Coming Home to the Pleistocene Quotes

“The health of a society is a measure of its freedom from stress, individual suffering, psychopathology, tyranny, and ecological dysfunction as a result of straying from that basic ancestral form.”
― Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene

“Art should return to its roots, to cosmology, to rite, and to ceremony. The religious nature of art is its true meaning. Modern art's commitment to "emotion" and "feeling" or to abstract principles of design is, by Pleistocene standards, a sacrilegious act, just as narcotics belong not in a recreational but in a religious setting. In most small-scale societies there is regular dialogue on divinatory and dream experience that gets translated into art.”
― Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene

“Our world does not make us; nor do we make ourselves; we are the continuing creation of the interaction between our organic structure and the way we shape the world around us. It’s possible to do it badly. It’s also possible to do it well. We are an epigenetic phenomenon: our development is elaborated continuously during our entire lifetimes as it has been down through the ages.”
― Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene