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THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY
the gift, if only when disaster forces us to, because that is the nature of reality. The truth will out. Let us stop resisting the truth before it kills us.
Storyteller Consciousness In the last two chapters I have illuminated something of the magnitude of the changes that will follow the transition to an Age of Reunion. If anything, I have understated them. The end of separation will penetrate far deeper than the forms of money and property, technology and medicine, work and education; it will eventually transform the very psychological infrastructure of the discrete and separate self—symbolic language, number and measure, linear time, and dualistic religion. Already we see how play refuses the linear measure of time and the discrete separation of subject and object: we lose ourselves in play’s timelessness and become “an organic agent of the universe’s own creative process.” It would seem, based on the arguments of Chapter Two, that representational language inescapably separates us from that world of play and casts us into a divided realm of object and label, self and other. We could perhaps return to the lingua adamica, 52 abandoning representational language and all the technology that rests upon it. For let there be no mistake: language is more powerful than, and prior to, any other form of technology. Almost anything we accomplish in today’s world, we accomplish through language. We present ideas, we make requests, we describe possibilities, we warn of consequences, we call others into action. Of course, there are some things you can accomplish without language, such as building a tepee, but nothing that requires the coordination of human activity. Activities such as running an airport or building a microchip absolutely require systems of arbitrary symbols, numbers, and the marking of time. Technology, however, need not be unnatural, nor depend on the doomed maintenance of a separate human realm. The destiny of humankind, in the coming age, is to extend nature into a new realm. We don’t need to go back to the Stone Age. As long as waste equals food, as long as it embodies nature’s cyclicity and does not pretend to linearity, as long as it enacts the dynamics of the gift rather than the program of control, then the human realm, separate no longer, will itself be natural in every sense of the word. And the communication system of this new realm is