A commenter sent me a link about another South American ancient civilization that has been found by flyover photos.

I am not sure I can define mantra thinking, but what occurred to me was another example of it. We keep finding dead civilizations. We keep studying each one in detail to find out What It Has To Teach Us. We never do the Mantra-like thing: We don’t step back, look at all those discoveries as trees, and see the forest.

And the forest, the big idea, the Occam’s Razor, is this:

How do we PREVENT ourselves from BECOMING a civilization whose CORPSE must be found by a uniquely advanced one in some indefinite and unlikely future? That is what dead “civilizations” have to teach us first of all.

We are actually digging around in the ruins of an old “civilization’s” corpse to find predictions of what will happen to US in 2012 A.D. It has not occurred to ONE PERSON fascinated by this to wonder why this Great Wisdom had not one word to say about the period of that civilization’s OWN TOTAL DESTRUCTION, which happened long ago.

Before he drools in awe over the Ancient Wisdom of dead societies, the Mantra Thinker asks first WHY THEY ARE DEAD.

All dead civilizations have brown skins. That is what is called an observation. Observation is he basis of Western thought.

I want to know WHY this is. Those who study the Great Dead Wisdom talk exclusively about the Wisdom, never about the Dead part.