I didn't start out to write this much.Bob tweeted me a link to a series of 14 videos on youtube and asked for me to comment on the content of the videos. The theme is about a purported "lost civilization", and the moderator has his own theory about what happened and whether the objects around the world like the pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and Asia support his theories:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhh9xQ6Sa5s
I'm posting the link to the third video, because that's as far as I've gotten in watching the series. I've watched other series of videos that have a similar but different variation on the theme. It's kind of spooky how this happens. Spooky in the sense that until all these individual efforts got posted on youtube or some similar video site that even the theorists themselves may not have known how many people were using this media to say what they see about the origins of life on Earth.
I proposed something like this myself a while back. I've been participating on the Gospel of Thomas e-mail discussion list for maybe five or six years now, and some of the discussion that transpired there led me to believe that the story of the Exodus was really the story of a special cult of people who were responsible for all the planning that went into the Egyptian spectacle, who got tired of living in their own shit (the originators of the "build it, and they will come" metaphor), and moved on to build other spectacular places in other parts of the world. Probably Lebanon.
The weird idea that some of the dreams and visions I've experienced made me special in some way is hard to maintain. In the past, I have pretended that I possessed information that might be worth treating me nice to get me to share. That was so lame, but sometime it worked for a little while.
In the past, I've reflected on the notion that what made me special (if at all) happened the other way around. Namely, people gradually began to approach me to convince me to share the source of my mystical posturing, and it caught me off-guard with no prepared rhetoric to say. The situation forced me to invent something fantastic to say on the spur of the moment, in order to maintain my temporary sense of equilibrium and poise. I had to. I was the only person there I knew. I've got an entire menagerie of ready-made things to say. I've known for a long time now that what I have to say is a copy-cat version of somebody else's truth.
The way I see myself after having lived as a stranger in strange places might have been invented for me by people who get unnerved because I'm not responding to mutually experienced stimuli anywhere near like what they expected me too. It's as though I've experienced so much humiliation by expecting people to know who-I-think-I-am-is, that I hold back a lot of what the other needs to file me away in some pigeon-hole.
Some of the people who have seemed temporarily befuddled by my response, or lack of a response to simultaneously experienced events and situations, come and tell me what they think they would be like if they acted like me. Some have been so convincing in their descriptions that I took them at their word, and have acted that way ever since. It's just something to say when it's my turn to talk. Why would I not? Who could discern the difference between now and before if I was a total stranger to the observer? On the road, I soon learned that I could act anyway I liked on impulse with the only proviso being whether what or who I became, just for the hell of it, would get me hung from the highest tree?
"Oh, woman would you weep for me." ~ Roger Miller
The real idea behind this (precluding Heinlein) is an even older adage, "Travel broadens." That's what happens when homo sapiens who are used to living in tribal groups go to places where people don't know anything about them, that their home town folks would take for granite. '-)
My favorite story about how this happens involves the building of a road with some very long bridges straight through the heart of the bayous of southern Louisiana. The bayous are a place in North America where people went to hide from people who outnumbered them and didn't want them around. They lived in little groups all over the bayous, and seemed bound together by their mutual desire to be left alone to their own devices.
When the road and bridge project was complete they found that people who lived as little as ten miles (16.1 km) apart couldn't communicate with each other because they had such different dialects of the same basic language.
To a lesser degree, the same thing happened in the swamps here in the coastal plains of the Atlantic. Lots of people who found themselves a minority in the more populated piedmont areas of Appalachia retreated to the swamps where they couldn't be chased down by men on horseback.
Others retreated to the mountains for the same reason. Militarily, I suppose, it's a secure feeling to know a big bunch of big mountains have got your back. That's why there are so many small countries in Eurasia who have names that end in "stan". Even today they can't be attacked by either horses or motorized calvary call tanks. There are just too many bumps in the road to mount a modern frontal assault and overwhelm the natives with shock and awe. They got too many places to hide and wait for you to spend your entire military budget trying to root them out.
It's like a man trying to use a horse to plow in a field full of stumps. When the plow point encounters a hidden stump in the field, the plow; the horse, and the guiding hands of the man all stop dead still. It can be a painful experience for the man and the horse, but the plow don't have feelings. If you're using a big tractor and run into a stump in a field like that, the sudden stop can crush your ribs on the steering wheel and break yo' punkin' haid open on the windshield frame.
Groups of men who rode horses were large and in charge except for where the horses couldn't run roughshod over men on foot. Imagine the last thing you do is reaching to save yourself from the snorting, charging huge horse, and then glimpse a flash of the saber wielded by the rider as your last grasp for life on Earth. AAaaiiiyeeeee!
Constantly living as a stranger in a strange land forced me to act different than how I conducted my affairs in the villages I was raised in where most people knew me and all my family's names. As an adult out in the real world I found myself acting like the people around me would naturally know me and how I was raised and what kind of people I come from, and we could expect of each other, and they didn't. How could they have? My dumb rustic ways have telegraphed my punch for years, and still does. What a drag, man.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
