Trace in Space - Introduction

1. Introduction

Introduction

    The relationship humans have with space has changed since pre-history. The amount of attention we pay to it is weakening, because we operate in a very different arena today.

    We all learn our first personal lesson about space when as infants we begin to crawl. We discover by that great teacher, pain, that we can’t occupy the same space at the same time as our baby sister when we both want the ball. We bang our heads on chair legs.

    That part of it is easy enough. All humans learn it or suffer continuing bodily damage.

    It has a wider form, in the old-mind understanding. We need to see that our relationship with space lingers on in the old mind and is perceived as one of life and death for deep, near-spiritual reasons. When the tribe sets off through the desert to find better conditions, everyone in it knows they’d better get it right, because that environment is continually offering hostility as well as succour. This brings with it a profound requirement of environmental understanding. Native people relate to the earth.

The old mind, when used on this website, is a term that refers to the deep, pre-historic impulses that still linger in the mind of human beings, and affect us in subtle, ingrained and non-verbal ways. They surface in many forms, explored by increasing numbers of modern writers – Lillian Glass in He Says, She Says, John Gray in the Mars and Venus books, and, most recently, Dr. Luan Brizendine in the recent book, The Female Mind. The old mind is our prehistoric wiring.

Space is the enemy when a human being is located in one place and for purposes of survival needs to be in another. If the desert intervenes between here, where we are, and good drinking water, where we need to be, that’s serious to the point of being deadly. Within the over-arching environmental context there lie other subsets of meaning, such as the role played by light and dark and also by the configurations up and down, left and right.

    The idea is not that space is bad, or the enemy. There are good things in space, too, not only bad ones. Space merely contains the enemy, along with a lot else.

    The enemy is anything that might hurt.

    The human brain has a profound need to create order and stay away from chaos. That profound need is part of the hard wiring. In the old mind, chaos is perceived to come out of darkness – that is, it brings the unknown. Chaos comes from unseen sharp edges, because they destroy the integrity of our flesh and do to us we-don’t-know-what. Chaos is perceived to wait for us when we’re injured and the tribe leaves us behind. Deep in the old mind is our belief that if chaos is coming, it will come to us across space.

    It’s consequently no wonder that there’s so much emphasis in the brain wiring to offer the best possible visual capacity. The eyes assess space, looking for irregularities, the unexpected, the causes of chaos.

    Going back into pre-history, stand-up comedians must’ve had a hard time finding material. For a long time our preoccupation was just survival. This is the framework that accounts for so much of the old mind activity behind our subliminal reactions to websites and other visuals, too, such as are found in advertising.