Sunday, June 01, 2008

Lost Tribes of the Amazon

There's a series of photos creating alot of interest in the news.

They were taken from a plane flying over an isolated village deep in the Amazon jungle. The people of the village are painted in bright colors and are obviously disturbed by the unknown object flying above, which they are threatening with yells & spears.


One can imagine the terror & anxiety seeing such a vehicle in the sky would cause to any person unfamiliar with aircraft. It's no different than if bizarre hyper-dimensional alien entities appeared to Americans over Washington DC. There was a pretty good comment in the Wall Street Journal article: "Will we look any less ridiculous if the aliens come? flying over in their giant silent craft and laughing at the nuclear weapons we point at them?"

Although I definitely don't think that inflicting mass psychological trauma on innocent people is a good thing, I have to admit these photos are pretty fascinating.

It shows that the myth of Eden is really just an analogy for a state of being. This way of life is one in complete sustainable harmony with the natural environment. Photos like these prove that this more organic state of existence still persists in certain isolated environments. The Garden of Eden is a cultural metaphor for a time before the imposition of large-scale society, when life was a process more in tune with the realities of Nature than a concept of "The State".


Unfortunately, the abstract organizing process and system of control known as "civilization" is surely on its way to devour these holdouts of human independence & self-sustenance. Then, their lifestyle will become a memory in the growing collective consciousness of humanity.

However, like a bacterium absorbing DNA from other living things, civilization has a way of assimilating useful traits from the smaller social entities that it engages. So, maybe the positive aspects of life in the remote Amazon jungle will be able to inform the global culture that is evolving & looking for ways to harmonize with the world we live in.

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