THE TURTLE
Gyromon Level 2 is animistic, tribalistic, and mystical. In this world of Turtles, we tend to have the first evidence of human bonding, the sense of a kindred spirit, that “I’m someone because I belong to a certain clan or certain tribe.” During the Ice Age, the world became overpopulated. There were more humans per acre than there had ever been before. We had groups in the Level 1 system beginning to bump into other groups, with a sense of competition for niches starting to appear. Suddenly a clan, which is loosely structured, solidifies into a tribe of, say, four to five hundred people, so that the previous clan can now survive in the midst of competition with other clans. So one of the Life Conditions changes that led to the shift from Level 1 to Level 2 had to do with territoriality and access to resources.
Now, at the same time, a mutation occurred to awaken in the brain the first real ability to assign cause and effect. This was the first sense of the metaphysical. In the Scrapper mind, events seem to be scattered, each one unto itself, without much predictability. But, for example, in Africa, if the moon is full and the cow dies, the Turtle mind connects the two events, one causing the other. So the awakening of the metaphysical system, together with the capacity to work more firmly in a team arrangement, occurred in the transition from the Dawn People (Scrappers) to the Mystical People (Turtles), precipitated by the changing Life Conditions that occurred during the Ice Age, about fifty thousand years ago.
It seems that the emergence of the capacity for bonding and working together, would literally improve one’s chances for survival. Because these stages of existence, or meme levels, represent bio-psycho-social systems, they indicate the evolutionary emergence of biological and physical capacities and abilities. For example, we know that the level of the brain chemical oxytocin, which has various health-giving benefits, is higher when humans eat in a group. And so eating together, breaking bread together, feasts of various kinds, all raise the oxytocin level in the brain and improve survival. Another thing that developed at this time was whatever it is in the brain that chemically enables the person to hear inner voices, the voices of spirits. The Turtle meme is heavily laden with such so-called right brain tendencies as heightened intuition, emotional attachments to places and things, and a mystical sense of cause and effect. |
