Well, I find this pretty interesting, and thanks, Paula. What I find most remarkable is there seems to be complete lack of recognition among the 'Western' or modern 'scientists,' that these ancient systems of knowledge existed or exist within a network of information and wisdom about the relationship of everything to each other. Of course there was much subtlety in the ancient compounds because then there was still a connection to the lifeblood of the earth itself. And people didn't get the cancers they get now because they weren't battling the accumulation of pesticides, the disruption of the food chain by agribiz and were still eating things like real cows that ate grass with bugs that all played a place in building our tissues, our immune systems, instead of soy by-products stripped of all vitality, and antibiotics that then accumulate in our tissues in weird ways....We're the ones that know hardly anything, and we think we can go in there and selectively weed out certain items that 'work' without even having the glimmer of a recogition of the complex balance with nature that many of these systems were masters of.

Now we sit in our isolated shrines of supposedly inert plastics, with our shiny, throwaway stuff, with no close relationships to animals, to the incredible growing things around us, the water and soil.....The hubris of these scientists to me is beyond belief, and this is not even addressing the greed component.

In my recent reading about mucuna, one of the things that delighted me the most, besides discovering that is not so toxic and possibly makes your brain a little better rather than guaranteed degeneration, was the fact that in Central America mucuna is used as a 'fertilizer' crop. They say it gives the land courage. After planting maize for a couple of seasons in a field, instead of then letting it lie fallow for five years, they plant mucuna for two, and somehow it revitalizes the earth so that they can plant maize again. I thought how wonderful that this plant does the same thing in our bodies somehow, gives us courage. And meanwhile our guys are scrambling to find out the special thing that makes mucuna work - gee, it's not really dopamine or serotonin or this or that, but something in there is acting in some unusual way....

Reminds me of a friend of mine who was a doctor and nutritionist in the Peace Corps in the late 70's. He was sent on a mission to Central America to teach the people from a certain area how to have better nutrition. Upon arrival he found that they had an amazing and brilliant way of farming and combining proteins through the crops they grew. The result of his mission was that he studied their ways and brought them back to the US. These people needed nothing that he was to give them.

The old Chinese Qi Gong masters often lived into their 100's. I know of an indigenous people in South America among whom I have friends, who have no contact with technological society. They are brilliant scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, with no written language, and no history of warriors or weapons. They know all about us and choose not to be a part of our world at all. Despite having none of our modern accoutrements, they routinely live into their 100's, and are still climbing around their beautiful mountains at that age. Their philosophy is that the purpose of human life is to protect all other life on this planet. What divinity.

So much for our notion that life among the savages was routinely nasty, brutish, and short. I think we have a lot to reconsider.