The Appearance of Man

“Arbitrarily, for the exact date of man’s appearance will never be known, let us estimate that appearance at about one and a half million years ago. Then let us propose a comparison of mankind’s history with a calendar year in which one ‘day’ equals four thousand years of human history.

In this scheme January First would witness the appearance of our Homo habilis ancestors. Homo habilis could walk erect and use the most primitive tools. Hunting in bands, he probably could not talk as we do, though he undoubtedly had some method of communication. Speech, as we know it today, evolved very gradually during the first three months of our year. Man’s evolutionary progress was at best tedious and halting: fire first for protection from the cold and wild animals, and only much later for cooking; tools chipped from stone; the skills of hunting; the slow concentration and evolutions of the cerebral cortex. Summer came and went, and the fall was two-thirds through its course when Neanderthal man finally appeared around November 1st. The first indications of a religious belief can be seen in the burial sites of the later neanderthaloids, around December 17th in our scheme.

By December 24th of our hypothetical year, all the nonsapiens or primitive forms of man had died out or been absorbed by the more progressive and modern Cromagon man. Agriculture began around December 28th and the whole of our historical era, the brief six to ten thousand years for which we have records, is nestled in the last two days of our year. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were born about 9am on December 31st, Christ at noon and Columbus about 9.30pm. The final hour of December 31st, from 11pm to midnight New Years Eve, embraces all of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” 
(The Appearance of Man by P. Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Harper, 1956 form the Preface written by Robert T Francoeur)

Reexamination

The tools of the mind become burdens when the environment which made them necessary no longer exists.

-          Henri Bergson

What you see is what you get!

What you see in other people is what you will get out of them!

~Rev. Frederick Eikerenkoetter  (Better known as Rev. Ike)

Security & Certainty

It is the child in us that demands security…

The adult can accept that there is hardly ever certainty.

The drama of life...

The drama of life is a psychological one in which we bring circumstances to pass by our attitudes rather than by our acts. The corner-stone on which all things are based is mans concept of himself. He acts as he does, and has the experiences that he does, because his concept of himself is what it is, and for no other reason. Had he a different concept of himself, he would act differently and have different experiences.

Man, by assuming the feeling of his wish fulfilled, alters his future in harmony with his assumption, for, assumptions though false, if sustained, will harden into fact.



CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE ONLY REALITY

Opinions

As Napoleon Hill pointed out in his great book, Think and Grow Rich -

"Opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth."

...too implicit a confidence in their public servants

"I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy."
--U.S. Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves."

Socrates

"The unexamined life is not worth living ."