The Continuum Concept
by Jean Liedloff

book review

by Tracy Marshall

The Continuum Concept was one of those books that found me, rather than the other way round. I wasn’t out shopping for books, I was waiting for a friend to choose a greeting card in a shop that sold second-hand books. One of them caught my eye because the cover blurb said “Jean Liedloff spent two and a half years deep in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians”. I’ve had a lifelong interest in other cultures, so I bought the book.

When I got the book home and read the cover information more thoroughly, I realized I’d bought a book that was primarily about raising children — what a disappointment! I had no small children, didn’t have any friends with any, and furthermore, I wasn’t interested in the subject — or so I thought. By the time I’d finished the book, I was — almost — wanting to have children just to put some of these theories into practice.

I was intrigued right from the start. Far from being ‘stone age’, these people turned out to be among the most ‘forward thinking’ on the planet today.

Apart from the (rather obvious if you think about it) points about babies being happier after birth if they have constant physical human contact, what really captured my interest was the way in which they trust their babies and children not to harm themselves. They allow babies to crawl around the clifftops of their jungle home, and guess what: they don’t crawl right over the edge. They pick up knives, and they don’t get hurt. Because the children are not bombarded with suggestions “Don’t do that, you might fall off!” “Be careful, you’ll cut yourself!”, their innate common sense and intuition is unhampered. They don’t respond to the suggestion “You will hurt yourself” if no-one is suggesting to them that they will.

Another fascinating concept is that these people never request another individual to do anything. If they want something that they are unable to do for themselves, they simply state their wish. Someone will feel like doing it and will respond. Amazingly, it works! One may assume then that nobody does anything with a sense of begrudging duty, or obligation, and that everyone does what they want. It would appear to work out perfectly.

A year or so after reading The Continuum Concept, I found the Elias transcripts online. Something about an ‘already shifted’ tribe¹ in South America caught my eye, and I wondered if it was the Yequana in Jean Liedloff’s book.

Subsequently Elias confirmed that it was indeed the same tribe. And not only that, many of our online meditation group have concurrent focuses (or other current reincarnational lives) there, including me.

When a book jumps off the shelf at you, there’s always a reason.

Yequana girl, illustration by Elikozoe

Endnotes:

1 Elias: “They are practicing in reality many of the elements of this shift in consciousness, in their abilities and allowing themselves enough of their own widening of awareness to be allowing themselves to move in and out of experiences that are held to be in conjunction with this shift in consciousness. Those experiences that you individuals presently move in the direction of exploration with, they are already experiencing as common ground of their everyday existence, although they have not entirely moved into the fullness of acceptance of belief systems within your linear time period yet.

In this, I shall express to you that they ARE moving quite close to this expression of the acceptance of belief systems, and as you en masse move more into the action of this shift in consciousness, this also lends energy to that expression of their acceptance of belief systems, which also lends energy to YOUR acceptance of YOUR belief systems.”

Other references

http://www.continuum-concept.org/

A website created by members of the Liedloff Continuum Network (LCN) to educate and serve anyone who cares about the well-being of infants and children by advocating the principles described in The Continuum Concept and suggesting practical ways to integrate them into daily life. [They] also hope to serve those who are recovering from the adverse effects of a modern, “non-continuum” upbringing, and who may or may not be parents themselves.