It is said that we are the Cro-Magnon. Within the statistical variations of human physiognomy if an infant from those scores of thousands of years ago were dropped down and raised amongst us, we would find before us a human being basically indistinguishable from the rest of us. The Cro-Magnon of 50,000 years ago had the body, the brain, the personhood, of ourselves.
Peter Ouspensky (d.1947), writing in his early Gurdjieff years of around 1915, expressed words to the effect that "one could go mad from contemplating an ashtray". I was in my mid 20s when investigating this material. I was surviving as a sculptor in copper, and I imagined Ouspensky in deep contemplation, settled in comfortable surroundings and smoking a cigarette. As he tapped the ash from his cigarette into the copper ashtray at his side he was flooded with intimations of all involved in its seemingly innocuous existence.
Between a Cro-Magnon fascination with a strange and wonderful substance sweated by the rocks from which he'd made his fire pit to the existence of Ouspensky's ashtray lie thousand of years of inspiration and iteration: thousands of years of innovation and intuition and (quite simply) Genius. And this is true of every aspect of modernity.
All the advances in practical solutions to everyday tasks have led to our ever-so modern "fifty dollar-answers-to-five cent-questions" and to fabulous answers to questions that don't even exist.
All of this is the product of Cro-Magnon consciousness.
The sleep of Awareness is undisturbed.
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