the Garden, part two

reading about developmental stages:

“what you describe is actually pretty common. It occurs just about at the onset of puberty, when kids go into what Piaget called the age of abstract thought (and what religions call the Age of Reason). It's when you become aware of your consciousness as a separate entity from your physical being. Certainly there can be internal monologue before that happens, but that odd feeling of observing oneself is a function of new brain processes that come about as the brain matures.”

~Miko, 12/1/2004 http://ask.metafilter.com/12374/What-on-earth-is-going-on-in-childrens-heads

Wondering if there’s a correlation/parallel here between human species (?) evolution and developmental stages of human growth. I seem to remember reading somewhere that humans go through all the same phases while growing up that – oh, wait, maybe it’s that the developing embryo, in the womb? goes through all the ‘evolutionary’ changes that humans went through on the road from being some water-based critter to bipedality (?).

So I’m thinking: What if the ‘age of reason’ corresponds to that same point in human evolutionary history where we went from animals who had no ability to self-reflect to being the currently self-absorbed, self-obssessed, guilt-ridden creatures we are today?

Maybe that’s the ‘apple’ point, at which the fruit of the Tree is absorbed?

The painful, hyper-self-consciousness/awareness of teenagers; the development of the ongoing ‘internal monolog (or dialog???)’. Wonder what age that starts? I’m thinking around age 6? Don’t know why that age comes to mind, exactly.

***
It’s something to do with shame, and sexual shame, in particular.

Cultures which don’t develop this sexual shame (are there any left?) don’t become split into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ portions of themselves; they remain whole, integrated, as nature intended.

Those who find themselves judged, and thus end up being judges themselves, are also subject to shame.

Can’t quite capture this, it keeps escaping.

the Garden

Teaching people how

to break the old patterns.

***
See, this is how it was:

Long ago, when we were becoming the kind of humans we are now,
people got REALLY LUCKY and lived in a place where nature was so bounteous and everything was so plentiful that we NEVER had to struggle, never had to work.

Fruit fell from the trees, it was always warm, fish leaped into our open hands to be eaten.

There was plenty of everything for everybody, and we became insanely healthy and happy.

And then: We had too many babies.

And there were too many people.

And what was once ENOUGH,

became NOT enough.

So people had to move away, to make room, to find new resources.

It turned out that the place we’d lucked onto at the beginning was the best place we were ever going to find.

That’s why we call it

the GARDEN.

***