How Simple: Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint

As I've tried to emphasize in this new venture of mine, I owe a lot to others. I intend to make good on it. Nothing disappoints me more than to see other bloggers out there ripping stuff off, presenting it as their own.

In truth, very little of anything is new; I mean: we're talking about ancient wisdom here, long lost to most of the modern world, whether by ignorance, stupidity or downright arrogance (that last one described me). The simple truth is that modernity is a double-edged sword. While our 3 millionish years of evolution adapted us marvelously to our surroundings, lots of people died very young lots of the time. Those who managed to avoid early death passed on their genes, and so on.

But today, through modern miracles of science, medicine and technology, we have the ability to overcome such natural selection. In essence, we can now preserve the "more feeble" among ourselves well into old age, so the less adept survive to pass on their genes. That's a good thing. Human life is precious. It's everything to us, and thankfully, we also evolved a conscience. We should treat others just as well as we'd like to be treated. Social wisdom doesn't get more fundamental than that, and it's probably for that reason it has been so aptly referred to as: The Golden Rule.

We make everything too hard and complicated. And, I think, owing to our propensity to hierarchical "authority" structures, many among us strive for "the easy route" through seeking out "authority" rather than actually thinking for ourselves. But those adept at placing themselves in positions of authority have an urge to remain in authority. These are the sorts of people who seek out lofty positions in academia, politics, and even religious institutions. Often, they promote their positions of authority by giving you just exactly what you expect, i.e., they complicate, confuse, and obfuscate, such that you come away with the conviction that you really need them.

I don't think you do, and if you were to get a simple blueprint for how to live as a primitive human being in a modern world, you just might begin to realize that you need no authority beyond the authority of your marvelously intelligent and capable mind. What you do need is the support, love, friendship, respect, and mutual value exchange of a very small circle of friends, family, and trading partners. It's well documented that hunter-gatherers existed in groups of around 25-30 people. When groups became larger than that, they would split. I speculate that the reason for that number is because each individual can make a real contribution to the survival of the group, be integral and influential, never compromising individuality in favor of the collective. Moreover, in such small groups, it's far more difficult to skate by.

With all that now under our belts, I hope it puts you in exactly the right frame of mind to go read Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint.

The Primal Blueprint is a set of simple instructions (the blueprint) that allows you to control how your genes express themselves in order to build the strongest, leanest, healthiest body possible, taking clues from evolutionary biology (that’s the primal part).

I really like how Mark actually gives you the blueprint from two perspectives, the primitive and the modern. Once you see the total, almost axiomatically logical blueprint from the primitive perspective, the modern becomes forehead-slapping obvious. See if you don't agree.

And when you've got that down and integrated, he also has The Primal Eating Guide.