Hi Mike,
It is always astounding to me that we “moderns” are surprised that humans actually communicated — and shared knowledge — around the world before modern science and tech made it “possible.”
I certainly was surprised the first few dozen times I learned of examples of it.
Even the village where I live in France had a prehistoric workshop where cro-magnon artisans fabricated decorative beads made of local stone and bone, and shells from hundreds of kilometers away. People got around.
Thoughts, systems of thought, and spiritual practices spread. According to the NYU anthropologists and linguists working in that dig, the artisans making those beads in that workshop necessarily had a working vocabulary the same size as our own today — and they were “cavemen.” It makes me smile at my own nativité having believed the rumors spread by my school teachers that such humans only grunted, or had the expressive ability of our modern pet dogs.
If you’re interested, I suggest you read Peter Kingsley’s work on the Ancient Greek spiritual-philosophical tradition of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles, who all predated Pyrrohn.
Their tradition is Greek, but their practices for training their minds came from the “East” (pointing towards Turkey and beyond). While Tibetan Buddhism was predated by— and has now assimilated — ancient Bön, originally from a kingdom west of Tibet, which shared similar mind-training practices to those in Greece, which the Bönpos said came from the West. The “way of truth” related by Parmenides in his only surviving writing, a poem, is completely consistent with the view found in Tibetan Dzogchen. And Dzogchen originated with Bön, made its way to India, and then from India to Tibet hundreds of years later. And presumably, it spread to Greece at the same time as it did to the Bönpos. I said Greece, because the practices in that Ancient Greek tradition were consistent with those of the Bonpos.
The names for the practices are different, their methods strikingly similar. In “Reality,” Kingsley mentions the discovery of a site in Elea (in modern Italy, but formerly part of Ancient Greece) where the busts of a lineage of Ancient Greeks heading up that tradition were found. Everything had been purposely destroyed in the first century, and covered over, much like the Library of Alexandria in Egypt was later destroyed to remove the ancient knowledge it contained, which undermined more modern stories of greatness arising from the ashes of a dark — and dumb — past.
Kingsley is a philologist from Cambridge University originally, who studied Ancient Greek writings. I recommend “Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic,” “In The Dark Places of Wisdom,” “Reality,” and “A Story Waiting to Pierce You.” But if you don’t have time, nor interest in detailed analysis of language use as it pertains to philosophical developments, just read “Reality.” The last book, “A Story Waiting To Pierce You,” may be too much, as it is an account of a Mongolian emissary sent to visit Pythagoras — a visit documented by a few contemporary witnesses, as well as a very Mongolian-looking gentleman visible in a Greek fresco from the time.
It’s all truly fascinating, and I look forward to the next installment of this subject by you.
