No one taught me to eat when hungry or react when in danger. These were gifts from nature for survival. Why didn’t nature/almighty equip us with meditation from birth to ensure the same for a healthy mind?

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Nature did, indeed, provide you with all the tools needed to begin a meditative journey. The problem is, you’re lazy. It’s not your fault. Nature also gave you the tools to run down a deer. You see, before we had sophisticated hunting techniques, scholars believe we did something called persistence hunting. Basically, we tire our quarry out by running longer than they can.

It’s a thing because of something that only humans and horses can do effectively. Sweat. This lets us cool down while exercising like no other animal can. So we simply keep up with the caribou until it drops of exhaustion and there’s dinner.

When was the last time you raced a caribou down until it couldn’t move any more?????? Exactly.

Modern life has removed everything from us that our survival used to utterly rely on. And it did that many thousands of years ago. Farming is like, way easier than running down deer.

What I like about persistence hunting is just how democratic it is. Woman, man, leader, follower, anyone could learn the technique and utilize it to bring food and plenty to your tribe. Patriarchy likely couldn’t happen until after humans settled down and this running business was for the birds.

With farming came inequality and well, that’s the real story of the Garden of Eden. God made a world in which we only had to listen to Him so as to rule over and with, and a third party found it ridiculously easy to exploit our weak points to get us to believe we can displace Him as the arbiter of good and evil.

Remember, Cain was a farmer. I’m not saying the Jews could have understood how humans thousands of years before their time lived, but they were able to see deeply how people lived and died. And in their foundational myth, agriculture rooted all evil. It was eating the fruit of a particular tree. And then the brother who farmed whose gifts God was displeased with.

There wasn’t any explanation for why Abel’s gifts were prized over Cain’s, so we can surmise that ancient peoples would have understood that shepherding was more noble than farming and this made farmers less trustworthy. Shepherding was closer to what God was trying to teach Adam, farming is something that would have only been discovered if man were to develop his own tech instead of relying on God. Abel would have been able to surmise that God wanted the choicest out of his flock, Cain wouldn’t have been able to work that out. As a result, God was displeased, but it was Cain that decided to kill. Go back and read it, the whole story is less than five pages long. There’s not a lot of detail to go by. You are expected to surmise.

If you look at a combination of history, human nature, and scripture, you can easily realize that man’s ability to connect with God has always been with us. Meditation, prayer weren’t invented. They rely on deep, evolutionarily-given brain pathways. Meditation is, in fact, one of the easiest things one can do. It requires no special tools, no knowledge, no anything really. You just sit quietly and watch your thoughts. Anybody can do that.

What you seem to be talking about is finding “success” with meditation. Discovering the jhanas. It’s true, this stuff wasn’t immediately germane.

Or was it? Ancient peoples each regularly develop the same general kind of spirituality, that which we call shamanism. Absent any kind civilized learning or education, shamanic practice is the form spiritual practitioners wind up discovering. For this to be a thing, it has to be something discoverable by a single person. It’s a real version of the chicken and egg argument atheists have been using to try to discredit religion for decades. If somebody has to have the knowledge of shamanism to each a new shaman, who taught the first shaman?

Shamanic practice is hardcore even for me. So I don’t directly do that. But I’m well aware that it involves combining both meditation and ritual into a form of spirituality more powerful than any I’ve directly witnessed. It’s so potent that only a handful of people in any given culture found themselves the shamans of their people. This is the sort of thing where the real abilities manifest. The closer you are to tribal, primitive existence, the more you need God’s guidance to survive.

Spirituality wasn’t some milquetoast wannabe ego-boost like it is today. Finding water, knowing what to eat and what to leave alone, finding appropriate ways to solve political problems, without Godly help, humans would have never gotten past our primate forbears. God truly made us in His image.

What I do do that’s just refined shamanism, is to trust my gut intuition. Humans have a innate sense of truth that we tend to shut off for, you guessed it, ego reasons. There’s a vast body of culture, knowledge, and folk understanding that teaches us to trust in ourselves as vessels of the Lord. It’s this gut feeling that created shamanic practice, which is just a person realizing they can trust that intuition ultimately.

A healthy mind can be yours if you can ignore the ego and all of the technological sophistication that tells you not to. You’ll find your spiritual journey awaiting and there’s nothing like a spiritual journey to cure the sick mind of it’s endless ills.