I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it must have been like to be a caveman. Not so much in terms of the primitivist “I hate hate civilization” angle, where I’ve been trying to re-construct their social organization or talk about their ecological footprint. Something much more elemental than that. What did it feel like – from the inside-out – to be a caveman? What did they think about? What did they believe?

The reason I am interested in these questions is that I share a mythological image of the caveman common to our culture (whether it’s accurate or not), of him being this sort of pure unadulterated “authentic” human – someone untouched by all the poisons of later civilization, history, ideology and the rest of the detritus that we have collected as humans, the pack-rats of history.

Inherent in that vision though, I recognize the assumption that in thinking of the caveman as this “pure” form of the human being, that I see myself as an impure version. I see this as a rather dangerous assumption, the evidence for which needs only to be verified by looking at the massive self-hatred and personal destruction that so much of the world seems to be involved in. Towards that end then, my experiments in reconstructing some image of our lost caveman ancestor is not a hopelessly romantic retreat back into the past as it is a rescue mission: go back in time to retrieve a treasure that was lost to us somewhere along the way, in order to make our current lives better, in order to rehabilitate how we see ourselves and one another.

And I choose the term “caveman” knowing full well it’s awkward politically incorrect cartoonish implications, and use that as a constant reminder that what I am doing is actually a fairly distorted caricature of reality, rather than reality itself. But I also just like the image of the club-wielding animalistic brute to be the one that we build on – because part of what we’re looking for here is not only the pure or authentic human, but also that crucial difference, that strange circumstance that separated mankind from other types of animals.

Using that image of primitive man as a hulking brute then as our springboard, I like to imagine how a group of cavemen would react to the types of conversations that typically occur on my website. On a recent post over at PopOcculture.com, Ted Heistman, author of the blog “Free Range Organic Human” left a comment about primitive societies, in which he pointed out that “They don’t have celebrities or even writers.” And adding later that “To live in a primitive hunter gatherer society requires almost no ego.” I tend to agree and I think in some sense, it might be impossible to communicate to our imaginary caveman friends some of the ideas we talk about here.

Especially since so much of what we talk about has to do with such abstractions as the nature of reality and consciousness, language and even magic. Actually, magic may be one of the areas we’d have in common with them. Chances are they could teach us far more about it as well, since in my imaginary view of cavemen, the world to them was nothing but magic. Nothing else existed. Rocks, trees, rivers, animals, wind, people – all of them were magic. Today we call this animism, although anthropologists usually go into something similar to the definition we find on Wikipedia wherein animism consists of “personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) endowed with reason, intelligence and volition inhabit ordinary objects as well as animate beings, and govern their existence.” But for our purposes, I think it’s a lot easier and probably more accurate to just say: everything is magic.

From that base starting point, I know a lot of us raised in a scientific-materialist paradigm would start sweating and hyperventilating and arguing with our caveman friend that, “Magic isn’t real!” But remember, we’re not talking about what you believe here. We’re talking about our caveman, who just came home from the hunt. We want to know how he might have looked at the world. To him, everything was definitely magic. There’s no doubt about it.

But those of us who don’t think magic is real can still have a meaningful back and forth with our hairy , thick-skulled imaginary companion. If we think that magic isn’t real, and he thought that everything was magic, then that probably means that the two of us live in almost entirely different worlds. And if his world was all magic and we don’t believe in magic at all, then that means that we don’t believe in his world at all. Or, put another way, we force him to live in our world, simply because we don’t believe his could have even existed in the first place, because magic isn’t real.

Which leads me to wonder if the caveman would be so quick to dismiss the world we live in. If we brought him back to our time, sort of like in that movie Encino Man with Brendan Frazier as a thawed out caveman, wouldn’t he see our world as being filled with magic? The magic of television, of cars, or giant steel birds roaring by overhead. So it’s probably true that he wouldn’t simply drop his beliefs about the world, just as most of us are unable to drop our beliefs in the world.

The crucial difference, I think, though is that I don’t think our caveman friend would tell us that the achievements of science aren’t real. After all, I think it’s science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke who famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Except, from our perspective, magic just isn’t real.

And that leads me to one of my main questions that I’ve been pondering for several months now: to the primitive mind, to the so-called authentic human, is there any such thing as real and unreal? Can you imagine a couple of cavemen sitting around a campfire debating long into the night about the ontological substructures of the cosmos? Cause I sure can’t. It just seems absurd. But not because I don’t believe that what we think of as “primitive” people aren’t intelligent. Quite the opposite. I think they were probably smart enough and in touch with reality in such a way that they would find it not relevant or meaningful to debate it.

What they would probably do instead is sit around the campfire and tell one another stories. Maybe they would be tales of the hunt, or lessons from a particularly hard winter, or maybe a vision they had once when they hadn’t eaten for many days and collapsed in the forest, or possibly a dream they had the night before.

Which leads me to another question that I’d like to ask if I ever meet a couple cavemen someplace: if everything was magic, and there were no questions about what was real and what wasn’t (simply because everything was equally real and valid), then how did they navigate the differences between the experiences of individual humans? That is, how did they build consensus reality?

Imagine it this way: after a long night of debating cosmological philosophy, our two caveman buddies fall asleep by the fire. When they wake up, the fire has gone cold. They yawn and stretch their arms and the first caveman says to the second: “Last night I became a deer and ran through the forest.”

But the second caveman doesn’t buy that. “No you didn’t. I was up really late and I saw you sleeping the whole time. All you did was lay there and snore.”

Something tells me a conversation like this would never happen among our club-wielding compatriots. It doesn’t ring true with the little mythical image I have of primitive people in my head. My intuition says no, that this is a much later problem we developed for ourselves. My intuition suggest that after the first caveman said, “Last night I became a deer and ran through the forest,” the second caveman would say something like, “Well last night I dreamt that I was running with a pack of wolves and we were trying to bring down a deer.”

In other words, in the primitive paradise that exists in my head, no one disbelieved anyone else’s unique experience. Because everything was magic. And if every thing was magic, then every person was magic, and every person’s experience was magic, and therefore real. There was, at some point, no such thing as the unreal.

Whether or not this really holds true with what cavemen experienced, I couldn’t tell you cause I’m not a caveman. But if a caveman came up to me and told me this was the case, I would have no choice but to believe him. What I mean by that is that I have been getting better and better at respecting other people’s experiences – especially in areas which traditionally violate consensus reality: such as psychedelic experiences, the paranormal, occult, spiritual, and transpersonal or archetypal psychological events.

I have also been doing my best to try out this alleged caveman worldview wherein everything is not only always real, but everything is also always magic. A slightly more scaled-down version of this (which the industrious among you might like to try out provisionally and see how it fits) would be to re-define “reality” as that which can be experienced. It’s a very simple definition which is likely to irk scientific types who are accustomed to ranking experiences based on repeatability, peer verification and the ranking of certain states of consciousness above others. We say that a bus is real because we can all get on the bus and ride it. But we say that a dream bus isn’t real because only one of us can ride it and we like to chauvinistically favor non-dreaming states of consciousness for some stupid reason.

The re-definition of reality as “that which can be experienced” opens up some other fun questions for us to explore. What does it mean to experience something? When we touch something, is that somehow considered better or more “real” than if we only look at it or smell it? Not usually – unless maybe the something being touched is dog poop, which then it might be better not to smell it or touch it, but to look at it as we pick it up with a plastic bag. But the point is: if we don’t rank our physical senses above one another, then how come we rank them above our non-physical senses? Under the heading non-physical senses, I would include perceptual activities thinking, imagining, dreaming, feeling, intuition, etc.

We tend to draw a thick conceptual dividing line between perception and cognition nowadays though. But how fair is that really? When you imagine your girlfriend or boyfriend or your parents or kids, what is it that you imagine about them? Probably, you imagine things like how they look, how they feel, how they smell. That is, our cognition is irrevocably linked to our cognition. An even better way of looking at it might be to say that thinking, feeling and imagining are sensory processes, just like touching, tasting, smelling, seeing or hearing. All our senses are are methods of interacting with objects in the world.

There’s a nice quote I found a while back by psychedelic author Daniel Pinchbeck where he is referencing the work of mystic Rudolf Steiner, one of his heros. Pinchbeck explains that:

“Thinking, for him, is a part of reality - as much a part of reality as any physical object. He points out that we have no right to consider a plant’s ability to produce leaves, roots, and blossoms as separate from the thoughts we have about that plant. It may be that our thoughts about the plant are as much a property of that plant as its blossoms, stems, and leaves.”

So then, if reality is anything that can be experienced, we’ve suddenly been given license to experience reality in lots of different ways – all of which are equally real, equally magical. You might argue something like, “Well, a pink monkey riding a unicorn through outer-space, chased by angry snakes drive semi-trucks and wearing red hats isn’t real because we can’t actually experience it.” But can’t we though? As I said that, didn’t you just experience an image of it happen internally in your mind’s eye? I bet you did, but you might just not want to admit it. Because if you admit that thoughts are as real as anything else, then it might turn out that you are just as responsible for your thoughts as you are for your actual actions in the conventionally-defined “real world.” But that’s a whole other ball-game best left for another time…

So then what did we learn today? We learned that (1) everything is magic, and (2) everything is real. There’s no such thing as unreal. That belief stems from a false dividing line drawn between perception and cognition, or external senses and internal thoughts and feelings. All of it exists. We know because we can experience it. And the range of ways in which we experience things is quite diverse. And I believe that in order to have the fullest experience of life, it would make sense for us to engage reality on as many levels and in as many ways as we can imagine. Because everything that we can imagine is real. Or at least, that’s what the caveman told me…

[Listen to this piece as a podcast here]