Why the Untethered Collective

Where the Practices Came From

Between two hundred thirty six thousand and three hundred thirty five thousand years ago, Homo naledi, an early human or perhaps pre-human, carried their dead deep into the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, dug holes in total darkness, and buried them. They made engravings on the walls.

Why would they do that? To protect the bodies from animals? To honor a life? To mark the difference between the living and the dead? Was there some belief in an afterlife? We will probably never know. But the question behind the act is no less powerful today than it was three hundred thousand years ago.

Meditation as a practice for spiritual growth has been around for thousands of years, and the word has collected a lot of meanings along the way. Five thousand years before Christ, hunter gatherers were doing something like it inside shamanic practice. Two thousand years after that, Vedic priests used it to go deeper into themselves and the universe. Walk forward through history and you find it central to Taoism and to Buddhism, and later practiced by Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics as contemplative prayer. Flash forward and you can buy mindfulness gummies and listen to ambient music infused with delta brainwave frequencies.

Hundreds of traditions and perhaps millions of teachers have taught the one right way to meditate. Before we evaluate any of them, it is worth asking a much more basic question, which is what this whole site is for.