This is so interesting! For the past two months I have been working on a human-to-animal adaptation artwork created from discarded clothing (metaphor for discarded humanity). The impetus for the work in progress had nothing to do with paleo-anthropology and paleontology. I thought I was making work about how humans are being experimented on, trained into obedience, and treated like animals by the overlords.
Very interesting 'coincidence'! The difference being that today (and for quite a long time, historically) we have been experimented on but it is now aiming not for 'animal' but for 'post-human', arguably less-than-animal...
There are esoteric threads crossing here - one driving what would have been a diversity-boosting and more or less 'natural' adaptation from human to animal, and another, diversity-crashing one to drive humanity out of humans.
It is so urgent for us to get clear about 'what it is to be a human'!
I appreciate your reply. What does it mean to be human? Humans have
emotions, memories, thoughts, creativity, spiritual connection. Humans are receivers of subtle energies from Universe. Humans are more powerful than they know.
However, all the attributes you list appear to be modifiable/hijackable by various types of programming, rather they have indeed been distorted into making us weak and fragmented.
Humans (and all life) do receive subtle energies from the Universe but have little to no experiential awareness of this. 'More powerful than they know' is an idea that is proffered abundantly these days but with little substantiation. To know this conceptually is so very different from actually experiencing it, and applying it responsibly to harmonizing and pacifying the turmoil all around us. Which in turn requires us to reintegrate all the parts of us that have been fragmented and distorted.
The problem is that modern people live in their heads, and the mind can feed on such uplifting ideas. But when the monster comes to me face to face, it won't be much good if I have only an abstract notion that 'I am so powerful' - the monster will laugh me down and give me a very hard time unless it feels that the true reintegrated human substance is alive in me.
I totally agree with you. How do we reintegrate our fragmented parts? I do this conceptually through an artistic process in which thousands of fragments of discarded clothing are integrated and united to create a new whole. Is there a simpler path from fragmentation to integration? My sense of self was already shattered and fractured and broken into pieces in early childhood.
The healing of psychological trauma seems to be a difficult lifelong process especially when new trauma keeps being piled on top of old trauma. https://www.lindafriedmanschmidt.com/
The soon-to-be completed human-to-animal adaptation artwork is not on my website yet. I am unable to send an image directly on Substack.
Your art work to turn fragments of cloth into a new whole is a great method - there are many ways, in fact, probably as many as there are humans... provided they want the reintegration!
Thank you for the link - your art work is stunning. Punch in the solar plexus... the gut, the heart, the face. I can relate, as they say. How you do those eyes with bits of cloth just blows my mind.
Like you, I can say I had no 'self', it only began to exist when I bore a child, and from then on, the many things I did artistically and otherwise gradually allowed it to grow. By now, writing seems to reconnect the pieces of 'self' into something more coherent, and being in silent communion with beings of Nature - she never lies and knows the keys of Life.
But the most potent has been the acceleration I experienced through the non-practices that I was compelled to share in my latest book ('Broody Blue'). They are the simplest yet most potent way I know of. They activate the greater subtle human in us as an experiential reality, and thus place us where we can contemplate our sufferings in a way that is not just 'healing' - I don't have a word for this. They take little time, are not 'meditation', and I did not 'invent' them, they were given to me from 'somewhere'. They have amplified for me the ability to hold the weight of the empath's feeling the suffering of others - such that the healing can be shared, and not just serving me.
There is a bare-bones version of the easiest of these non-practices in an earlier post called 'a gift', and its sequel with a title that mentions 'the Japanese non-practice'. The book is a deeper exploration of that one plus two more, along with plenty of explanatory and contextual material.
Thank you very much for the kind words about my artwork and for the recommendation of "Broody Blue." The most healing for me has been dancing with humans of all ages, races, and nationalities. At the same time I started making the art (when I was nearly 50 years old) I started dancing ballroom salsa on2, a very fast dance in which partners change when the music changes. The communication is non-verbal, through the hands, elaborate routines of silent connection, fingers telling palms what the body should do. The connection, touching so many diverse people in a short period of time along with the amazing motion have been the most healing. The "plandemic" put an end to this for a few years.
I am hesitant to write to you because I feel I might be wrong or am speaking about something I don't know about but have just read about.
But I am still curious and interested and would love to talk to you.
What you wrote here reminded me of something I read in George Gurdjieff's book Beezlebubs Tales to His Grandson.
Gurdjieff talked about devolution. A few things I remember Gurdjieff talked was about our ability to see colors. He spoke about the Law of Sevenfoldness. We see 7 colors. Gurdjieff said at the time of Babylon we saw 49 colors and in Ancient times we saw more than 5,000,000 with the exception of one.
Gurdjieff also spoke about our diminishing lifespans. Which reminds me of times when I went to India with my parents as a teenager and saw a place in the mountains where a person lived to 900 years if I remember correctly.
Gurdjieff also talked about different changes that were made to our species. I would love to read your thoughts on this :)
Could it be possible that there were two different changes of our species one of our "Ancestors" into different "animals" perhaps to fulfill different functions on Earth. But also another change which was done not in partnerships with Earth, the one gurdjieff talks about? More in line with what is talked about in Krivda?
Just curious, I'm not sure what the answer is or even if what I asked is a valid question so I would love to read if you have anything to say.
Thank you for both these comments! I think you're touching on some pretty important points. Of course we have no way of 'really knowing', at least under the present circumstances, but both of your arguments are definitely in the realm of possibility.
At this point, the best thing we can do is diligently keep an open mind - especially since we know that everything we have been taught is at least tainted if not outright falsified, any new idea is potentially as good as any of the 'established' theories.
At this point we should not be trying to aim for the kind of factual certainty in 'knowledge' that we have been programmed to believe in. Best to just let in different points of view when they are backed up by someone's solid experiential and scholarly argumentation, and sincerity too. Let it all marinate, and sooner or later, puzzle pieces will fall into place.
There were very probably different races of humans seeded 'from outside' at different geological times, and plausibly different animals de-evolving from those humans. Although note the really interesting bit about Bielov's crocodiles - those evolved from hominids of 400 million years ago remained more 'human' anatomically than those coming from more 'recent' hominids while still all belonging to the 'crocodile' family.
What intrigues me more, and is not addressed by Bielov, is the question of why the natural law down here requires a 'food chain' in which everyone has to eat someone else - somehow I feel that this was not the 'initial plan'. This kind of thing is not knowable 'scientifically' through material means - it can only come forth from deep 'rishi-diving', the work of 'seers'.
And indeed I have my own 'private' kind of quasi-certainty that in a very very remote past humans did have all sorts of subtle senses and abilities that were lost later. Longer life spans too, and the capacity to choose one's time of passing. And yes, in India there were (may still be) yogic ascetic characters who lived several hundred years until the recent past.
I am not yet ready to do more than hint at all these aspects. It will take a lot more contemplation before I can come out with notions I would like to share. But it is fun to share possibilities, be it only to widen the landscape that our minds can hold and consider.
And let us consider the possibility that whatever capabilities we had in the very remote past, the subtle seed of those still remains in us. I sense that we have had to lose a lot of what we were, as 'magical beings by default', in order to become, ourselves, the re-creators of 'being-human', to be the sane owners of our humanity.
A quick comment: I loved reading this article (and your others as well!) because it reminded me of the deep conversations of life I used to have with other humans. It made me feel like I was back to a time where it felt wonderful to take in knowledge that was so new and so different, and let it tickle my brain. Thank you!
This is so interesting! For the past two months I have been working on a human-to-animal adaptation artwork created from discarded clothing (metaphor for discarded humanity). The impetus for the work in progress had nothing to do with paleo-anthropology and paleontology. I thought I was making work about how humans are being experimented on, trained into obedience, and treated like animals by the overlords.
Dear Linda,
Very interesting 'coincidence'! The difference being that today (and for quite a long time, historically) we have been experimented on but it is now aiming not for 'animal' but for 'post-human', arguably less-than-animal...
There are esoteric threads crossing here - one driving what would have been a diversity-boosting and more or less 'natural' adaptation from human to animal, and another, diversity-crashing one to drive humanity out of humans.
It is so urgent for us to get clear about 'what it is to be a human'!
Dear Enna,
I appreciate your reply. What does it mean to be human? Humans have
emotions, memories, thoughts, creativity, spiritual connection. Humans are receivers of subtle energies from Universe. Humans are more powerful than they know.
Dear Linda,
Indeed!
However, all the attributes you list appear to be modifiable/hijackable by various types of programming, rather they have indeed been distorted into making us weak and fragmented.
Humans (and all life) do receive subtle energies from the Universe but have little to no experiential awareness of this. 'More powerful than they know' is an idea that is proffered abundantly these days but with little substantiation. To know this conceptually is so very different from actually experiencing it, and applying it responsibly to harmonizing and pacifying the turmoil all around us. Which in turn requires us to reintegrate all the parts of us that have been fragmented and distorted.
The problem is that modern people live in their heads, and the mind can feed on such uplifting ideas. But when the monster comes to me face to face, it won't be much good if I have only an abstract notion that 'I am so powerful' - the monster will laugh me down and give me a very hard time unless it feels that the true reintegrated human substance is alive in me.
Wouldn't you agree?
Dear Enna,
I totally agree with you. How do we reintegrate our fragmented parts? I do this conceptually through an artistic process in which thousands of fragments of discarded clothing are integrated and united to create a new whole. Is there a simpler path from fragmentation to integration? My sense of self was already shattered and fractured and broken into pieces in early childhood.
The healing of psychological trauma seems to be a difficult lifelong process especially when new trauma keeps being piled on top of old trauma. https://www.lindafriedmanschmidt.com/
The soon-to-be completed human-to-animal adaptation artwork is not on my website yet. I am unable to send an image directly on Substack.
Dear Linda,
Your art work to turn fragments of cloth into a new whole is a great method - there are many ways, in fact, probably as many as there are humans... provided they want the reintegration!
Thank you for the link - your art work is stunning. Punch in the solar plexus... the gut, the heart, the face. I can relate, as they say. How you do those eyes with bits of cloth just blows my mind.
Like you, I can say I had no 'self', it only began to exist when I bore a child, and from then on, the many things I did artistically and otherwise gradually allowed it to grow. By now, writing seems to reconnect the pieces of 'self' into something more coherent, and being in silent communion with beings of Nature - she never lies and knows the keys of Life.
But the most potent has been the acceleration I experienced through the non-practices that I was compelled to share in my latest book ('Broody Blue'). They are the simplest yet most potent way I know of. They activate the greater subtle human in us as an experiential reality, and thus place us where we can contemplate our sufferings in a way that is not just 'healing' - I don't have a word for this. They take little time, are not 'meditation', and I did not 'invent' them, they were given to me from 'somewhere'. They have amplified for me the ability to hold the weight of the empath's feeling the suffering of others - such that the healing can be shared, and not just serving me.
There is a bare-bones version of the easiest of these non-practices in an earlier post called 'a gift', and its sequel with a title that mentions 'the Japanese non-practice'. The book is a deeper exploration of that one plus two more, along with plenty of explanatory and contextual material.
Thank you very much for the kind words about my artwork and for the recommendation of "Broody Blue." The most healing for me has been dancing with humans of all ages, races, and nationalities. At the same time I started making the art (when I was nearly 50 years old) I started dancing ballroom salsa on2, a very fast dance in which partners change when the music changes. The communication is non-verbal, through the hands, elaborate routines of silent connection, fingers telling palms what the body should do. The connection, touching so many diverse people in a short period of time along with the amazing motion have been the most healing. The "plandemic" put an end to this for a few years.
💚 Beautifully creative art. 💚
I appreciate your kind words.
Hi Enna,
I am hesitant to write to you because I feel I might be wrong or am speaking about something I don't know about but have just read about.
But I am still curious and interested and would love to talk to you.
What you wrote here reminded me of something I read in George Gurdjieff's book Beezlebubs Tales to His Grandson.
Gurdjieff talked about devolution. A few things I remember Gurdjieff talked was about our ability to see colors. He spoke about the Law of Sevenfoldness. We see 7 colors. Gurdjieff said at the time of Babylon we saw 49 colors and in Ancient times we saw more than 5,000,000 with the exception of one.
Gurdjieff also spoke about our diminishing lifespans. Which reminds me of times when I went to India with my parents as a teenager and saw a place in the mountains where a person lived to 900 years if I remember correctly.
Gurdjieff also talked about different changes that were made to our species. I would love to read your thoughts on this :)
Could it be possible that there were two different changes of our species one of our "Ancestors" into different "animals" perhaps to fulfill different functions on Earth. But also another change which was done not in partnerships with Earth, the one gurdjieff talks about? More in line with what is talked about in Krivda?
Just curious, I'm not sure what the answer is or even if what I asked is a valid question so I would love to read if you have anything to say.
Dear Sahibjit,
Thank you for both these comments! I think you're touching on some pretty important points. Of course we have no way of 'really knowing', at least under the present circumstances, but both of your arguments are definitely in the realm of possibility.
At this point, the best thing we can do is diligently keep an open mind - especially since we know that everything we have been taught is at least tainted if not outright falsified, any new idea is potentially as good as any of the 'established' theories.
At this point we should not be trying to aim for the kind of factual certainty in 'knowledge' that we have been programmed to believe in. Best to just let in different points of view when they are backed up by someone's solid experiential and scholarly argumentation, and sincerity too. Let it all marinate, and sooner or later, puzzle pieces will fall into place.
There were very probably different races of humans seeded 'from outside' at different geological times, and plausibly different animals de-evolving from those humans. Although note the really interesting bit about Bielov's crocodiles - those evolved from hominids of 400 million years ago remained more 'human' anatomically than those coming from more 'recent' hominids while still all belonging to the 'crocodile' family.
What intrigues me more, and is not addressed by Bielov, is the question of why the natural law down here requires a 'food chain' in which everyone has to eat someone else - somehow I feel that this was not the 'initial plan'. This kind of thing is not knowable 'scientifically' through material means - it can only come forth from deep 'rishi-diving', the work of 'seers'.
And indeed I have my own 'private' kind of quasi-certainty that in a very very remote past humans did have all sorts of subtle senses and abilities that were lost later. Longer life spans too, and the capacity to choose one's time of passing. And yes, in India there were (may still be) yogic ascetic characters who lived several hundred years until the recent past.
I am not yet ready to do more than hint at all these aspects. It will take a lot more contemplation before I can come out with notions I would like to share. But it is fun to share possibilities, be it only to widen the landscape that our minds can hold and consider.
And let us consider the possibility that whatever capabilities we had in the very remote past, the subtle seed of those still remains in us. I sense that we have had to lose a lot of what we were, as 'magical beings by default', in order to become, ourselves, the re-creators of 'being-human', to be the sane owners of our humanity.
Does all this make sense?
A quick comment: I loved reading this article (and your others as well!) because it reminded me of the deep conversations of life I used to have with other humans. It made me feel like I was back to a time where it felt wonderful to take in knowledge that was so new and so different, and let it tickle my brain. Thank you!