The Negligence of Intelligence – Part II
Darwin’s theory of evolution gives us the idea that mankind has evolved from chimps in to ever more complex hominids, resulting in the pinnacle that is us modern humans – Homo-erectus. This may well be true on many levels but the idea that there is a continual improvement and advancement of our intelligence is highly debatable and misleading. Clearly with over 8 Billion humans on the planet we have a vast spectrum of people with different levels of intelligence. We have genius technicians who are able to send rockets out in to space, geneticists who can unravel DNA and scientists who can split the atom. Whilst in the meantime, often in the same village, we can also have knuckle-dragging simpletons who appear to have barely evolved beyond Neanderthal status. (Apologies to any actual Neanderthals out there!)
This disparity of intelligence occurs not just across our culture but also across time, and intelligence does not necessarily increase in an orderly chronological fashion. For example it took the Britons over a thousand years to recapture the level of technological sophistication that the Romans took away with them when they left. Archaeologists around the world are now beginning to discover lost civilisations that were far more advanced than many that came after them. History is continually having to be rewritten, where we are discovering evidence of technologies that we are now only truly beginning to understand. We are coming to realise that many ancient peoples were actually far more advanced that we originally gave them credit for.
However the ever increasing complexity of tools and machines is clearly only one form of intelligence. We are now supposedly living in the era of the greatest technological achievement but what would happen to us if suddenly all the lights went out? If the internet were switched off and no one was there to deliver your food, what form of intelligence would be useful then? It would be those who knew how to live off the land that would prosper, those who can hunt and gather food, build shelters and fire. The so called ‘primitive’ indigenous peoples of the jungles would be those who would survive, just as they always have done.
As a proponent and practitioner of a very ancient medicine I am acutely aware of these fluctuations of intelligence over the course of time. The mind of the ancient Chinese evolved in an entirely different direction to ours and they developed an entirely different form of intelligence. They devised a kind of internal technology of consciousness, where they perceived and understood the processes in which the mind and energy moved through the body. Even with our most magnificent modern machines we are unable to measure or even describe consciousness, let alone how it moves, which is why the subtleties of Chinese energetic theory have largely been dismissed by modern science. But just because we cannot measure it with our devices doesn’t mean something doesn’t exist. We can’t measure love or hate or joy or grief but we all agree that these things are very real.
Luckily for us, the ancient Chinese mapped out these energetic pathways, these stream of consciousness, on the body so that we can follow them and make use of them. Much of what we know about acupuncture comes from the book The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal medicine. This was written by Huang Di over 4500 years ago but interestingly, within the text, the main characters talk about a golden age in the long forgotten past, when people even further back in time were even more advanced when it came to understanding the energetics of the human body.
My first encounter with the Chinese arts came in the form of Lee style Tai Chi. Chee Soo, one of the pioneering teachers who brought some of these practices to the West, stated that the ancient Chinese were given their knowledge by a group a seven foot tall, red haired people who came across the sea over 10,000 years ago. This may well seem fanciful to many but there is a growing body evidence that suggests around 12,000 years ago the earth was subjected to a meteor strike that led to a global cataclysm. Known as the Younger Dryas impact theory and put forward by journalists such as Graham Hancock, the idea is that something happened to the planet that led to mass extinctions on a global scale and the loss of a seemingly advanced civilization. At the moment, no one really knows if there was a highly intelligent race that existed before this time but this theory does seem to be gaining in momentum and acceptance.
Sadly much of history has been lost, perhaps partly due to the global cataclysm itself. However the stories of a lost ancient civilization live on, not just in the myths ancient China, but of Plato and Atlantis, of Lemuria, of El Dorado, Shangri-La, Shamballa and Quetzlecoatl to name but a few.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact remains that if we are as intelligent as we claim to be, we should probably question the direction that our modern form of technological intelligence is taking us – otherwise when the next global cataclysm strikes, it will probably be one we have caused ourselves.