"Instinct and Revelation" revolves around the hypothesis that mystical awareness in early hominids may have helped to spawn the evolution of the human brain and human consciousness. Using an integral perspective comparable with systems theory, the book carefully interweaves fact and theory from physical and cultural anthropology, psychobiology and the brain sciences, psychology, and to a lesser degree, Eastern philosophy. This book breaks from tradition by discussing, from a purely anthropological perspective, the origin of human consciousness within a philosophical framework that embraces precepts from human evolution, evolutionary psychobiology, biocultural anthropology and cultural symbolic anthropology. The book's central theme is that transcendental awareness of one of its precursors may have existed in proto-humans who lived over one million years ago. The author proposes that some form of transcendental consciousness proved to be a significant but neglected force that helped shape the biological evolution of the hominid brain.