Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.

vn

The worldwide web of belief and ritual

00:03
You know, culture was born of the ___________, and the imagination -- the imagination as we
know it -- came into being when our ___________ descended from our progenitor, Homo erectus,
and, infused with ___________, began a journey that would carry it to every corner of the
habitable world. For a time, we shared the stage with our distant ___________, Neanderthal, who
clearly had some spark of ___________, but -- whether it was the increase in the size of the brain,
or the development of language, or some other evolutionary catalyst -- we quickly left
Neanderthal gasping for ___________. By the time the last Neanderthal ___________ in Europe,
27,000 years ago, our direct ancestors had already, and for 5,000 years, been crawling into the
belly of the ___________, where in the light of the flickers of tallow ___________, they had brought
into being the great art of the Upper Paleolithic.

Part 2
00:56
And I spent two ___________ in the caves of southwest France with the ___________ Clayton

PREP.VN
Eshleman, who wrote a beautiful book ___________ it into being. But more importantly, it spoke
of a deeper ___________. And the way Clayton put it was this way. He said, "You know, clearly at
some point, we were all of an animal ___________, and at some point, we weren't." And he
viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt, through ___________, to rekindle a
___________ that had been irrevocably lost. So, he saw this art not as ___________ magic, but as
postcards of nostalgia. And viewed in that light, it ___________ on a whole other resonance.

Part 3
01:40
And the most amazing thing about the Upper Paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic ___________,
it ___________ for almost 20,000 years. If these were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very
long ___________ indeed. And it was also the beginning of our ___________, because if you
wanted to distill all of our ___________ since the Paleolithic, it would come down to two
___________: how and why. And these are the slivers of insight upon which ___________ have
been forged. Now, all people share the same raw, ___________ imperatives. We all have children.
We all have to deal with the ___________ of death, the world that waits beyond death, the elders
who fall away into their ___________ experience, and this shouldn't ___________ us, because, after
all, biologists have finally proven it to be true, something that philosophers have always
___________ to be true. And that is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all cut
from the same ___________ cloth. All of humanity, probably, is ___________ from a thousand
people who left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago.

Part 4
02:39
But the corollary of that is that, if we all are brothers and sisters and ___________ the same

Page 1 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

genetic material, all human ___________ share the same raw human genius, the same
intellectual acuity. And so whether that genius is placed into -- ___________ wizardry has been
the great ___________ of the West -- or by contrast, into unraveling the complex threads of
___________ inherent in a myth, is simply a ___________ of choice and cultural orientation. There
is no ___________ of affairs in human experience. There is no trajectory of progress. There's no
___________ that conveniently places ___________ England at the apex and descends down the
flanks to the so-called primitives of the world. All peoples are simply ___________ options,
different visions of life itself. But what do I mean by different ___________ of life making for
completely different ___________ for existence?

Part 5
03:27
Well, let's slip for a moment into the ___________ culture sphere ever brought into being by the
imagination, that of Polynesia. 10,000 square kilometers, tens of ___________ of islands flung
like jewels upon the ___________ sea. I recently sailed on the Hokulea, named after the sacred
star of Hawaii, ___________ the South Pacific to make a film about the navigators. These are
men and women who, even today, can name 250 stars in the night sky. These are men and
___________ who can sense the ___________ of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible
___________, simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their vessel,
knowing full well that every ___________ group in the Pacific has its ___________. These are
sailors who in the darkness, in the hull of the vessel, can ___________ as many as 32 different

PREP.VN
sea swells moving through the canoe at any one point in time, distinguishing local wave
disturbances from the great ___________ that pulsate ___________ the ocean, that can be
___________ with the same ease that a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea.
Indeed, if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and ___________ it
to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.

Part 6
04:38
And if we slip from the realm of the sea into the ___________ of the spirit of the imagination, you
enter the realm of Tibetan Buddhism. And I recently made a film called "The Buddhist
___________ of the Mind." Why did we use that word, science? What is science but the empirical
___________ of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2,500 years of ___________ observation as to the
nature of mind? I travelled for a month in Nepal with our good friend, Matthieu Ricard, and you'll
remember Matthieu ___________ said to all of us here once at TED, "Western science is a major
___________ to minor needs." We spend all of our ___________.

Part 7
05:16
Our billboards ___________ naked children in underwear. Their billboards are manuals, prayers to
the well-being of all sentient ___________. And with the blessing of Trulshik Rinpoche, we began
a pilgrimage to a curious destination, accompanied by a great doctor. And the ___________ was
a ___________ room in a nunnery, where a woman had gone into ___________ retreat 55 years
before. And en route, we took darshan from Rinpoche, and he sat with us and told us about the
Four Noble Truths, the ___________ of the Buddhist path. All life is suffering. That doesn't mean
all life is ___________. It means things happen. The cause of ___________ is ignorance. By that,

Page 2 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

the Buddha did not mean stupidity; he meant clinging to the illusion that life is ___________ and
predictable. The third noble truth said that ___________ can be overcome. And the fourth and
most important, of course, was the delineation of a contemplative ___________ that not only had
the possibility of a transformation of the human heart, but had 2,500 years of empirical
evidence that such a ___________ was a certainty.

Part 8
06:14
And so, when this door opened ___________ the face of a woman who had not been out of that
room in 55 years, you did not see a mad woman. You saw a woman who was more clear than a
___________ of water in a ___________ stream. And of course, this is what the Tibetan monks told
us. They said, at one point, you know, we don't really believe you went to the ___________, but
you did. You may not believe that we achieve ___________ in one lifetime, but we do. And if we
move from the realm of the ___________ to the realm of the physical, to the sacred ___________
of Peru -- I've always been interested in the ___________ of indigenous people that literally
believe that the Earth is alive, responsive to all of their aspirations, all of their needs. And, of
course, the human population has its own reciprocal ___________.

Part 9
06:59
I spent 30 years living ___________ the people of Chinchero and I always heard about an event

PREP.VN
that I always ___________ to participate in. Once each year, the ___________ young boy in each
hamlet is given the honor of becoming a woman. And for one day, he wears the ___________ of
his sister and he becomes a transvestite, a waylaka. And for that day, he ___________ all able-
bodied men on a run, but it's not your ___________ run. You start off at 11,500 feet. You run
down to the base of the ___________ mountain, Antakillqa. You run up to 15,000 feet, descend
3,000 feet. Climb again over the ___________ of 24 hours. And of course, the waylakama spin,
the trajectory of the ___________, is marked by holy mounds of Earth, where coke is given to the
Earth, libations of ___________ to the wind, the vortex of the feminine is brought to the
___________. And the ___________ is clear: you go into the mountain as an individual, but through
___________, through sacrifice, you emerge as a community that has once again reaffirmed its
___________ of place in the planet. And at 48, I was the only outsider ever to go through this,
only one to finish it. I only ___________ to do it by chewing more coca leaves in one day than
anyone in the 4,000-year history of the ___________.

Part 10
08:10
But these ___________ rituals become pan-Andean, and these fantastic festivals, like that of the
Qoyllur Rit'i, which ___________ when the Pleiades reappear in the winter sky. It's kind of like an
Andean Woodstock: 60,000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the
sacred ___________, called the Sinakara, which is ___________ by three tongues of the great
glacier. The metaphor is so clear. You bring the crosses from your ___________, in this wonderful
fusion of Christian and pre-Columbian ___________. You place the cross into the ice, in the
___________ of Ausangate, the most sacred of all Apus, or sacred ___________ of the Inca. And
then you do the ritual dances that empower the crosses.

Part 11
Page 3 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

08:48
Now, these ideas and these ___________ allow us even to deconstruct ___________ places that
many of you have been to, like Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never a ___________ city. On
the contrary, it was ___________ linked in to the 14,000 kilometers of royal roads the Inca made
in less than a ___________ of sacred geography. The intiwatana, the hitching ___________ to the
sun, is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that ___________ on the sacred Apu
of Machu Picchu, which is Sugarloaf Mountain, ___________ Huayna Picchu. If you come to the
south of the intiwatana, you find an ___________. Climb Huayna Picchu, find another altar. Take a
direct north-south ___________, you find to your astonishment that it bisects the intiwatana
stone, ___________ to the ___________, hits the heart of Salcantay, the second of the most
important mountains of the Incan empire. And then beyond Salcantay, of course, when the
southern cross ___________ the ___________ point in the sky, directly in that same alignment, the
Milky Way overhead. But what is enveloping Machu Picchu from below? The sacred river, the
Urubamba, or the Vilcanota, which is itself the Earthly ___________ of the Milky Way, but it's also
the trajectory that Viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the ___________ into
being. And where does the river rise? Right on the slopes of the Koariti.

Part 12
10:08
So, 500 years after Columbus, these ___________ rhythms of landscape are played out in ritual.
Now, when I was here at the first TED, I showed this ___________: two men of the Elder Brothers,

PREP.VN
the descendants, ___________ of El Dorado. These, of course, are the ___________ of the ancient
Tairona civilization. If those of you who are here remember that I ___________ that they remain
ruled by a ritual priesthood, but the training for the priesthood is ___________. Taken from their
families, sequestered in a shadowy world of ___________ for 18 years -- two nine-year periods
deliberately chosen to ___________ the nine months they spend in the natural mother's womb.
All that time, the world only exists as an ___________, as they are taught the values of their
society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone,
___________ the cosmic balance. Now, the ___________ of a society is not only what it does, but
the quality of its aspirations.

Part 13
11:02
And I always wanted to go back into these mountains, to see if this could ___________ be true,
as indeed had been ___________ by the great anthropologist, Reichel-Dolmatoff. So, literally two
weeks ago, I ___________ from having spent six weeks with the Elder Brothers on what was
clearly the most extraordinary trip of my life. These really are a people who live and ___________
the realm of the sacred, a baroque religiosity that is simply ___________. They consume more
coca leaves than any human population, half a pound per man, per day. The gourd you see here
is -- everything in their ___________ is ___________. Their central metaphor is a loom. They say,
"Upon this loom, I weave my life." They refer to the movements as they exploit the ___________
niches of the gradient as "threads." When they pray for the dead, they make these ___________
with their hands, spinning their thoughts into the ___________.

Part 14
11:54

Page 4 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

You can see the calcium ___________ on the head of the poporo gourd. The gourd is a
___________ aspect; the stick is a male. You put the stick in the ___________ to take the sacred
ashes -- well, they're not ashes, they're ___________ limestone -- to empower the coca leaf, to
change the pH of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride. But if you
break a gourd, you cannot simply throw it away, because every ___________ of that stick that has
built up that calcium, the ___________ of a man's life, has a thought behind it. Fields are
___________ in such an extraordinary way, that the one side of the ___________ is planted like that
by the women. The other side is planted like that by the men. Metaphorically, you turn it on the
side, and you have a ___________ of cloth. And they are the descendants of the ancient Tairona
___________, the greatest goldsmiths of South America, who in the wake of the conquest,
retreated into this isolated ___________ massif that soars to 20,000 feet above the Caribbean
___________ plain.

Part 15
12:49
There are four ___________: the Kogi, the Wiwa, the Kankwano and the Arhuacos. I traveled with
the Arhuacos, and the wonderful thing about this story was that this man, Danilo Villafane -- if
we just jump back here for a second. When I first met Danilo, in the Colombian ___________ in
Washington, I couldn't help but say, "You know, you look a lot like an old friend of mine." Well, it
___________ out he was the son of my friend, Adalberto, from 1974, who had been ___________
by the FARC. And I said, "Danilo, you won't remember this, but when you were an ___________, I

PREP.VN
carried you on my back, up and down the mountains." And because of that, Danilo ___________
us to go to the very heart of the world, a place where no ___________ had ever been permitted.
Not simply to the flanks of the mountains, but to the very iced peaks which are the ___________
of the pilgrims.

Part 16
13:35
And this man ___________ cross-legged is now a grown-up Eugenio, a man who I've known since
1974. And this is one of those initiates. No, it's not true that they're ___________ in the darkness
for 18 years, but they are kept within the confines of the ceremonial men's ___________ for 18
years. This little boy will never step ___________ of the sacred fields that surround the men's hut
for all that time, until he begins his journey of initiation. For that ___________ time, the world only
exists as an abstraction, as he is taught the ___________ of society, including this notion that
their ___________ alone maintain the cosmic balance. Before we could begin our ___________, we
had to be cleansed at the portal of the Earth. And it was extraordinary to be taken by a priest.
And you see that the priest never ___________ shoes because holy feet -- there must be nothing
between the ___________ that they call the heart of the world.

Part 17
14:35
We traveled high into the paramo, and as we crested the ___________, we realized that the men
were interpreting every single bump on the ___________ in terms of their own intense religiosity.
And then of course, as we ___________ our final destination, a place called Mamancana, we
were in for a surprise, because the FARC were waiting to kidnap us. And so we ___________ up
being taken aside into these huts, ___________ away until the darkness. And then, abandoning

Page 5 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

all our gear, we were forced to ride out in the middle of the night, in a quite ___________ scene.
It's going to look like a John Ford Western. And we ran into a FARC patrol at dawn, so it was
quite harrowing. It will be a very interesting film. But what was ___________ is that the minute
there was a sense of ___________, the mamos went into a circle of divination.

Part 18
15:20
And of course, this is a photograph literally taken the night we were in hiding, as they
___________ their route to take us out of the mountains. We were able to, because we had
___________ people in filmmaking, ___________ with our work, and send our Wiwa and Arhuaco
___________ to the final sacred lakes to get the last ___________ for the film, and we followed the
rest of the Arhuaco back to the sea, taking the ___________ from the highlands to the sea. And
here you see how their sacred landscape has been ___________ by brothels and hotels and
casinos, and yet, still they pray. And it's an amazing thing to think that this ___________ to Miami,
two hours from Miami, there is an entire civilization of people praying every day for your
___________. They call themselves the Elder Brothers. They dismiss the rest of us who have
___________ the world as the Younger Brothers. They cannot understand why it is that we do
what we do to the Earth.

Part 19
16:15

PREP.VN
Now, if we slip to another end of the world, I was up in the high Arctic to tell a story about
___________ warming, ___________ in part by the former Vice President's wonderful book. And
what struck me so extraordinary was to be again with the Inuit -- a people who don't ___________
the cold, but take advantage of it. A people who find a way, with their ___________, to carve life
out of that very frozen. A people for whom ___________ on ice is not a sign of death, but an
affirmation of life. And yet tragically, when you now go to those northern communities, you find
to your ___________ that whereas the sea ice used to come in in September and stay till July, in
a place like Kanak in ___________ Greenland, it literally comes in now in November and
___________ until March. So, their entire year has been cut in half.

Part 20
17:01
Now, I want to ___________ that none of these peoples that I've been quickly talking about here
are disappearing worlds. These are not ___________ peoples. On the contrary, you know, if you
have the ___________ to feel and the eyes to see, you ___________ that the world is not flat. The
world remains a rich tapestry. It ___________ a rich topography of the spirit. These myriad voices
of humanity are not failed attempts at being new, failed ___________ at being modern. They're
unique facets of the human imagination. They're unique ___________ to a fundamental question:
what does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, they respond with
6,000 different ___________. And ___________, those voices become our human repertoire for
dealing with the challenges that will ___________ us in the ensuing millennia.

Part 21
17:46
Our ___________ society is scarcely 300 years old. That shallow history shouldn't ___________ to

Page 6 of 7
Học tại Prep, đỗ mọi kỳ thi tiếng Anh https://prep.vn

anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the
ensuing millennia. The myriad voices of ___________ are not failed attempts at being us. They
are unique answers to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive?
And there is ___________ a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it not only plants and
___________, but the legacy of humanity's brilliance.

18:14
Right now, as we sit here in this room, of those 6,000 ___________ spoken the day that you were
born, fully ___________ aren't being taught to children. So, you're living through a time when
virtually half of humanity's ___________, social and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away.
This does not have to happen. These peoples are not failed attempts at being modern -- quaint
and ___________ and destined to fade away as if by ___________l law.

Part 22
18:39
In every case, these are ___________, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable
forces. That's actually an optimistic ___________, because it suggests that if human beings are
the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural
___________.

18:55

PREP.VN
Thank you very much.

Page 7 of 7