Why "Ancient Futures"?

Yogic insights for worldly predicaments

My aim is to explore how ancient wisdom – particularly from yoga and similar traditions – might offer us guidance for facing the future.

I don’t presume to have solutions to all the world’s problems. However, some of those afflicting our minds seem remarkably unchanged over thousands of years. This is not to neglect modern remedies, or scientific insights, but to think more holistically about how to live.

The title of this newsletter dates back to my youth in the 1990s, combining Terence McKenna’s Archaic Revival with Helena Norberg-Hodge's reflections in Ancient Futures on “Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World”.

I first encountered the former’s musings via this musical performance with Space Time Continuum, which begins by declaring:

"History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew..."

I’m not sure that McKenna’s “Great Horned Mushroom Goddess” from “the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago” has the answer – not least since he raved about the need for a “heroic dose” of psilocybin, despite himself having such a bad trip that it put him off mushrooms (according to his brother).

Still, the basic idea of reviving connections to the natural world that we once felt part of instead of above seems self-evidently useful. And perhaps McKenna’s own story is a metaphor for pitfalls in styling oneself as a psychedelic prophet. I once quoted this line of his in my memoir, A Rough Guide to the Dark Side (about which more here): “The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed.”

Norberg-Hodge sounded no less evangelical, but also more grounded. “It may seem absurd that a ‘primitive’ culture on the Tibetan Plateau could have anything to teach our industrial society,” she wrote. “Yet we need a baseline from which to better understand our own complex culture. In Ladakh I have seen progress divide people from the earth, from one another, and ultimately from themselves. I have seen happy people lose their serenity when they started living according to our norms.”

Her book sought to promote a more sustainable balance between the local and the global, as well as other polarities such as “urban and rural, male and female, culture and nature”, and ultimately East and West – or South and North. “Another way is possible,” she concluded. “We think of ourselves as ‘having everything,’ and are surprised when young people turn to drugs or strange gurus to fill the void in their lives.” Instead, we need to get in touch with our interdependence.

I first visited Ladakh in 1998 and also found it inspiring. It was the start of a journey that took some strange twists, from drug-fuelled idealism as a foreign correspondent to disillusioned adventures with Balkan gangsters. Eventually, I wound up in a yoga class – then back in India for multiple trips, before an M.A. in yoga studies.

I’m the author of The Truth of Yoga, and have been writing about yoga philosophy for more than a decade. Part of its traditional message is that death holds no sting, and can be faced with equanimity. In the meantime, it gives us some frameworks for causing less harm. I look forward to what might emerge here.