Clark Strand

Because he was a scientist and not a shaman, such language was probably as close as Wehr could get to saying outright that we have lost our access to the realm of the ancestors—that we can no longer commune with the dead.

Estrogen and testosterone production bumped upward when early humans brought firelight inside of their caves, convincing their bodies that the days were actually growing longer and that it was time to mate. Human females (who were then most fertile in late summer, when food was plentiful) gradually became capable of reproducing at any time of year.

Before fire, human beings were one species among many - a persistent thread in the evolutionary tapestry that spread here and there through the big picture - but the weren't the point of that picture. There was no sense that Homo sapiens were the endpoint of evolution. There was no sense that, having created them, the world (or God) was effectively done with its creative work.

When we [researchers T. S. Wiley and Bent Formby] asked Dr. Thomas Wehr, the head of the department studying seasonal and circadian rhythmicity at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] in Washington, whether he felt the public had a right to know that on less than 9.5 hours of sleep at night—i.e., in the dark—they will (a) never be able to stop eating sugar, smoking, and drinking alcohol and (b) most certainly develop one of the following conditions: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, infertility, mental illness, and/or premature aging, he said, “Well, yes, they do have a right to know. They should be told; but it won’t change anything. Nobody will ever turn off the lights."

What is electricity but an exercise in human self-importance? It accomplishes nothing else.
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Turn out the lights—and leave them off—and we will experience a consciousness our minds have never known but our bodies still remember.