Our greatest gift as humans is our consciousness. Our greatest burden is to know that we will all die.

In this episode, I will explore the nature of “consolation” religions and show how they emerged from the then new world of agriculture. We will see that the “Patriarchy” is real and was based on solving the problems of this shift in human culture.

We will see how different was the world-view of the networks of wandering tribal people who hunted and gathered for millions of years before agriculture. They inhabited an animated universe where everything was connected to everything. Where the cycles of life affected everyone as well as the rest of nature. The irony is this idea of an energetic and networked universe is now how science sees the universe as well.

I will explain how we might be going back to such a world-view and what that means in practice. For I believe that, just as each of us has an individual track for development, so we also have one as a species. And that, just as an old person re-develops early values such as wonder and play, so as we mature as a species, we seek many of the old values from humanity’s childhood as a species.

I lay out some of these old values in the hope that we can console ourselves by using them to guide us in having a good life and so a good death.

I close by illustrating how our lack of confidence in the old consolation is driving a new religion. That is the hope that medicine can conquer death.

In the next episode we talk about the institution of medicine.