Preparing For New Health
How differently our current state of social health appears to us, in comparison with the experience of natural life and health, when we return from a survey of the natural world and compare it to the state of modern society today. It is often revealing and even somewhat disorienting to again rejoin contemporary society – after the study of natural health science and time in new personal experiences of natural life – and observe life in our time from a more scientifically-informed, and health and nature-centered perspective.
In important ways, the pervasive health of natural life seems to have stopped at society’s gate. We see that all or many of the people around us fail to possess the vitality of the plants and animals of wild nature. We seem less robust and less energized than we might be, and often appear to live far less compellingly than we might or might want. In general, we seem unable to share in the ability of natural organisms to maintain high levels of health and fitness into and past adolescence, let alone far into adulthood and throughout life. We thus newly find ourselves lacking in fundamental ways – amidst our modern wealth and power, and amidst our new scientific understanding.
Our past is still present
As we have discussed, for centuries before our time and across many influential cultures, people generally held the mistaken view that humans were not animals and instead were of a domain apart from the natural world. Often battling nature as poor and indebted farmers, shepherds, and townspeople, or as living cloistered in luxury, our ancestors frequently perceived the natural world as a threatening, evil, and unhealthy place.
Such outlooks, and the priorities and norms they engendered, can seem curious and even inconceivable to modern and more nature-oriented people today. But each of us pursuing natural health must recognize this fact and seek to perceive traditional influences on the world around us today. And we must take away a larger lesson. This lesson is that even the most untraditional of outlooks in our time inevitably contain their own biases and unexamined imperfections, which we must equally work to see and resolve in our quest for progressive and open-ended life and health.
Modern science of course now has placed human beings squarely and definitively back in the animal kingdom. Science no longer allows us to think credibly in older ways that saw people apart from nature, or that perceived nature as opposed or tangential to human life and well-being. Science equally does not permit us to gloss over the facts of our past in an optimistic way, and to think romantically or clumsily about the facts of natural human life, as some of us have a tendency or desire to do in our time. If we are animals, this must imply that our earlier life in nature was more animal-like than we might initially envision or want to believe, just as it was likely more humane and less savage than some of our traditionally-minded ancestors believed.
In this way, an animalized human species and naturalized human past compel us to consider carefully, and with the full force of science, the truth of our original natural state. These new traits of ours oblige us – if we hypothesize and seek fuller expressions of our natural health amidst modern life – to know as best we can our long-evolved and presumably naturally healthy condition. And they encourage us to understand thoroughly why we differ today in our levels of personal fitness and vitality from all other animals.
The new opportunity of modern science of course now permits and even forces us to look more deeply into natural human life, and to restore and then build upon our original state of natural health. As we have suggested, critical insights, with profound implications for the health and vitality of all people and all human societies, wait for us all in this new and important line of inquiry. In the next section of this program, entitled Our Past, we will provide a thorough summary of the science of our natural past, as a foundation for introducing the critical techniques needed to restore and then enhance our natural health and vitality.
Is it possible that advanced human civilization, with its complex social organization and widespread use of technology, is incompatible with our original nature and natural requirements for healthy life? As the existence of this program suggests, and as you will validate for yourself in using the program, HumanaNatura can demonstrate that this is clearly not the case. Advanced human society and robust natural health can coexist successfully, and both are now well in reach for us individually and collectively. Indeed, achieving a truly advanced and sustainable global society in our time involves not just the restoration of our natural health, but its profound new expression.
Social health’s recent origin
We mentioned before that an important insight awaits us, in seeking to better understand the gap today between our social health and the natural states of health we can observe in the larger world. Before we close this section of the program, let’s spend a moment explaining what this insight is and some of its implications. We will do this as a prelude to a deeper and more expansive look at the facts of our natural human history in the next section of the program.
Based on the findings of modern anthropology, and evolutionary and physiological science, HumanaNatura and others have concluded that humans greatly lowered our natural health as we abandoned essential aspects of our ancient mobile and foraging life in wild nature, which began with the formation of the first fixed agricultural civilizations. This change in human living conditions began gradually over several thousand years, but then accelerated quickly and transformatively approximately ten thousand years ago.
Our rapid human shift from mobile foraging life to settled agricultural and pastoral life appears to have begun with semi-settled people in the Middle East and eastern China, and the co-evolution and increasing domestication of certain plant and animal species. As we will discuss in more detail, once this new approach to human life and land use took hold, it spread quickly throughout much of Eurasia and then the rest of the world, during what is now called the Agrarian Revolution. This change swept though most of our species between twelve and eight thousand years ago, as the earth’s most recent ice age yielded to relatively warmer and drier conditions. Combined with enabling climate change, settled agricultural life itself allowed much higher birth rates, on the back of less healthy but more calorie-rich foods, and the numbers of people in this new mode of life swelled – in both absolute terms and relative to hunter-gatherer populations.
Once this shift in human living conditions away from natural, mobile human life began, the historical development and evolution of fixed civilization naturally worked to reinforce a new era and pattern of human life, one emphasizing acquisitive life and separating people from important natural conditions we are adapted for (conditions which we still require and must restore for optimal health today). A key result of this change was a dramatic and largely unconscious decline in our natural health and overall well-being, and a general estrangement from the conditions that fostered our original states of natural human fitness and vitality.
Our challenge is new health
As suggested before, it is tempting to conclude that fixed civilization and our social and technological evolution since the Agrarian Revolution are incompatible with the earlier designs of our natural evolution and natural human life. In this view, the benefits of civilized life come with unavoidable costs to our natural health and vitality. Some in the natural health movement hold and espouse this belief today.
While it is true that our health suffered historically, and even quite significantly, when fixed life began and as early civilizations evolved and altered ancient human living conditions, HumanaNatura cautions against drawing too sharp a line between our natural and social evolution. After all, natural and human social evolutionary processes are clearly related and have similar inherent dynamics, and the advent of civilization proceeded directly from and contains strong roots in and influences from our natural human living patterns.
HumanaNatura sees it is both justified and more fruitful to consider and act toward the new synthesis of society and nature we have discussed. To challenge any antisocial or anti-technological beliefs you hold at this stage of the program, we will simply propose that it is a limited and unproductive outlook – given our waiting ability to transform our health and lives through modern health science – to live today resigned to the idea that our social systems and individual lives must inevitably remain out of synch with nature, or that we individually cannot return to compelling natural life in our time.
For perspective, we would add that our historical past and civilization today, even with their significant misalignment with nature and failure to meet critical natural health requirements, may merely be a transitional period of a few thousand years, a relatively short span in the history of our species, in the progression toward a fundamentally higher and far more adaptive state of human life. With advancing science and human awareness, and the now rapidly growing understanding of the important evolutionary risks and opportunities before us, the world seems ripe for and increasingly aware of its need for a new synthesis with nature, and for a healthier and more sustainable global civilization.
This change – to establish a richer and more direct human connection to the natural world and natural life – is perhaps already underway. New nature-oriented synthesis may even be in early evidence, in our emerging post-modern desire for greater personal and social health and well-being, and for greater understanding of and harmony with the natural world. We can easily take these developments as given, but they are in fact new and unprecedented in historical terms, and may already represent a coming transformative shift in our species toward new health and expressions of natural life.
If we are all now estranged from our original human niche and important natural human conditions, as modern evolutionary and health science now strongly suggests, it is no surprise that our health suffers. Equally, if we have not examined and addressed natural human limitations on our potential for progressive growth and quality of life, and still other limitations that have evolved since the advent of fixed civilization, it can hardly be unexpected that the progress of human science now compels increasing numbers of people to question past assumptions and begin a modern rethinking our lives and values today.
As you will learn firsthand using HumanaNatura’s natural health techniques, the irony and opportunity of modern human life is that we can already transform ourselves, substantially and sustainably, through a science-enabled awakening and the informed cultivation of our natural health. We already can do this, now, in our lives today as they are, and simply and powerfully.
Robust and even extraordinary new levels of natural health and well-being can be achieved by you and by the people around you. As the structure of the HumanaNatura system suggests, this can occur first by restoring specific health-essential aspects of natural human life within our lives today, and then by progressively pursuing the many opportunities for new health and quality of life that wait in our advanced civilization.
Health validates – and liberates
The power of the science that underlies HumanaNatura’s natural health techniques reveals itself in the fact that most of us can validate this new approach to human health and life for ourselves – quickly and reliably, and initially with only modest changes in our lives.
Even with as little as thirty days of sustained practice, we can watch as simple adjustments in our diet and activity patterns begin to restore our natural human fitness and vitality, reconnecting us to the world around us more fully, and often engendering surprising new feelings of vitality, openness, and harmony in our lives.
As our health improves, we begin to look differently. We begin to think differently. Our bodies become stronger and fit, and soon begin to more closely resemble those of other animals living in nature. Our outlooks and perspectives become clearer and broadened. We begin to see ourselves and our lives in new, more natural, and more health-oriented ways, with new priorities and goals emerging from our transforming health.
As our fitness levels and perspectives change, the way we feel and sense is altered too. Our emotions often become calmed and more centered, permitting use to find and tap into natural human feelings that are uplifting and joyful. We can use our increasing health to see the world more clearly and experience new connection and harmony in the world. We soon begin to search for and better sense the person we most want to be.
In our resurgent health, we become freed to achieve still new levels of health, free to live more directly in our vitality and well-being, free to take greater and more thoughtful control of our lives. We become free, in turn, to see and live past the many harmful, health-reducing, and self-limiting behaviors and attitudes that are still common in society today.
With our lives better grounded in our health, we can consider new goals and make new choices for ourselves, and can encourage new and more informed and liberating choices in others. These choices come from and directly contribute to our pursuit of our naturally health life. We are thus freed to live more simply and vitally, to have less and to do more that advances our well-being and quality of life, and the health and life of others.
In the end, through science and power of our natural health, we become free even to be human again – in new and exciting ways, in this remarkable and unprecedented time in our natural history.