Transsubstantiation

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In your book, you're kind of casting yourself back in time to try to imagine what it would be like to think like somebody in the paleolithic or neolithic. Just go back a little bit and think about transubstantiation. You know, t does the ah, the wafer, and and and wine turn into the body and blood of christ? Now to day, in a post enlightenment or enlightenment world view, we might say, ok, it's a metaphor. They just kind of take it metaphorically. It's a metaphorical truth. But what you're talking about, back when this was a debate amongst theologians, they weren't thinking of it like that.

Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, natural history, agriculture, medical law and ethics, Charles Foster, in Being a Human, makes an audacious attempt to feel a connection with 45,000 years of human history. He experiences the Upper Paleolithic era by living in makeshift shelters without amenities in the rural woods of England. He tests his five impoverished senses to forage for berries and roadkill and he undertakes shamanic journeys to explore the connection of wakeful dreaming to religion. For the Neolithic period, he moves to a reconstructed Neolithic settlement. Finally, to explore the Enlightenment, he inspects Oxford colleges, dissecting rooms, cafes, and art galleries. He finds his world and himself bizarre and disembodied, and he rues the atrophy of our senses, the cause for much of what ails us. This glorious, fiercely imaginative journey from our origins to a possible future ultimately shows how we might best live on earth — and thrive.