This is part of the learning and the lessons which the time of my exploring the Northern Chaco and the realm of the Ayoreo without contact quite naturally had challenged me to assume. I realized that there existed different and diverse ways in which our perception works, and that there was therefore a diversity of ways to constitute knowledge: being focused the way I had been taught myself so insistently during my upbringing, was not always a virtue; it could make one miss essential things in life, things lying outside the range of a focused perception, things which fell through the grid of exact and intention-charged perception like through a sieve that would not retain the unexpected and the hardly perceptible. I came to realize that there were cognitive abilities present and active in the people I was with, which are normally out of reach for members of modern societies: an ability to be open to capture and stay in touch with various things present, and various things happening simultaneously; or the ability to stay communicated internally – without words nor visible gestures – with other people or members of one’s group.
Such abilities, if not unknown to me and my kind altogether, were in no way abilities at my command. It was not the first time I had come across cognitive faculties which were uncommon or even unknown in modern life that sometimes even ranged them at the borders of, or within, the realm of para-psychology or esotericism. I had observed them in other indigenous contexts myself, and had also found them sometimes in literature describing experiences in indigenous cultures.
I came to understand that such special faculties and abilities, though exclusive to indigenous peoples now, had not been exclusively theirs always, but had also belonged to us at a time when in the past we, our ancestors, were more ‘indigenous’ ourselves still; when we used to be in a more egalitarian and receptive relationship with nature. I viewed them not as something alien, but, with a certain envy and regret, as something forgotten by ourselves. Something forgotten, but perhaps – why not – retrievable, something which we could learn again.