Intro to Paleo

Paleo means ancient. It is more than just a way of eating, it includes ways of perceiving and behaving that align us with the lifeways and consciousness of those who came before us.

From the early 1970s to early 2000s, powerful books opened access to primitive perspectives and skills:

The Tracker

The Tracker, by Tom Brown, Jr., introduces the practical wisdom of an Apache Scout and fully functional primitive hunter, Stalking Wolf, who taught him how to move through the world like a natural animal—using psychic and spiritual abilities domesticated people suppress. The book ignited an explosion of interest in practical primitive skills. A later book, Tom Brown's Field Guide to Wilderness Survival sums up what he learned thematically, as an organized curriculum.

The Tender Carnivore

The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, by Paul Shepard, summarizes what is known about how primitive people worldwide live and cooperate: functioning as an emotionally unified social organism. The book became the bible of practical environmentalism: Understanding what reality our physical, social, and psychological structures are optimized for enables us to reunite humanimals with nature successfully. We are a special animal. How we functioned for thousands of years, living in small tribes, still influences most of our activities.

Journey to Ixtlan

Journey to Ixtlan, by Carlos Castaneda, demonstrates how a metaphysical lineage thousands of years old retrains primitive perspectives and activates ancient human abilities in present-day participants. Metaphysics is what is beyond physics, ways of behaving that recognize and align with patterns beyond the obvious, that seem to have magical results. This native tradition is actually more scientific than most modern science, and uses only a single instrument (the human body) to verify its experiments. The book, and others in the series, provides an actionable operating system for regaining full functionality as magical actors. It is used by millions.

We Want to Live

We Want To Live, by Aajonus Vonderplanitz, was the book that launched the paleo carnivore revolution. The author was a starving vegan, dying of cancer, who went out to the desert to fast to death. A group of coyotes befriended him, took him hunting with them, laid a freshly killed rabbit in his lap, and urged him to eat it. He did, became well and strong, and began a ministry of healing with raw animal foods that touched thousands. His other book, The Recipe for Living Without Disease is worth reading as well.

Nourishing Traditions

Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, Mary Enig, et al., summarizes the work of Weston Price, Frances Pottenger, and other nutrition-oriented doctors and contextualizes it with modern food science. Price was a Cleveland dentist who traveled the world in search of perfect teeth and perfect health. He visited most of the world's remaining relic indigenous populations in the 1930s and 1940s and studied them. His research is probably the most important physical anthropology ever conducted. Instead of finding the perfect vegetarian tribe, as he hoped, he found that all the people with perfect health ate heavily of animal foods and ate most or all of them raw. The book is also a cookbook that covers healthy traditional recipes from all over the world, including raw and fermented ones. It rounds out history and practicality with insights into how profit-seeking has perverted food, and how "food science" has betrayed and concealed actual science.

Healing with Whole Foods

Healing with Whole Foods, by Paul Pitchford, made the first coherent effort to make Taoist food science accessible to Western audiences and cross reference it with modern science. Food is one of the branches of Traditional Chinese Medicine, over 3000 years old. With this book in hand, hundreds of thousands of people realized that they could heal themselves of modern diseases by using diet deliberately, and did.

Light on the Yoga Sutras

Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, by B.K.S. Iyengar, translated the ancient Vedic manual for enlightenment for modern audiences. With the arrival of Yogananda in the West in 1920, interest in Yoga ignited. The possibility that one could shut up, stop thinking, and do something that steadily built a connection to the divine was pursued by millions of Americans. Iyengar was an Indian Yoga master, to whom thousands of Americans traveled to train with. His book was not a manual on how to do Yoga, but why. It was a mirror that held up regular civilized thinking, perceiving, and behaving as a disease that needed to be healed, and showed how to heal it.

Born To Run

Christopher McDougall documents recent encounters with the Tarahumara indians, a tribe that evaded European conquest by running away, whose oldest members routinely run fifty miles or more at a time and whose champions can run three hundred miles or more, straight. The book makes obvious what primitive people were capable of doing and we still are, covering modern ultramarathons in rugged country and the people who run them. Get it here.

What we've lost is what we are looking for. By using the skills our ancestors used, we regain access to their perspectives and powers. Start with this guide to Castaneda and associates.