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How are you. It's nice to meet you. Nice day isn't it. This is the stuff of everyday conversation. But before we go ahead and write off these seemingly pointless conversational artifacts, it occurs to me that there might be more to this than meets the eye.

This particular train of thought has its origin from a person i know who is prone to responding to "Its nice to meet you" with "How can you know that yet? I might be an ogre." That's Scorpios for you. But he might have a point, which is that perhaps we might bring some more consciousness to the purpose of such language.

Prior to big city life, it is generally thought that strangers would have not been a welcome sight. Jared Diamond writing in his book Guns Germs and Steel talks about how pre-agriculture hunter-gatherers would have lived at population densities rarely over one person per ten square miles. Living in small bands of 20-50 people on 500 square miles or so, meant that we encountered strangers rather infrequently. And when we did, the chance that their intentions were good was probably less than even.

Im also reading Danny Vendramini's book Them and Us, which posits a theory that humanity's extraordinary rapid evolution from the 100kya Skhul-Qafzeh hominids into modern humans was caused by severe predation by other branches of the primate tree. Predation to the point of near extinction. Science tells us that the DNA of the entire human race contains less genetic variation than a random group of 150 chimps. This indicates that we as humans started from a very small group of ancestors, and that one possible explanation for this is that we were hunted to near extinction.

The theory (while not exactly endorsed by the consensus of evolutionary biologists) does offer intriguing insight into the human experience of fear of other, in-group formation, as well as an interesting explanation for anyone that notices an underlying low level anxiety about being preyed upon. As kids being scared of monsters outside the window.

Polyvagal Theory tells us that our limbic neuroception detector is interested in one thing, and one thing only: is this person in front of me safe or are they not safe. So when we say Hi how are you, probably what we are really saying is, Um, are you going to eat me? Depending on how they respond, using both words and non-verbals, tells us whether they are friend or foe.

What this all means to me, is that the work AR is attempting to do, is actually a miracle to to even be occurring at all. And as we struggle with our practice, for example falling back to old habits at times, maybe we need to be a bit more patient with ourselves, and remember that we are collectively only just beginning to rewrite a brand new story of humanity.

Image credit: Pixabay