Agrarian Society

The Hindu
 Divide life into certain stages
 What are called the Ashamas
 The first is called Brahmacarya
 The second Grehasta
 And the third Vanaprastha
 Brahmacarya
 Means the stage of the student, the apprenticeship
 Grehasta the stage of the householder
 And Vanaprastha
 The stage of the forest dweller
 This is related
 To the cultural history of early India
 Before we have agrarian communities
 We have a hunting culture
 Which is on the move
 In a hunting culture
 Every male
 Knows the whole culture
 There is no division of labor
 And the holy man of the hunting culture
 Is of course called a Shaman
 A Shaman
 Is a
 A realized man
 A man who knows the inner secret
 He's seen through the gate
 And he finds it by going away alone into the forest
 And cutting himself off
 From the tribe
 That is to say from social conditioning
 And he goes maybe for a long period into the forest
 And comes back
 He's found out who he is
 And he sure as who he was told he was
 But as hunting cultures settled into agrarian patterns of life
 What do they do?
 They build a village
 And around the village they set up a stockade
 Which is known as the Pale
 And the village is always of course standing at crossroads
 And there you get in an agrarian society a division of labor
 And the division of labor comprises four
 In Medieval Europe we call them Lord spiritual
 Lords temporal
 Commons
 And Serves
 In India they are
 Brahmins
 Chatria
 That means fighter
 Vaicher
 Merchants
 Traders
 Chutara
 Labour's
 So, you've got the priests
 The warriors
 The merchants
 And the laborers
 Division of labor
 The four Sections of town
 So, the four basic castes
 So, when you are born you are born into a caste
 And your duty as a Grehasta or householder
 Is to fulfill your caste function
 And to bring up a family
 When you've done that
 You go back to the forest
 Back to the hunting culture
 And you drop your role
 And you become nobody
 A shaman again
 So a Hindu calls one who does this
 Ashramana which is of course the same word as Shaman
 And the Chinese called him a Shia
 A Shaman is an immortal
 Why immortal?
 Because it's only the role that's mortal
 The big front
 The persona
 The one who you really are
 The common man that is to say the man who is common to us all
 Which you could call the son of man
 That's the real self
 That's the guy who's putting on the big act
 And of course, he has no name
 Nobody can put a finger on him
 Because
 You can't touch the tip of the finger with the tip of the finger