| Continued...
Now let us say that a anicent tribe in Africa had added mind-expanding mushrooms to their diet and had experienced drug induced visions about heavens and hells (and other things) which resulted in an early type religion. They could not see the microscopic pores and so could not plant and harvest the mushroom and depended on finding them in the open African fields, and noticed that they grew in the damp dung of cattle, which were wild at that time, and so they assumed that their sacred mushrooms were a gift from the cow, that resulted in them protecting cows and learning about herding, which advanced the knowledge of the tribes involved. Even today in Inidia the cow is thought of as a sacred animal to be protected but they no longer recall why. Anyway after generations of doing that ritual the process became part of the gentic make up of the human race and the visionary ablity was passed on as part of the gene pool, so that after time people would no longer need magic plants to experience their newly manifested imagination which became the evoultionary effect of that orignal cause - the religious vision quest.
And then the race moved northward (etc) into India and the middle east where such mushrooms were no longer part of the new environment and so they over time forgot about such useage. None the less they did maintian and continue the rituals of seeking visions for religious purposes.
Nowadays it is not uncommon for a new idea to pop into a persons mind or to formulate in their imagination. Those ideas have resulted in a number of inventions and concepts which have been the guiding factor for human progress and culture. |