Some of my friends are talking about peak experiences. When looking into the subject, I found Abraham Maslow's statement of surprise that his students reported peak experiences using the same sort of words that famous mystics had used to describe life-altering moments. Besides that, peak experiences were reported at both climactic moments such as reaching the top of a beautiful mountain but also while shaving or doing the dishes. I continue to be interested in the effect of meditation on our ability to notice what we are thinking and accept or reject our thoughts and their associations.
On our recent trip, I was checking email and became aware of a book by the historian Stephanie Coontz. I had already benefited from her book "The Way We Never Were", comparing the realities of America's 1950's with myths and stereotypes. The book "Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage" by Coontz hit hard in the first chapter. I knew that marriage had for centuries been more about economics and wealth than about love between two people. But Coontz emphasizes a different angle. Today, we accord our leaders authority because they get votes. But in many former places, the question was about parentage and therefore marriage.
So, I was struck by the realization that we use votes, which makes sense but we might have used "blood lines", real or alleged lines of descent. It doesn't take many generations before we have only claims of descent, whether they are about human ancestors or claims of divine descent.
Prof. Coontz went on to strike me again: monogamy has its uses and its claims but some peoples have shown a preference for multiple wives for one husband and here and there multiple husbands for one wife. She explains that when "blood lines" mean power and wealth and security, casting aspersions on an opponent's descent or the correctness with which his marriage or his parent's marriage was carried out (long ago, of course) can be an important political move.
She hit me again with examples of young women, sometimes as toddlers, being given in marriage, virtually as property, of course. In other cases, young women who saw the disadvantages of being married (and owned) arranged to marry a man who was already dead. Some managed to be officially married to a neighbor's foot or to a dog.
While realizing how many ideas, concepts and stories we humans have kept close to our hearts and believed in and lived by, I found this TED talk by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who emphasizes that 70,000 years ago, humans didn't matter much. Now they matter tremendously and he characterizes the reasons for their emergence as their ability to believe in "fictions".
I have had a lot to think about.
--
