Situational awareness: A conversation at the Rift Valley

‘The traffic is dangerous in Kenya,’ Iris says. ‘The police are better at enforcing the rules now, but young drivers are over-confident and the cars are fast and the roads are bad.  Pedestrians and cyclists are unprotected. But Africa is booming. They used to say Africa’s a sinking continent. That is not true anymore. It is a rising continent. Of course, there are costs but know, Africa is coming.’

Within an hour we reach the Rift Valley. We park at the edge. Iris wants to negotiate about a piece of cloth in a tourist stall.

I walk away to get a free view at the valley. It is the widening trench between the main African Plate and the Nubian or Somali Plate at the eastern side. The plates are slowly drifting from each other. It's not that I can see that. I have to believe the scientists who study tectonic plates.

I stare contemplatively at the valley deep below and the slopes at the other side. Many think that the eastern plate, where I stand, lost its dense forest cover after the rift was formed and that the hominids living here had to survive in more varied landscapes. This forced adjustment might have been the start of humanity.

‘Had enough reflections, Pete?’ Iris, without cloth, calls from before the stall. ‘Let’s go for a drink.’ We find a small terrace. I sit with a view at the valley.

‘Now,’ she says, ‘you still have to tell me what we can learn from simple tribal life.’

‘Did you hear about situational awareness? It’s what our ancestors had and some people are now rediscovering. In the far past they were constantly alert, always aware of details in their natural environment, with all their senses and energy frequencies relating to nature. For them it was a matter of life or death to stay in contact with the environment. We have largely lost this capacity of reacting to subtle influences that prevents more serious diseases and injuries.’

‘I think I recognize that. But go on.’

‘When you are aware of the environment with all your senses and energy frequencies, you will also be aware of what happens in yourself, with all your senses and frequencies. You can immediately react to coming up disturbances of your system.’

‘How did we lose that capacity?’

‘It’s the power of imagination. As it kept growing we could think more about others, elsewhere and past and future. That gave us not only better technologies and but also larger, more complex societies. You find that in tribal, nomadic, agricultural and industrial societies.'

'I know,' says Iris.

'To run social complexity,' I say, 'we developed hierarchy and the oppression of one by the other. It was again the power of imagination that made us able to internalize social oppression: we came to oppress unconsciously many natural inclinations within ourselves. We increasingly ignored signs of danger, hunger, pain, discomfort and injury on the one hand and signs of saturation, fulfillment and pleasure at the other.’

‘Wait a minute. I have to digest this. The evolution in a nutshell. Something. Look,’ Iris says pointing at the other side of the Rift, ‘there is a child herding a cow. And a car is coming on that road.’

I watch - giving Iris time to reflect. My temperament wants to go on but I’ve learned to slow down or stop, by trial and error. The cow in the distance seems to be an obstacle on the road. The car, anyway, reduces speed. The moving dust cloud that follows is shrinking.

‘So, then, Pete, do you mean if we imagine things we are thinking?’ Iris says.

‘Well, for sure it is brain activity. And it has grown so much that it overrules our subtle noticing of bodily signals,’ I say. ’Yet, deep down, our situational awareness may be alive in us.’

‘Perhaps the discharge cycle is also still hidden in us,’ Iris says.

‘Discharge cycle?’

‘Yes, among animal biologists it is known that when an animal is out of danger, it takes time to discharge the tensions. You see it sweat, tremble, shake or breathe deeply. The nervous system comes back to where it was before the danger. We call that the discharge cycle. The animal does not oppress its inclination to recover its inner balance immediately.’

 ‘That must be what Peter Levine uses in “somatic experience”, his trauma healing approach. He brings traumatized people back into the old bodily experience of their trauma. The body then takes over and completes what was left unprocessed. Fantastic.’

‘Does it happen just like that?’

‘Well, no. It takes many sessions to make it work.’