found there. But with its anti-egalitarian bias, Tao Te Ching 65 seems to me a bit off - maybe a late addition lacking in some of the spiritual awareness of earlier lessons in the book.

These I admire:

Tao Te Ching - 76
A man is born gentle and weak.
At his death he is hard and stiff.
Green plants are tender and filled with sap.
At their death they are withered and dry.
Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.
A tree that is unbending is easily broken.
The hard and strong will fall.
The soft and weak will overcome.

And 81
Sincere words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not sincere.
Good men are not argumentative, the argumentative are not good.
One who knows is not erudite; the erudite one does not know.
The sage does not take to hoarding.
The more he lives for others, the fuller is his life.
The more he gives, the more he abounds.
The Way of Heaven benefits and does not harm.
The Way of the sage works and does not compete with anyone.