ANIMISM (Book Excerpt)

[Magnet Man]

ANIMISM - A Kalahari Safari into the Origins of Spiritual Awareness

Animism: ‘The belief that natural objects, natural phenomena and the
Universe itself possesses soul’ (Webster’s Dictionary)



Some thirty years ago, I spent several months documenting a number of Shaman spiritual mediums practicing witchcraft in Soweto, the great black township near Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city. I was interested in both the spiritual calling of apprentice shamans as well as their training, and tried to capture in a television program, the subtle nuances of the psychic energies that motivated neophytes to seek out accomplished ‘babas’ who would then help them to develop their psychic gifts.

At that time, South Africa was still deeply locked into the racially discriminatory apartheid (literally “separateness”), policies. The white population, and to some extent the detribalized urban blacks as well, generally viewed shamanism as a ‘sham’, a primitive superstitious practice that had no spiritual validity. Others viewed and feared it as “tagati”, an occult form of black magic based on the negative dare of devil worship.

My documentary was the first national television broadcast that tried to reveal shaman mediumship as an ancient universal call of the spirit towards The Good, that most shamans were beneficial psychic healers, with only a few taking the left-hand path that led to the black arts of ill intentions.
After completing the documentary, and not feeling fully satisfied with my initial attempt at grasping the underlying cultural significance of this Bronze Age practice, I realized that in order to gain and share with my audience a clearer insight into the validity of spiritual impulses in general, I needed a deeper understanding of the prehistoric origins of our base of spirituality.

I did not know much more about the Stone Age form of spiritism that we know as Animism, than the information supplied in a modern dictionary definition. I decided to go on a safari into the Kalahari Desert, where I hoped, I would be able to make contact with one of the last surviving uncontaminated hunter/gatherer family groups, reputed to be still living a Stone Age existence in the vast waterless wastes of the Kalahari Bushman
Reserve. I wanted to see if I could get some inner sense from them about the spiritual impulse that defined Animism.

How several hundred Bushman families managed to sustain a Stone Age existence in the Central Kalahari desert up until the present time, is a controversial case study in itself. I do not believe, as conventional wisdom has it, that they retreated into the desert after being driven off their traditional hunting grounds by the arrival of Bantu and European colonists in Southern Africa a couple of hundred years ago. I think that they have lived there for thousands of generations – perhaps since the dawn of human time. The unique physiological mutation, which allows Bushmen to store moisture in the fatty tissues of their buttocks (steatopygia), in the same way that camels do in their humps, would have taken thousands of generations to genetically imprint. It marks them as true desert survivors, not simply new arrivals. Their ability to survive in a waterless desert, plus the protection of the tsetse fl y, has kept people and cattle out of their ancient hunting ground. I also believe that a similar case of environmental adaptation via genetic mutation, reveals why the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Congo Basin also sustained a Stone Age existence into modern times. I suggest that the lack of sunlight in the dense shade of the rain forest canopy, after thousands of generations of genetic mutation, stunted the growth of the Pygmy humans, elephants, hippos and rhinos who live there. That shade will also not allow grass to grow on the forest floor and has kept domestic livestock at bay.



Though the conditions in Botswana have vastly changed now - with international hotels, airports, plush safari lodges and tarred roads - thirty years ago, organizing a private expedition into the middle of the Central Desert, in an effort to make contact with a surviving Stone Age family, and then getting back out of its sandy clutches alive, was no simple matter. Unlike the eastern and western edges of the Kalahari. At that time there were no roads, or government boreholes to assist the traveler, wishing to enter the Central Desert. Some of the sand ridges are sixty feet deep; churning along across those natural barriers in the extreme heat in a four-wheel drive vehicle for hours on end, with only a compass for a guide, chews up precious gas, water, and nerves. Back then, and even today, very few people had ever penetrated the Central Desert. It takes some daring, plenty of motivation and a lot of organization. The information able to assist me before setting out was sparse at best.

In the mid 1950’s, the British-ruled Bechuanaland Government, had engaged a local colonial who was born and raised in the Kalahari, to make a survey of the San family groups still living out in the Central Desert. I managed to get hold of an obscure copy of the Silberman report ten years later. The information it contained was primarily concerned with a population count of the surviving families and a list of the types of food the Bushmen hunted and gathered. It said very little about their cultural behavior. Laurens van der Post’s book: “The Lost World of the Kalahari” recording the impressions of his own brief expedition into the Central Desert, was the only other information available at that time. It provided a sympathetic portrait of the innocent Bushman psyche, but it too had very little in it about Animism.

Since my own expedition, I have subsequently heard rumors of two anthropologists, one a female Soviet and the other a male Japanese, who had each gone into the desert alone during the 1960’s, but I have never been able to substantiate it. If they ever published any thesis on their studies, it is not to be found in the English language. As far as I know, my sojourn with a San family group in the Central Reserve was one of the few expeditions to witness and document an uncontaminated Stone Age existence. It is too late now for further studies. In the intervening decades, the Botswana Government has insisted on pulling the San out of the Bushman Reserve and integrating them with modern cultures.

I began my expedition into the Kalahari by first making contact with an elderly Afrikaner safari guide who had grown up as a boy on the cattle ranches in the remote Ghansi settlement, of Northern Botswana, where Bushmen were hired to tend the herds. He had learned to speak the difficult tongue-click of the Xung. He said that we stood a reasonable chance of finding an isolated hunter/gatherer group if we could make it to the Southern edge of the Reserve. Smoke signals would eventually attract them to us if we did not cut their sign. Since gas and water took up most of the load, I only had enough provisions for a two-week stay. There no hope of getting any financial assistance from anyone so I had to foot the bill myself. Setting out to measure the depth, quality and spirit of an extinct culture that I may or may not find, was not exactly a scientific or commercial inducement for backing. Once we made contact, I could only hope that I had developed my own extra-sensory perceptions enough, to perhaps interpret the essence of Animism. The change of spiritual attitude that helped to meld the two halves of my psyche and make me a more insightful observer had not come easily.

As a 13th generation colonial child surrounded by a sea of tribal cultures, I had been raised to take pride in European values, and zealously indoctrinated by an Apartheid system to have nothing but contempt for the superstitious heart and soul of Mother Africa, the birth-home of our kind. That indoctrinated attitude was broken down while working with the shamans. The experience made me realize that before we had literature, the spiritual origins of every culture on the planet was based on the oral traditions of Shamanism – and under that lay the ancient spiritual force of Animism.

At that time, in the mid 1960’s, with world condemnation against apartheid growing stronger every year, as a professional film and television producer, I felt that Europeans in general needed to know more about the primitive cultures that we discriminated against. I wanted to produce a series of programs that would try to break down racial barriers via a more comprehensive look at how human spiritism first began, and show through the commonalty of that revelation, that our pre-literate spirituality formed the common foundation that inspired the eventual God-centered compositions of our religious scriptures. In order to practice what I preached, I joined one of the worldwide metaphysical movements that taught westerners the ancient religious philosophies and spiritual practices of the Far East. I accepted the yoga meditation challenge to concentrate on a mantra and attempt to still the incessant machinations of the analytical half of my brain and see if I could evoke my psychic potentials. Daily sessions of mantra meditation and hatha yoga awoke the dormant part of my psyche and succeeded in stirring altruistic feelings within me that I had previously been unconscious of. For the first time in my life, I was able to penetrate beyond the narrow focus of my own material needs and feel a sincere sense of love and understanding for the upward struggle of those around me. I began to sense a deep spiritual communion with a vast brother and sisterhood of devotees, all engaged - not just in bare existence, or in endless schemes of material enrichment - but in a genuine spiritual effort to enlighten themselves, and through that, the world as well. These feelings of compassion motivated me to try and make my documentaries and my unique position in mass communication a lasting contribution to self-knowledge.

(Continued below)

[Magnet Man]

The upshot of my work in Soweto was; not only did I gain a basic knowledge of spirituality from the shamans; I also unexpectedly got a painful glimpse of our own Christian culture. I became shamefully aware of the unholy manner in which we had destroyed the African psyche by undermining and defiling the beneficial influence of the shamans and forcing black Africa to adopt a narrow, white man’s view, of God. Everything else that I thought that I knew about European social and spiritual mores received an even more painful prod while I was among the Stone Age San, or Bushmen.

My safari into the Bushman Reserve and the short time I spent with the tiny elfin people that fathered the human race accomplished more than I had bargained for. By returning to the very roots of human consciousness, I attained far more insight into our modern culture and the makeup of my own psyche than I had thought possible. The secrets revealed out in the desert were not so much about unveiling the mysteries of Animism, but more of moving me to wonder why such a pure, uncontaminated view of reality has never been shared with the world before. The San taught me more in those few weeks about Man and God and Nature and how human evolution distanced us from the basic source of our wisdom, than anything my religious or science masters in our modern culture had ever revealed to me.

The purity of Truth, when one sees it for the first time, is a terrible thing to behold, and it can hurt the ego when one sees it in close-up. I went through a long period of awful anguish, wallowing in self-denial and personal shame before I was able to gain some perspective on what my culture and its material goals had done to my soul, and see faintly through dark glasses the light of a larger Truth.

The evaluations and assessments provided in this testimony about Animism did not fully mature in my consciousness at the time of exposure out in the Central Kalahari desert. They are the result of later years of reflection and comparative studies as I went around the world experiencing other climes and the religious views and social mores practiced there. It is only now as I have grown older, that I am able to see how the unplanned youthful impulses and aspirations jerking me here and there about our planet, were all pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle that gave meaning and purpose to my life – which only a consciousness deeper than mine (my own subconscious if you like) could have seen and orchestrated. What I have found to be particularly amazing about this karmic process is the sheer amount of subliminal information the psyche registers during our life-time – countless tiny bits and pieces of information that one would not normally consider important enough to consciously take note of, but later, as one tries to put the pieces together, all that stuff resurfaces and fleshes out the larger puzzle, revealing a veritable host of previously hidden secrets in a wondrously meaningful fashion.

As a result of unraveling some of the mystery of my own karma, I have come to see that the collective human psyche is a vast extra-sensory network, continuously uploaded every second of every day with an infinite variety of sense inputs that come from the life experiences of six billion personal computers –fused with the experiences accumulated by our uncounted ancestors. I believe that one fine day this vast legacy of our evolution, the blood, sweat, tears and laughter experienced by all of us, in the flesh, on this Good Earth, under our Star, in our Galaxy, since our very first ancestor was inspired, has been, and will continue to be projected before an appreciative cosmic Godhead, to be played and replayed, and marveled by each and every one of us, over and over again – until the Big Crunch starts us out again, on a brand new safari into another dimension.

My first lesson in Animism in the Kalahari, began one morning after I had made contact with a hunter/gatherer family group out in the Central Desert. Instead of accompanying the males on their daily round of checking their traps and looking for fresh spoor to follow on a hunt, as I had done on previous days, this morning, I decided to accompany the women and children with their digging-sticks and springbok hide tote bags, and watch them while they gathered wild vegetables.

As a large perimeter around the Bushman camp had already been thoroughly picked over, it was some time before we reached an area that had not been harvested and I could begin my observations.

The group began foraging through sparse patches of tsama melon and wild cucumber, and digging in the sand for roots and tubers. The smaller children joined in the search by competing to be the first to spot a new food source, grubbing for insects, chasing down and capturing the odd lizard. The harvest disappeared into the gradually bulging bags slung over the women’s bony shoulders. Towards midday the foragers suddenly moved off in a lateral direction. Now, for some reason, the harvesting seemed to be more selective; food sources pointed out by youngsters were studiously avoided, and the children admonished not to harvest them. It took me a while to realize that the women had reached the edge of the family’s hunting territory. There was a line in the sand, which the women could see and I could not, beyond which it was taboo to trespass, because it marked the beginning of the neighboring family group’s larder.

The basic social integrity that this Stone Age group exhibited by not crossing that invisible line and taking selfish advantage of short-term expediency, thereby preserving a long-term relationship of peaceful grace with their relatives, made the subtle wisdom of survival logic very clear at that moment. The women were responding to an unwritten code of specie interrelationships that manifests in our consciousness as common decency.

That realization stirred atavistic memories. Could the fact that people in general do not raid a neighbor’s pantry when they are not at home, be an ethical force governing social behavior that has nothing to do with artificial scriptural admonishments? The more I thought about it, the more esoteric my thinking became. If that sense of unease when we trespass is not simply an indoctrinated cultural imprint, how much deeper did it go than animals instinctively not straying beyond their territorial boundaries? Something more than mere survival logic seemed to be at work here. I experienced an epiphany - concerning the integrity of all organized atomic associations.

Organisms had to have some invisible charismatic force shielding them from alien invasion, or they would lose their integrity, mutate and distort into something not intended. Without that protective shield, beauty and harmony of form on the physical plane would not prevail; misshapen ugliness and chaos would be the norm. In the realm of metaphysics, without that sense of non-trespass, ethical behavior would not prevail; betrayed trust would impinge on and distort the emotions, and instead of peace, the rage of revenge would cloud our consciousness.

Did this Stone Age group perhaps not merely rationalize, but also psychically anticipate the pain they would cause, and therefore refrain from trespassing? That concept transcended mere intellectual rationale; it made sense only if the Universe was indeed governed by Soul and the ethic of non-trespass.

For some reason the purity of that moment filled me with a strangely reassuring sense of awe. I felt that I was almost in touch with some vast Cosmic Over-Soul. Something or someone more transcendent than ego guarded the ethical borders of social order. It set me to thinking about quantum mechanics and the particle physicists’ choice of words when they used “charm” and strangeness” and “beauty” while alluding to the attributes of sub-atomic behavior; the Center of Consciousness had to lie in the nucleus of the atom.

I wondered about the pangs of chagrin that we all feel at even the slightest transgression on the common good, not only within ourselves, but also when we are witnesses to the trespass of our neighbors. Something sacred seems to be defiled and it bothers us deeply. From whence comes the burn if we ignore subtle warnings when we cross the invisible line – and why is the fire even fiercer when we are shamed out of hiding by others?

There was more: What about the foreboding sense of unease we sometimes feel, long before a harmful trespass occurs? Was the Intuitive Self, unlimited by analytical notions of time and space, able to warn us of “future” events? Had we once possessed an active sense of future outcome, a “hunch” of pending unease, and thereby hesitated and were forewarned before taking a step that would cross the line? Are we now too intellectually preoccupied and therefore too desensitized to “heed” the warning before we actually trip and fall? Did we once have an active 6th sense? Was it now deadened, and if so, why?

Atheists rationalize that guilt is an artificial feeling, imposed on the human psyche by way of religious indoctrination. If so, w hat then, made this hunter/gatherer group refuse to trespass, if not some sense of future unease? There were no priests out there to minister to this Stone Age family, no Holy Scriptures to threaten hell and damnation, no Congress to pass laws, no police to enforce them. Yet here were humans, living every day on the verge of starvation, resisting the temptation to trespass on their neighbors and insisting that their children also obey, The Good. Who or what first taught them that wisdom?

The intangible force guarding that invisible line in the sand held chaos at bay. It manifested itself in practice by motivating sound social policy, out here, far away in the desert, and it did not cost human government a single red cent.

By instinctively obeying the atomic code, a sense of ease and well being was the payoff for the Bushmen. They had no sense of guilt; no sense of foreboding, no feeling that luck would be against them in the hunt. No need for guile. They were innocent, like children: Pure. The Stone Age was not the brutal era we believed it was. Our ancestors were, in effect, all God-conscious, and innately noble, once upon a time.

Because every force has an equal and opposite reaction, pain and disease existed. There is a price to pay for crossing the line. Goodness eases it, disease affirms it. So the balance between good and evil is maintained.

Basically, then, there should be no distinction between Church and State, because something more universal than either keeps guard over order. At heart we need neither institution. In fact, the officious nature of their existence has deadened our psychic capabilities, stripped us of self-reliance and made us lean on artificial policing. We live by an artificial code of written laws, instead of trusting in the natural law of self-policed personal integrity. Somewhere between the Stone Age and the Iron Age, we lost it. How do we get it back?

If the atomic law of non-trespass is instinctively observed and parentally encouraged, and not intellectually distorted by contrived social and spiritual ideologies, there is no need for institutionalized religion or social supervision. If we encourage a child, right from the start; before engaging their psyche in artificial social arguments, to become superstitiously aware of the indivisible and undeniable laws of Cause and Effect, they would become self-policed for life. They would learn to rely on their own natural base of common sense and moral integrity and not be so easily swayed by superficial propaganda.

Nature is ever at hand to assist the parent in training a disobedient child. Even a destructive thought is a potentially serious transgression. The pain Nature inflicts is never an accident but always a reaction to trespassing, proceeded by one or more subtle warnings, and the honey is always there to forgive and to comfort. When a bump bruises, or a thorn pricks, a bone breaks, or a snake bites; who or what is there to cry out against, but the transgression of the self, because of the balance that must be maintained, ere the universe collapses.

But what of blameless babes who are maimed or killed? Who decides to make such supreme sacrifices? How does such extreme karma work?

My epiphany soared to ever-greater heights. Are there millions of spiritual martyrs among us who take birth and willingly suffer the pain of the transgressions of others, and lend their lives in pain in order to keep a cosmic balance? The poignancy of that thought brought a twinge to my heart.

My conclusion was that Animism is an invisible charismatic force that controls the ethical behavior of all atomic associations in the Cosmos. A universal Spirit allows Nature to maintain social order; it sets a universal ethical standard of non-trespass and reverence for orderliness that is sustained by self-inflicted punishment whenever the force is denied. It is the unspoken unwritten force we call God, and it cannot be summarily dismissed as heathen nonsense….

I emerged from my spiritual high and climbed back down the mountain bearing new Commandments for the Good life. But how to share it with modern men who worshipped gold and guarded the line in the sand with armies of police? I was filled with the sober realization that my esoteric analysis would only remain as a fanciful mirage in the desert, if I could not find some way to remind us of our original state of personal honor. But where to start?

I found myself acutely aware that during the week that I had spent with the group, I had never heard an infant cry, never witnessed an argument among siblings, a reprimand from an adult towards a child, or a sharp exchange between adults. I had to remind myself that I was not watching mere primate behavior. This was Man acting as a super-natural Being, infinitely more complex, and consequently more volatile, than any other creature on Earth. This thought sharpened my social perception and made me more sensitive to the magnetic currents that underlay many of the other seemingly mundane interactions of this primitive family group.

There were four adult women in the group; three of them were the grown daughters of the wrinkled old matriarch who led it. These three in turn, were the mothers of nine children ranging in age from newborn to puberty. Five of the children belonged to the oldest daughter, who seemed to be in her late thirties; the next oldest was a mother of three in her late twenties, still nursing a two-year-old. The youngest daughter, barely in her teens, nursed the newest-born child. The two older daughters had pre-teen sons who were out hunting with their fathers and the grandfather of the group. All the siblings were more or less evenly spaced, about three years apart.

Stone Age family groups are matriarchal. After puberty males migrate in search of mates in neighboring families. When they find them, they attach themselves permanently to the new group. Females, on the other hand, never leave their home range. So, the line in the sand that had been invisible to me could be rationally explained. Over generations, the women grew up to recognize every little bush and plant during their annual circuits around their wild garden. They then instilled that boundary in their children and reminded them how hurt they would feel themselves, if the neighboring family came across the line and picked an immature plant that they had left for the next season’s harvest.

Throughout the heat of the day, as mothers struggled with increasingly heavy bags and infants, I could see how the siblings on their own initiative, assumed increasing degrees of responsibility. They took over the care of straggling toddlers when they tired and had to be carried; then kept them amused while the digging at the new location took place. It did my heart good to see a six-year-old uncomplainingly struggle for miles through the heavy sand with a sleepy three year old more than half her size perched on her hip. Then, when they arrived wearily back at camp that evening, all pitched into preparing the food, fetching firewood and helping to cook. No one shirked his or her share of work. Wherever I looked, The Good was at work.

The Stone Age family group was, in effect, an extended family of father and mother with their daughters, sons-in-law and grandchildren, all working together as a single unit to survive in sublime harmony, in an inhospitable desert.

A life-long curiosity about our human condition could now be satisfied at a fundamental level. I had before me the entire range of individual human expression, from infancy to sagehood, relating and cooperating harmoniously within a natural social grouping, uncontaminated by artificial social or religious ideologies. This living expression of Stone Age life allowed me an objective examination of individual family and extended family values in their purest state.

I was in a privileged position, not just socially attuned but now also psychically alert to the underlying spiritual reality that controlled every interaction. With the aid of my modern vantage point I was able at will, to flit comparatively easily, backwards and forwards across a thousand generations of Time and Space. I could examine our original State of Being, untainted by artificial scriptures or contrived politics, and see our unpainted, unscarred human face clearly, as it had been, before our image had become scarred and tattooed by the pressures and rituals of the Ages that have followed.

I have always believed that the best way to know and understand an individual or a culture is to see how they educate their children; become the child yourself and experience their culture as they see it.

Take the relationship between mother and infant. Here among the San, I quickly realized that the silence of the infants was not really strange. It sprang from the unbroken physical bond between mother and child that inhibited the crying reflex. No mother ever left her babe unattended; there was no crib away from her side. No separate nursery room; mother and child were always in close contact, with the infant held in her arms or tied sleeping to her back ever-ready to be breast-fed, comforted and reassured as soon as the infant stirred. There was no reason to cry out for attention. There was no artificial milk in their system to give them colic, and the jounce of continuous motion from their mother’s back relieved the gases building up in their intestines. That close bond remained unbroken until weaning took place in the third year. A new pregnancy assisted in making the break natural. The three-year spacing ensured that there would be no premature denial of the breast, resulting in unnatural sibling rivalry.

The incessant crying of the modern child that we take for granted as natural, is in fact not natural at all. In the wild, a crying child attracts predators, but that wilderness reality has long been forgotten in our modern milieu and our vigilance has relaxed, so we accept crying as natural when in fact it is related to neglect. The modern child wakes, finds itself abandoned; the breast is not handy, or the formula bottle is not ready, or it has colic from undigested synthetics; so it cries for one or all of these reasons, and only then does the mother come running.

In our busy lives we are constantly seeking excuses to put the child down so that we can get on with something else. In effect, by doing this we abandon the child and break off both bodily and spiritual contact. If the crying reflex is set off once too often, crying tends to become habitual, and it is not long before the babe learns to wield this negative power as a medium for endless demands for attention. This unnatural behavior eventually strains the bonds of parental affection, and the distortion is compounded as time goes on; simply because of a subconscious sense of maternal guilt.

A life time of dysfunction can be avoided and mutual affection immeasurably deepened, if every mother simply ties the babe to herself and never allows broken contact to become habitual - until the day that the child itself crawls away on its own to investigate the world.

Not all that long ago, every child on earth was naturally birthed at home by their mother, without the aid of drugs. The child never left her side for a second and started feeding off the breast within moments of being born. There is an increasing awareness among modern behaviorists that our movement away from natural birthing has not been for the better.

Today doctors deliver the modern babe in antiseptic hospital theaters, without any awareness of how keenly alert all five of the infant’s senses the moment they exit the womb. More concerned with set medical procedures ordained by insurance companies, they pull the babe out, cut the cord, immediately begin checking vital signs, take blood-pressure, weighing, and so on. Then they give the mother a brief moment with the child before whisking it off to the nursery ward for more manhandling by strange hands - with the crying reflex constantly being set off from the very first moments of life.

The old tale that infantile senses are barely alert at birth makes no sense. It is certainly not so out in the wild, especially amongst the larger social groups. All five senses are needed to make an immediate identification bond between mother and infant.

I have been present at the births of three of my children. I can vouch for the gimlet eyes of my daughter taking in the entire room and everything in it with one raking glance. I believe that every single impression in the birthing moment is sharply and indelibly imprinted on the psyche. The first faces it sees, the first body it smells, the first voice it hears, the first milk it tastes, the first hand it feels - all these are fundamental imprints that can never be erased from its memory.

A hospital delivery artificializes all of that. The drugged mother is almost a bystander, and lawsuits deriving from incompetent deliveries have made Cesarean sections standard practice. Modern medicine should only be needed to detect possible complications at birth. Otherwise it should be on standby only in case of an emergency. If all the signs are normal, mother and child should be allowed to experience a natural birth.

The pain involved with natural birthing that moderns are trying so desperately to escape; and in the process imprinting our newborns with unnatural first impressions, has lifetime social and spiritual benefits for both the mother and child. Natural birthing is an initiation in self-reliant womanhood. Recollections of the pain endured, and the life brought forth as a result, form an unbreakable psychic bond and a commitment to motherhood. Every girl naturally dreads it, and every initiate who has been through the fire becomes a woman with a tempered sense of self-worth that can never be taken from her.

Parenthood is unquestionably the most responsible individual social and spiritual commitment that any human can make in life. Motherhood sets the tone and determines the well being of the future adult; how each parent goes about taking on that responsibility from the birth moment onwards, determines the quality and character of human society.

As a base for sound individual development and future interpersonal relationships, there can be no substitute for natural birthing, breast-feeding and unbroken physical contact within the setting of an affectionate family and extended family; all engaged in the practicalities of existence in a home-based milieu. Measuring the extent of the break in those basic bonds provides us with pathological criteria for gauging the depth of modern insecurities.

Dr. Spock could not have been more wrong in suggesting to an entire generation that the babe should be separated from the mother as soon as possible. Our modern education and economic systems could not be more wrong in prematurely breaking up the family and extended family, by sending tiny kids to school; parents onto the production line, before all the fundamental factors that ensure sound personal and inter-personal values are solidly grounded. The false economy of such artificial practices; which interferes with the natural processes of ethical development, is reflected in the stark reality that we spend as much as 80% of our GNP on trying to govern and police the distortions in our modern “adult” social behavior.

I noted that among the family members of the San, even the opinion of an eight year old girl, who had already learned to behave as responsibly as her mother, was regarded as relevant, and she was never patronized. When I shared some of my own meager store of provisions with the group, everything was meticulously divided. Even a small square of chocolate given to one of the children was triumphantly born back to the group and divided by nibbles into twenty-three, minute portions.

Their interest and delight in any novelty was always an experience that had to be shared among the group, and they would wait for all those who were absent to return to the camp before sharing it. The underlying reality of their insistence on group sharing was based on a simple yet profound reality: no taste or experience had any relevance until, and unless, the aftertaste had been shared and discussed - and the larger the circle, the deeper the consensus was.

(Continued Below)

[Magnet Man]

With my third eye now partially open, even the tiniest acts in their everyday behavior took on a profound significance. I was in the midst of an innocent group of entirely unaffected guilt-free individuals, living together in a pristine condition of family group cooperation. The modern concept of our Stone Age past as brutish skull-bashing louts could not have been more distorted; the group I was with shared the enjoyments and hardships of the human condition equally and collectively, with no sense of divisiveness.
I was overcome by a sense of privilege, of observing something unique which once had been common to all of mankind and now could not be found anywhere else on the planet. Though it would take 40 more years for DNA evidence to trace every human being living on the planet back to the San Bushmen of the Kalahari, I was nevertheless aware at the time of being transported back in history to our original family base, to mankind’s original state of Being.



These tiny elfin people still lived the life of our Stone Age ancestors; the lessons imprinted in their genes were also imprinted in ours. They were as tough as nails. Hardened and tempered by hunger and privation in an extreme environment. Their minds and souls had been refined by obedience to an ethical force that ensured The Good. They were masters at physical survival, affectionate, playful, joyful, artful …and supremely spiritually aware.

Here were our great ancestors Adam and Eve, a thousand generations removed, at peace in the Garden before our numbers crowded the hunting ranges, imposing a chore-based work ethic, gradually losing our tempers and becoming estranged from each other as the stresses of more demanding social disciplines and spiritual obligations distorted our original clear view of reality.

I watched everything they did, and wished that I had a thousand reels of film so that I could document everything I saw. Everyone remained occupied for much of each day - hunting or gathering, preparing the food, fetching firewood, nursing the young, amusing the toddlers. All helped with repairing tools and hunting weapons, or making new ones, scraping and staking raw hides, making twine and bowstrings out of cactus fiber, starting a fire, or scraping huge tubers and squeezing moisture out of the moist shavings into ostrich-shell containers. Watching each precious drop of bitter liquid squeezed from the tuber by a clenched fist; running down the spout of the thumb and dropping neatly into the tiny hole pierced in the shell, made me aware that all of this activity was taking place in a devastatingly harsh environment, where there was no surface water for most of the year. No other social group but the Boskopoids would be able to survive.

I remembered that only a few months previously four young students from the city, had been forced to land their light aircraft in this same desert. Five days later their bodies were found only a few miles from their plane; all had died from exposure and dehydration, and, I suspected, synthetically inspired panic.

Our near-total reliance on modern technology has robbed us of our natural base of survival smarts, and our intuitive sense of ethical behavior, making us helpless in the face of real adversity. In the face of death, those four college-educated young men who had crash-landed their plane in the desert had been unable to access the genetically imprinted survival instincts of an ape. Without written instructions on desert survival they felt helpless and did not have a clue about what to do. Panic set in and they died shortly afterwards and their big brains, without a handy pamphlet, turned out to be useless, in fact, lethal. Thus it is that we no longer share an instinctive base of survival smarts with all the other creatures on earth.

Script-based indoctrination has shut us out of access to our own basic common sense - the survival smarts that all animals are born with. The tragedy of those marooned men in the desert and the hundred others who die in the wilderness every year is calmly accepted as the natural price of modern existence. Just how unnatural and how steep is that price? Having gained the spectacular advances of technological genius, are we gradually losing the essential wisdom and vitality of an organic state of Being and evolving into some form of future android?

On the rare occasions when a large animal like a gemsbok or eland was brought down with a poisoned arrow, each individual Bushman consumed prodigious amounts of meat - eight or nine pounds at a sitting. Once sated, it was a time to ease accumulated tensions. For two or three days the daily foraging grind would be put aside, and the Bushmen would feast on the meat at hand, sing, dance, smoke dagga (cannabis), fall into ecstatic spiritual trances, hallucinate and prophesy more hunts like this.

All the activity in the San camp took place in an elegant grace of interpersonal actions as they exchanged tools and tasks in tranquil harmony and affectionate interactions that left me gazing at them for hours; sunk in sublime absorption.

Our caveman origins were never barbaric. Here before me was the real cradle of civilized behavior, the fruit of those 99,000 generations that our specie had invested in the prehistoric Stone Age, long before we invented the artificiality of script, and decided in our infinite wisdom to define human intelligence and civility only from that moment when recorded history began. Our subsequent reliance on script and the libraries of written laws that such indoctrinated learning has forced on us, reveal not our intelligence as much as our discarded ability to intuit Truth directly and instinctively.

Newtonian physics propelled us into a mechanistic state of mind, living in a clockwork universe that lies beyond the esoteric influence of God. And now we need written instructions on how to survive and behave decently.

But has not quantum mechanics and the nuclear equation refuted Newton and pointed back through the relativity of Time to the charismatic potentials hidden in the nucleus of the atom? Would it not be far more intelligent and creative if we stopped suppressing our animistic instincts and kept our spiritual insight actively alive, side by side with our growth in technological mastery?

In our sophisticated insistence on early literacy and reliance on technology, as manifested in our Headstart educational programs which hasten to get babes to read and do math, are we neglecting our basic infant charm and undermining the natural growth of native wisdom before those survival assets can develop as Nature intended?

Are we artificially short-circuiting a sense of personal self-confidence, inter-personal civility and group harmony, by superimposing a mechanistic mind-set on impressionistic young psyches and robbing them of an organic enjoyment of life and self? Could not 12 years of classroom indoctrination in literature and mathematics be accomplished after puberty, at a fraction of the time and cost that we currently invest in it, by only hitting the books once our basic intelligence is properly seated?

Why do we have to lose our base of common sense in order to become scientists? Why not have both native intelligence and technological genius? They are not incompatible. Why not let us have spiritualized scientists?

By artificializing life during infancy and childhood, are we not forgoing our intimate connection with Nature and our ability to feed off Her breast? Can we regain our ability to sense and respond instinctively to Her ethical Laws, without the need of law books to define right and wrong and state police to make sure that we obey? If we invested our national resources first in the family base, developing the dual nature of our psyche, both in a practical grasp of physics, as well as our social respect for ethical behavior, and based our faith in our future genius on the sharing ethic and a chore-based work ethic cultivated in a home base of family values and not in the classroom and production line system; would we not have a more inspired and harmonious global society?

Amidst this Stone Age family group I felt myself in the presence of an elegance of social and spiritual communion as profound, if not more so, than a university lecture room or a cathedral service. I felt that I had stumbled on an original state of Truth and intelligence buried deep in the sands of our prehistoric past. I felt that I knew from an ancient source of knowledge buried deep inside my genes what the power and discipline of Animism was and what it meant in terms of heightening our appreciation of Being.

An inner sense of reverence inspires us towards excellence in behavioral expression. Technological genius is its by-product. Spiritual awareness is not an opiate sold to us by a priest caste. It makes us more than just shit machines, surviving for no deeper reason than endless consumption and ego satiation. I felt how timeless and incontestable Animism was, as opposed to a script-based spirituality.
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These surviving family groups of San Bushmen showed me just how acutely early Man related to the invisible forces of the universes, and the ethical nature that they are based on, and how zealously those Cosmic Laws are guarded and protected. What I wanted to know, was what factors in our collective evolution had allowed us to ignore our individual sense of unease, causing us to join into bands and armies; then invade, raid, rape and occupy our neighbor’s territories en masse.

If we still shared our candy meticulously with our siblings while at home and felt unease if we did not, what factor in our evolution allowed us to leave home, accumulate vast hordes of private wealth in the public sector, and care little about a beggar on the corner outside the windows of our limousine, or a child starving in Africa? Why was the aftertaste of experience not shared with as wide a circle of fellow human beings as possible? What circle of fellowship could be wider than an egalitarian global society? What was our modern reference for finding agreement or disagreement on what was best for us? Were we evolving in order to be collectively wiser or more individually isolated?

I wanted to understand the great tragedy of how we had lost clear sight of our innate sense of territorial integrity and common human decency that once governed us so justly. What made the modern psyche so stricken with suspicion about our neighbor? Why did we begin to lock our larders, pass laws, hire police and distrust our collective Self, at the cost of the bulk of our gross revenue? What evolutionary advantage was there in that? Where and when and how did we stray across the atomic boundary of territorial integrity and break a fundamental Cosmic Law?

This primitive group I was with instinctively knew right action from wrong action. They did not trespass, and so, avoided the endless anguish of social adjustments that would be required to restore order and trust and thereby keep the peace. They needed no vast library of laws to be written in the sand to give them direction and spell out the value of common decency. Animism was not the primitive heathen concept that I had been trained to believe it was. Here it was in action before me, and it showed itself, through inter-personal kindness and care, to be a sophisticated state of individual ease and behavioral elegance. Here was the spiritual basis of human decency!

What, then, had happened to us during our evolution to break that chain reaction and desensitize us from our innermost instincts, to the extent that we could no longer feel our neighbors’ hurt and ended up viciously eager to fry them by the hundreds of thousands in a nuclear holocaust? I could not help being reminded of a shaman that I had worked with when making a documentary film on urban witchcraft.

Robert Shabalala was a genuine psychic healer; h e could feel the pain of his patients, and he had to cure them in order to heal himself. There was one incident, three days before his patient arrived, during which he himself had to be hospitalized by pains that were not his. Here was the exact opposite of a desensitized psyche - something marvelously supernatural, a being opening himself to an invasion in order to heal and assuage another’s pain. A true brother, filled with concern for another, knowing intuitively that his comfort depended on every one else’s comfort; a true doctor who didn’t need a stethoscope, or a written body of medical knowledge, or laboratory analysis, to make a diagnosis. His own atomic sensitivity to territorial boundaries was the instrument of analysis; his own compassionate psyche and its empathetic inter-relationship gaining the trust of his patient and thereby providing the healing balm.

When I had worked with Robert the enigma of the stigmata had come to mind. Did Padre Pia while contemplating Christ ’s suffering on the cross, feel His pain so acutely that he actually manifested the wounds himself? The sensitivity of Robert and many other shamans I worked with made me believe that this was so. And if that sensitivity is true for them, then that same psychic potential must be imprinted in all of us.

In trying to define the Psyche-Genetic theory I soon knew that I was marching into unknown territory. We cannot just continue to analyze basic motivational impulses by way of our sexual drive, nor through our material ambitions or by rational deduction, without factoring in the infinite force of spiritual reality that permeates existence. Empiricism does not explain our compassion for one another, our feelings of courage or cowardice - why we feel ashamed or proud. Why we sing with joy or cry with sorrow; why we make music, art and dance. Physics cannot explain what makes us cringe at inner revelations or burst with ecstasy; why we feel a sense of guilt; what made us murder Abel; why we trespass; why we send out armies of invaders; why we commit mass genocide.

I needed more holistic answers to these questions, not only those couched in scientific terms, but ones that I could understand and accept intuitively as common sense. There had to be evolutionary rationales for all of our social and spiritual impulses, and specific reasons for why we became dysfunctional. There had to be a more universal way of explaining them, than by lying on a couch with one dysfunctional modern trying to reassure another dysfunctional modern, about the reason behind his or her bad dreams, or why he or she felt like committing family murder.

Since childhood I had instinctively felt that I was on the trail of our basic instincts and impulses, and that the answers lay in Africa, with its oral based traditions and tribal lore. The difference between the white society I was born into and the vast sea of black people that surrounded us, could not be summarily segregated by the callous racial remarks of apartheid, which dismissed Africa as primitive, barbaric and irrelevant, with only European values holding any worth.

Fundamental ethics of dignity and social integrity that had remained intact in the tribal lore of black social relationships were lost to us in our artificial white society. For instance, if a woman in traditional black society runs short of salt and suspects that her neighbor has extra, she would feel uneasy about visiting unless she was assured that at some point her neighbor would divine her need and offer her some as a matter of common decency, thereby leaving them both at ease and free of concerns about obligations. They accepted the natural law of give and take – of what goes around, comes around.

I tried to imagine a society in which nobody ever “owes” anybody anything; one in which we divine each other’s needs, feel each other’s joys and pains, and share all our resources, as a good family should. I thought of the countless wars that have put massive barriers between us. Once upon a time we did know how to truly relate to each other as family, and I wondered if we could recover our ancient extra-sensory social skills and if we could get them back working for us again.

My experience among the San made me realize that the truth of who we really are underneath our modern distortions, was forged back in prehistoric times. The problems we are having in trying to analyze our behavior are because the top branches of the family tree are laden with bitter fruits that far too many of us taste. Attempting to stare down through the confusion of twigs and branches of modern circumstances, trying to unravel the Gordian knot of twisted human relationships just to get at the roots of our collective psyche, is endlessly frustrating.

The simple truth of human relationships that I discovered out there in the desert made me feel that I did not need to study Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Merton’s functionalism, Marx ’s conflict theory, or du Bois’ race relations, to try and understand the nature of Man. No matter how well I mastered their treatises, I felt I would end up no wiser than when I started in trying to explain our reasons for building weapons of mass destruction and our policies of mass domination.

My basic observations among the San put me at the very font of human relationships. I felt that I had unearthed the very roots of how humans cultivated social behavior and responded to innate feelings of ethical conduct. Now all I had to do was keep to the main trunk of the family tree by working my way upward through one social progression after another, and see exactly what practical and spiritual factors gradually altered our behavior. Thereby, I would come to understand the growth, the fruit, and the twists and turns of the family tree, from root-level upwards.

Just a day’s drive from my home I could keep in direct contact with Stone Age family groups in the Kalahari, Bronze Age clansmen in Zululand, Iron Age Boer nationalists in Pretoria, Steel Age internationalists in Johannesburg and pockets of budding Nuclear Age globalists in New Age sects. With a basic understanding of the Nuclear Equation and the whole range of social progressions through four separate Ages of development at my fingertips, I was equipped with a larger and more practical laboratory for social and spiritual analysis than any other earlier searcher in human history. The answers were out there, all the ingredients were present, and I knew their locations. All I had to do was dig and prune away the dross of over-growth.
That sojourn among the San Bushmen allowed me to realize that our Animistic Stone Age respect for territorial integrity was a real force. We honored those boundaries; the invisible line in the sand could not be rubbed out, and it was as clear to those San women as a chain-link fence or the Great Wall of China. It was simultaneously esoteric and rationally definable: the food on the other side of that line belonged to the families of their migrated sons and their families, and thus was sacrosanct.

This Animistic instinct is ethically sound and species-friendly. If a member took just one aggressive step across the line, where and when would it stop?

That atavistic sense of territorial integrity is part of our makeup. To this day, despite all our artificial distortions, we can all still intuit a sense of inner discomfort when we cross an invisible line, moving outside of our own territory and trespassing in a neighbor’s house without first getting a friendly welcome. That under-current of unease is an atomic attribute. It protects the atomic integrity of the cosmic structure. The magnetic poles of attraction and repulsion manifest as extra-sensory impressions, intuited and interpreted as welcome and unwelcome feelings in our atomic human form. And because it is innate, none of us really needs a physical fence, a moat or a castle wall to tell us when we have trespassed into a neighbor’s atomic space; nor do we need policemen or lawmen to monitor our motivations.

Boundary lines were artificially marked when Man began to domesticate Nature and upset Her balance. We created a chain-reaction of new adaptations that artificially altered our behavior and allowed us to graduate into a Bronze Age of agricultural disciplines and more complex social organizations.

When man was turned out of the Gates of Eden to toil in the soil and domesticate Nature, we artificially upset Her delicate symbiotic balance. As a consequence, for the next five or six hundred generations, in a new Bronze Age of agricultural disciplines, we had to learn and devise ways and means of dealing with a long chain-reaction of adverse ecological reactions.

We have to keep reminding ourselves of the invisible laws of metaphysics that bind the universe together. Nature is not unfeeling. She is not mechanistic. Our sense of Being has been nurtured and nourished by Her; if we trespass on Her body unfeelingly She is morally offended, and is bound by Cosmic Law to correct us.

I left the Kalahari and the San with a vague notion that, if I went and spent some time among Bantu tribal groups who still retained many of the oral traditions of Bronze Age agricultural societies, I might find that next evolutionary step of ours and discover just what factor caused our first trespass. Why did we first invade our neighbors’ territory? What made us do it, thereby unleashing all the misery of the Ages? It had to have happened in prehistoric times, long before writing was invented, so we have no written record of the event.

It was all very well to dream the impossible dream of utopian future for our kind, but there was little value in drawing up plans for a New Age and then building the New Civilization on the ruins of the old, without knowing exactly what had ailed the previous one and caused it to collapse.

The endless rise and fall of our civilizations is a paradox of crumbling theories that all the scientists and all the kings men have never put together cohesively before. Trying to piece together our prehistoric past from fossil bones and broken pot shards after 25 centuries of scientific research has not resulted in a true sense of self knowing, at least not to the point that it brings forth a World of Peace and Hope, but the opposite. And we are running out of time.

Anthropologists who study surviving remnants of prehistoric cultures; besides being trained by their own rules not to “see” the culture’s underlying spirituality, are not allowed to make subjective determinations about primitive behavior patterns that might assist us all towards a greater understanding of our collective Self.


These scientific limitations are compounded by the reality that one of their own most eminent researchers has determined that atomic behavior is in fact indeterminable, which means, that all that science can give us, is possibilities and probabilities.

If that is the case, any free-thinker who is not trapped in those self-imposed limitations, provided he or she has enough gray in their hair and sense of parental responsibility, has the right to rise up at the tribal council and throw in their two pennies’ worth as to the nature of reality. And if the possibilities and probabilities they put forward happen to resonate with the common sense of all who listen to them, then let those who agree, move forward along that line of thinking and see where it may lead us.

I left the desert with these thoughts on my mind, and felt that I might have a chance of solving the paradox of lost civilizations and perhaps diagnose the ailments that are killing this one. Africa had held on tightly to Her spiritual secrets throughout the colonial era. Animism remained a mystery to Europeans; She had never released Her inner Self to our missionaries, nor to any purely scientific inquiry, and the World was all the poorer for it.

But I had stared into an old Bushwoman’s eye, and seen our Ancient Mother Eve reflected in her frank gaze as she sized me up with unclouded preconceptions, and in those dark depths I had caught a pure glimpse of Mother Nature Herself, and for a timeless moment a sober reflection of my own self as I really was, without my race identification number, my credit cards and my Mercedes.

I knew that if I could keep my newly opened psychic eye from closing in sleep again and remained compassionate towards Her children, Mother Africa would slowly lift Her veil and reveal Herself fully to me. Perhaps among the Zulus or Pondos I would find out exactly what made Man first cross that line in the sand, break the universal code of non-trespass and lead us down the road towards collapsed civilizations.

(An extract from Psyche-Genetics. The Metaphysical Implications of Human Evolution.)