In the Ground of Our Unknowing – Emergence Magazine

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/?fbclid=IwAR0qjjC1VgiyV7d2mHrKlg22jeJrErNOAu9HNqorKK3LKr_fjvknlHXvVsE

Facing the paradoxes and ambiguities enmeshed with the COVID-19 pandemic, David Abram finds beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. As we’re isolated in this uncertain time, he writes, we can turn to the more-than-human world to empower our empathy for each other.

Right now, the earthly community of life—the more-than-human collective—is getting a chance to catch its breath without the weight of our incessant industry on its chest. The terrifying nightmare barreling through human society in these weeks has forced the gears of the megamachine (all the complex churning of commerce, all this steadily speeding up “progress”) to grind to a halt—and so, as you’ve likely noticed, the land itself is stirring and starting to stretch its limbs, long-forgotten sensory organs beginning to sip the air and sample the water, grasses and needles drinking in sky without the intermediating sting of a chemical haze. The reports of abundant fish returning to the effluent-clogged canals of Venice may not be true—mostly, it seems, the usual murkiness of the canals is clearing due to the circumstance that ceaseless boat traffic is not churning up those waterways, and so it’s become possible, for the first time in ages, to glimpse schools of fish who’ve always been there swimming through the suddenly pellucid waters. But if we can see those fish in the long quiet of these days, then those finned beings can also see us, can see the sun and the gleaming moon in ways they’ve not been able to for decades. Gray Whales and Humpbacks in the Pacific Northwest can suddenly hear one another’s hundred-mile songs and calls echoing through the depths, uninterrupted by the incessant mechanical whine of boat engines—since the whale-watching tours that hound them have stopped indefinitely, as have the growling propellers of cruise ships and the whirring of most pleasure boats (an underwater cacophony that’s been steadily intensifying over the years, monopolizing the exquisite auditory conductance of the aquatic realm, and confounding all those who communicate in buzzing blips and pings and singsong descants through the fluid medium).

Just as, in multiple cities, the profusion of birdsong is becoming evident, no longer hidden by ringtones, honking horns, piercing car alarms, and people yelling into their phones (by all the giddy roiling thrum of business as usual).

And right now, late at night, a child is stepping outside her home in the suburbs of Shanghai—as another child is doing in Mumbai, and another in Madrid just before dawn. The child in Shanghai is walking the family dog with her father. The girl stretches her cramped limbs, leaning her head back—whereupon she notices something surpassingly strange.  Her eyes widen in wonder: a glimmering river of light is coursing above the silhouetted buildings! Numberless points of light (she knows they are stars) gleam and wink at her along the margins of the overhead river, while near the central current those lights seem to fold into a churning froth of bright cloud. “What is that?” she asks her father. He follows her gaze upward. “Oh,” he says, “that’s the Silver River.…”

In Mumbai, the boy’s grandmother says, “Oh c’mon, you know that: that’s the Ganges of the Aether.”

In Madrid, the father looks up, and then replies to his son: “That’s the Milky Way. Don’t you remember learning about it?” “Yeah…,” the boy answers. “I just didn’t know that you could actually see it.” The father looks back up, then removes his glasses. They both stare and stare.

Luminous beauty in the midst of shuddering terror. Interpersonal solidarity—layer upon tearful layer of empathy for one another—in the midst of enforced solitude and loneliness. The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath.

Here’s another ambiguity. We’re finally being forced to recognize that no top-down institution, governmental or otherwise, can fully ensure our safety. That our deepest insurance against disaster is going local—by getting to know our actual neighbors and checking in on one another when we can, participating in our local community and apprenticing with the more-than-human terrain that surrounds and sustains us. Eating more of what grows locally, and learning to grow some of these foods ourselves, reduces the long supply chains that bring not just foods and products from far-flung places into our lives, but also pathogens that would otherwise be way more limited in their circulation. Here in northern New Mexico, youth climate activists have in the last two weeks established a thriving and rapidly growing mutual aid system, whereby individuals are offering all sorts of gifts and skills to the wider community, wherein anyone can request needed help and be matched, fairly quickly, with someone providing those skills free of charge. In fact, by the time of this writing (in late March) analogous place-based mutual aid initiatives are sprouting up in localities pretty much everywhere around the world—wild harvesting needed herbs, providing childcare for doctors, delivering food and pharmaceuticals and equipment, offering skilled counseling (by phone) for folks freaking out, setting up sanitation systems in rural areas with scant water, handcrafting masks and protective gear. What a wonder! Yet at this same moment, the very same catastrophe that’s teaching us to bring our attention back to the local and nearby, forces us to take distance from every person in our vicinity, and to connect only via the most mediated and disembodied of ways, speaking only via the phone and the computer, exchanging information via FaceTime and Zoom and Twitter.

Even a neo-Luddite like me has to admit that the online and internet world has become a huge boon and blessing in this tenuous time! And of course even before the pandemic, the digital sphere was enabling crucial and unexpected alliances to spark up and proliferate under the radar, empowering vital mobilizations to crystallize long before top-down powers could catch sight of and try to quash them. Yet the internet has also enabled the consolidation and widespread organization of many insidious impulses as well, including the most sociopathic forms of fearmongering and scapegoating (to say nothing of the limitless capacity for personal data harvesting and surveillance that the internet offers, free of charge, to transnational corporations). In their enthusiasm for the wired world, many commentators have been saying, “Wow, the coronavirus is a fast track to the future! Once we see that we can enact much of our lives online, why should we go back to doing things in the far less efficient world of flesh-and-blood interactions?” In The New York Times, one columnist suggested that once we’ve learned how to conduct most college courses over the internet, why would we ever want to go back to sitting and lecturing in classrooms? Meanwhile, my son in tenth grade is jumping out of his skin with boredom at the doldrum dullness of screen-imprisoned classes, and my daughter—abruptly forced home from her blissful freshman year at college—is despairing at the drab inanity of college seminars without the delicious bustle of seeing, hearing, and especially feeling her classmates as they reflectively tussle with one another and with the professor while puzzling out problems together. She’s missing the (let’s face it) erotic goodness of real learning that happens in direct physical interchange with one another, when so much of what is really discovered happens at a bodily-felt level below the strictly cognitive layer of the words. The completely conscious layer of learning rides on that depth like ripples on the surface of the sea. Wisdom arises—whether within a student or a teacher, or within the awareness of an entire class—when the verbal, cognitive layer of learning is awake to its rootedness in the emotionally charged dimension of our corporeal and intercorporeal life with one another, in the palpable rooms and landscapes we inhabit together.

So while I trust that there’s a lot we’ll be learning from the strangeness of these days in enforced isolation from each other, I sure hope that we’ll not be drawing upon this time to swivel huge swaths of our public and private life permanently into the virtual sphere, away from the necessarily fraught and vulnerable world of fleshly encounter in the thick of the sensuous—which, I hasten to add, is the only world that we share with the other animals, the plants, and the blustering winds. I mean, do we really wish to render education even more abstract and aloof from the perspectives of other creatures, from the intricately entangled wetlands and rivers, from the many-voiced forests with whom we share this round world? Do we really need to render ourselves still more oblivious to the reality of other, nonhuman lives? If so, then by all means let’s all pile online, and look to conduct more and more of our lives in virtual spaces.… But the cascading catastrophes of climate change, and our apparent inability (or unwillingness) to alter our lives in response to those cataclysms, suggest that it might be salutary for us to replenish our direct, sensorial contact with the wider community of beings wherever we live. We might wish to reacquaint ourselves with the other denizens of our locale.

After all, while this plague enforces a temporary distance from other humans, there is no reason not to lean in close to other beings, gazing and learning—for instance—the distinguishing patterns of the bark worn by each of the local tree species where you live. No reason not to step outside and pry open your ears, listening and learning by heart the characteristic songs and calls of the various local birds; no reason not to apprentice yourself to a spider as it weaves its intricate web in front of the porchlight. Or to practice recognizing and naming—as I have been—the different types of clouds that are conjured out of the blue by the scattered mountains in this region, the wispy brushstrokes and phantom ridges and clumped clusters that congregate and dissipate in the high desert sky. Estranged from direct human contact for a brief while, we’ve a chance to open a new intimacy with the wider world we’re a part of, with coyote and owl and aspen. Soon enough, if it’s not already happening where you are, spring will be exploding out of all those budded branches. And that is a goodness. If you live anywhere near a wetland, pay it an evening visit—see if you can join your voice to the gurgling chorus of frogs without shocking them all into silence (it takes practice, sure, but I promise it’s doable).

Sit down for tea with a lichen-encrusted boulder. Excellent. Now get over your shyness, wander over to the bank of the river that courses through your town, and invite the gushing current to dance with you. If it accepts, you needn’t plunge in (maybe save that for the summer), but rather gaze and listen and feel into the flux as you move—let its wildness tumble downstream through your muscles, coaxing the river into rapport with your own sinuous moves and meanders, experimenting till you find the right rhythm, the right syncopation for the erotic rock and roll of its alluvial groove.

Sure, it’s mighty important to keep apprised of the human news. Yet we can draw unexpected nourishment by walking away, now and then, from the screen-mediated sphere of our exclusively human concerns, rekindling our animal senses and rediscovering our solidarity with everything else.

So some of us are now learning to listen in to and maybe even converse with the elemental utterances of things that don’t speak in words, tuning our ears and our skin to the discourse of multiple other-than-human beings: each redwing blackbird or storm cloud or naked chunk of sandstone jostling with the rest of existence. And every one of us is now shuddering with inadvertent creaturely empathy at what’s befalling so many of our human sisters and brothers who abruptly find themselves unable to draw breath, their lungs ravaged, their bodies cut off by plastic enclosures and pumps from the touch or even the sight of their loved ones.

We breathe for each other. We feel each other’s feelings shuddering through us—we cannot help but do so! Yet is this because we’re all human, because we share a basic commonality of body and mind, because our species has its own autonomy and autonomous integrity, such that all of Humankind is a single collective Body that flexes and reverberates in each one of us?

Such is our common assumption, but actually … no, I don’t think so. If we consider the extant and far-flung span of our collective human flesh—if we consider the actual spatial shape of this hopelessly spread out thing we call humankind, we will notice, I think, that its shape is that of a sphere. Because it is the vast and spherical Earth that gives us our actual shape and coherence as a species.

And if we ponder the activity of any individual human at this very moment, we’ll notice that he or she or they are breathing (or struggling to breathe)—each of us drinking this unseen elixir that’s granted to us, ceaselessly—by the innumerable rooted, leafing, needled, stemmed, trunked, or algal beings that are also breathing in our vicinity. We have no autonomy, no integrity as a species separate from the other species of this world, no collective existence as a creature apart from the animate Earth. We can understand ourselves, and feel what it is to be human, only through our interaction and engagement with all these other, nonhuman beings with whom our lives are so thoroughly tangled. And yes, of course we can and indeed do feel a deep solidarity with one another, and with the rest of our kind. Yet we cannot stretch that bodily empathy out to all of our single species except by way of the more-than-human Earth. We cannot extend our senses to the whole of humankind without the sensitive and sentient Earth getting us there. It is this vast and sensitive sphere, glimmering with sensations, that grants us that ability to feel and resonate with one another, to ache when another aches—whether it be a small girl hospitalized in Iran or a young elephant whose mother was killed by poachers, whether an old man struggling to breathe in China or an aging sea lion snagged and tangled in a fishing net. Our real collective Flesh is not that of “humankind” as an autonomous abstraction, but is the living Body of this biosphere, breathing. That’s us.

Still, there’s the rising tide of human happenings reaching us through the media, much of it sad beyond reckoning. One massive matter that this virus is abruptly making visible, for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t see it before is the dumbfounding injustice—the outrageous coldheartedness—of the way our societies are currently structured, such that some persons seem always able to avail themselves of protection from the devastation of illness (having ready access to tests, and fine doctors, and all the necessary machinic support) while crowds of others are tossed aside or treated grotesquely. Like the undocumented immigrants currently crammed into overcrowded detention centers here in the US: how can we keep the virus from running rampant in such spaces? Or overseas: how can we protect, from the spreading contagion and death, countless half-starved Syrian refugees now stranded and stateless? Or the laid off workers in India now trying to make their way back to their rural villages in overstuffed buses or on foot through a gauntlet of regulations and club-wielding police? And here at home: how can we protect our brothers and sisters doing time in private, for-profit prisons without even minimally adequate sanitation? Or the many who are homeless and destitute, usually through no fault of their own?

Healthcare, as both Sanders and Warren proclaimed over and over, ain’t a privilege: it’s a basic human right. We instinctively feel that everyone deserves respect and the right to live out their days, that no human should have to forfeit their life simply because they’ve only ever earned minimum wage, or due to their skin color, or their age, or their refugee status. But as this pandemic swells and breaks like a colossal tsunami across the land, it strips away the flimsy facades, exposing all the god-awful structural violence of this winner-take-all society, leaving most of us feeling astonished and ashamed that we could have allowed such hideous disparities to grow and grow without struggling steadily to rectify them.

I reckon we’ll no longer be able to easily hide or paper over much of this structural violence after the virus has had its way with us. At least I pray that we won’t. We will have to change. In ever so many ways, we’ll have to change. (Dear Gaia, let us PLEASE not go back to fucking “normal.”) But what shape, what mode will the changes take? Will we simply go back to the rickety Rube Goldberg contraption of “Obamacare” and just extend it to cover a few more people? Might we begin to notice that a person’s health depends on having a range of real relationships, on face-to-face community, on reciprocity with a robust and flourishing ecology? Or will we strive now to make our lives ever more antiseptic, engaging not only our social interactions but more and more of our education online, so we’ll not have to risk contamination through physical contact—so we’ll not have to tangle with the always unpredictable muck of the real? Will we all be so desperate to have everything go back to “normal” that we’ll rev and rev and ramp back up our overly addicted fossil-fueled economy, injecting gobs of crude oil back into our veins like strung out junkies, throwing the megamachine into overdrive? And in this way consign our own and every other remaining species—those we’ve not already crowded and kicked over the brink of extinction—to the irreversible hell of runaway climate change?

Or will we recognize the coronavirus as a fierce but relatively gentle harbinger of something far more calamitous, a teacher kindly sent to slap us awake to our actual circumstances?

Much that influences the future shape of our societies will ride on how we emerge from this crisis—assuming we do emerge—how we transition out of the strangely suspended dreamscape in which we suddenly find ourselves adrift. Governments and their administrative agencies will play their roles as best they can, each trying to claw or engineer its way back into the daylit realm. But the textures and tastes that eventually come to predominate, the rhythms of community in our bioregion, the generosity and convivial ethos of the larger body politic—or the robotic and bureaucratic rigidity of that body politic—will to a large extent be determined by the choices each of us makes in this cocoon-like, shape-shifting moment. The future will be sculpted, that is, by the elemental friendships and alliances that we choose to sustain us, by our full-bodied capacity for earthly compassion and dark wonder, by our ability to listen, attentive and at ease, within the forest of our unknowing.

Listen to an Interview with David Abram

In this interview, cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram discusses the animism, power, and potency of the living world. In our current moment of ecological and societal instability, he calls on us to remember our inherent participation in the collective, embodied flesh of the Earth.

• Writer

  David Abram

  David Abram, PhD, is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. He is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. His books include Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World.
• Artist

  Lina Müller

  Lina Müller is an illustrator based in Central Switzerland. She studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Zurich University of the Arts, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was nominated for the 2017 Swiss Design Awards.
• Artist

  Luca Schenardi

  Luca Schenardi is a Swiss-based illustrator and artist. He studied at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. His illustrations have appeared in international newspapers and magazines, including Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, and Rolling Stone Magazine.

solution to the human condition

https://www.humancondition.com/the-interview/

Part 1

The psychosis-addressing-and-solving, real biological explanation of the human condition

Craig Conway : Hello to everyone listening. My name is Craig Conway. Now, whilst I’ve been an actor by profession, very recently I’ve been introduced to doing radio where I talk to people from all over the world. Well, today I have a very, very special guest on the line from Australia.

The turmoil and trauma of this coronavirus pandemic has only amplified the now dire need in the world for a deeper, lasting solution to all the chaos and suffering in human life. And this deeper enduring solution is actually what this biologist I’m about to interview is going to provide us with. He is going to do it by explaining and solving the underlying cause of all the suffering, which is our ‘good and evil’ stricken so-called human condition.

So I don’t care what you’re doing, you need to stop and listen to this interview. In fact, I don’t care what you do for the rest of your life, if you can you just need to listen to this!

The interview will be in four parts, each averaging 15 minutes, which is not a lot when you consider that we’re going to be explaining the whole human condition!

So it’s a great privilege to introduce Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith. He’s the author of a book titled FREEDOM: The End Of The Human Condition, and this is my copy, which I’ve had with me now for quite a long time and I take it everywhere with me, and there are now millions of people all over the globe studying, reading and researching through this book that Jeremy has brought to us. [Craig learnt of Jeremy’s explanation of the human condition in early 2019, and became so impressed by it he started a WTM Centre in north east England to promote it; see www.WTMNorthEastEngland.com.]

So, I’m here to tell everyone that this book has not only blown me away, it has also impressed Professor Harry Prosen, who is a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association—so he’s one of the world’s leading psychiatrists—and he said, and I quote, ‘I have no doubt Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition is the holy grail of insight we have sought for the psychological rehabilitation of the human race. This is the book we have been waiting for, it is the book that saves the world.’ End quote.

Now, I think everyone listening would agree that ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ is exactly what this world needs! So buckle into your seats, this is going to be the most interesting—and exciting—talk you have ever heard.

So Jeremy, thank you for talking with us. Tell us, how does your work bring about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ and end all the suffering and strife, and, as Professor Prosen said, ‘save the world’?

Jeremy Griffith : Thank you very much for having me on your program Craig. Finding understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition has actually been what the efforts of every human who has ever lived has been dedicated to achieving and has contributed to finding. As Professor Prosen said, finding understanding of the human condition has been ‘the holy grail’ of the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry.

We humans have absolutely lived in hope, faith and trust that one day, somewhere, some place, all the efforts of everyone—but of scientists in particular—would finally produce the completely redeeming, uplifting and healing understanding of us humans. I know it must seem outrageous to claim that this goal of goals has finally been achieved, but it has. In fact, the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.

Craig : Okay then Jeremy, solve the human condition for us, we’re all ears!

Jeremy : Firstly, I’m a biologist, and that’s important because I think everyone will agree that what we need is a non-abstract, non-mystical, completely rational and thus understandable, scientific, biological explanation of us humans.

So how are we to explain and understand the human condition, understand why we humans are the way we are, so brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but unbearable. In fact, how are we to make so much sense of our divisive behaviour that the underlying cause of it is so completely explained and understood that, as Professor Prosen said, the whole of the human race is psychologically rehabilitated and everyone’s life is transformed?

Craig : Yes, that’s what we want; the human condition finally explained, fixed up and healed forever!

Jeremy : Exactly Craig. So, to start at the beginning, I know everyone listening is living with the belief—well it’s what we were all taught at school and are told in every documentary—that humans’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behaviour is due to us having savage, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals have.

I mean, our conversations are saturated with this belief, with comments like: ‘We are programmed by our genes to try to dominate others and be a winner in the battle of life’; and ‘Our preoccupation with sexual conquest is due to our primal instinct to sow our seeds’; and ‘Men behave abominably because their bodies are flooded with must-reproduce-their-genes-promoting testosterone’; and ‘We want a big house because we are innately territorial’; and ‘Fighting and war is just our deeply-rooted combative animal nature expressing itself’—and the most common comment of all Craig is that ‘It’s just human nature to be selfish’.

Craig : Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve understood is the reason for our competitive and aggressive nature—that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school.

Jeremy : Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely.

Surely this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’ competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral, brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.

Our ape ancestors were not savage, barbaric brutes as they have for so long been portrayed, but rather they were innocent, loving nurturers as depicted below by the paleoartist Jay H. Matternes in Science magazine.

What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin said, ‘The moral sense…​affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly 

 lovingly, otherwise how else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal, club-wielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocent gentleness—which, as I’d like to explain to you later in this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is 

 living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in. For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (‘Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949).

Large group of Bonobos Group of bonobos Science magazine cover featuring Ardi ‘Breakthrough of the Year’: cover of the December 2009 issue of Science magazine Various ardipithecenes standing in natural environment Matternes’s reconstruction of the 4.4 mya Ardipithecus ramidus in its natural habitat

•  So saying our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as I’d like to come back to shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the psychosis-acknowledging-and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive and aggressive human condition! Craig : Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes? Jeremy : Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with, hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again. Key Unlocking the Mind illustration by Matt Mahurin for ‘Time’, Nov. 29 1993 As I said, the ‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present. Craig : Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled human condition! Jeremy : Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation is actually very obvious. If we think about it, if an animal was to become fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing, understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves. Craig : Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess? Jeremy : Well, the easiest way to see what happened is to imagine the predicament faced by an animal whose life had always been controlled by its instincts suddenly developing a conscious mind, because if we do that we will very quickly see how that animal would develop a psychologically troubled competitive and aggressive condition like we suffer from. So let’s imagine a stork: we’ll call him Adam. Each Summer, Adam instinctually migrates North with the other storks around the coast of Africa to Europe to breed, as some varieties of storks do. Since he has no conscious mind Adam Stork doesn’t think about or question his behaviour, he just follows what his instincts tell him to do. Adam Stork Story - 1. Storks flying before Adam became conscious But what if we give Adam a large brain capable of conscious thought? He will start to think for himself, but many of his new ideas will not be consistent with his instincts. For instance, while migrating North with the other storks Adam notices an island full of apple trees. He then makes a conscious decision to divert from his migratory path and explore the island. It’s his first grand experiment in self-management. Adam Stork Story - 2. Storks flying as Adam becomes conscious Adam Stork Story - 3. Conscious Adam sees an island The Story of Adam Stork - 4. Disobedient Adam But when Adam’s instincts realise he has strayed off course they are going to criticise his deprogrammed behaviour and dogmatically try to pull him back on his instinctive flight path, aren’t they! In effect, they are going to condemn him as being bad. Adam Stork Story - 5. Conscious Adam gets criticised Imagine the turmoil Adam will experience: he can’t go back to simply following his instincts. His instinctive orientations to the migratory flight path were acquired over thousands of generations of natural selection but those orientations are not understandings, and since his conscious mind requires understanding, which it can only get through experimentation, inevitably a war will break out with his instincts. Ideally at this point Adam’s conscious mind would sit down and explain to his instincts why he’s defying them. He would explain that the gene-based, natural selection process only gives species instinctive orientations to the world, whereas his nerve-based, conscious mind, which is able to make sense of cause and effect, needs understanding of the world to operate. Adam Stork Story - 6. Conscious Adam’s talk with his instincts But Adam doesn’t have this self-understanding. He’s only just begun his search for knowledge. In fact, he’s not even aware of what the problem actually is. He’s simply started to feel that he’s bad, even evil. Craig : Okay, so what you’re saying is a war has broken out between his conscious mind and his instincts, which he can’t explain, and it’s left him feeling bad or that he is bad in some way, or even evil. So what happened then? Jeremy : Well, tragically, while searching for understanding, we can see that three things are unavoidably going to happen. Adam is going to defensively retaliate against the implied criticism from his instincts; he is going to desperately seek out any reinforcement he can find to relieve himself of the negative feelings; and he is going to try to deny the criticism and block it out of his mind. He has become angry, egocentric and alienated—which is the psychologically upset state we call the human condition, because it was us humans who developed a conscious mind and became psychologically upset. (And ‘upset’ is the right word for our condition because while we are not ‘evil’ or ‘bad’, we are definitely psychologically upset from having to participate in humanity’s heroic search for knowl.edge. ‘Corrupted’ and ‘fallen’ have been used to describe our condition, but they have negative connotations that we can now appreciate are undeserved, so ‘upset’ is a better word.) So Adam’s intellect or ‘ego’ (ego being just another word for the intellect since the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘the conscious thinking self’ (5th edn, 1964)) became ‘centred’ or focused on the need to justify itself—Adam became ego-centric, selfishly preoccupied aggressively competing for opportunities to prove he is good and not bad, to validate his worth, to get a ‘win’; to essentially eke out any positive reinforcement that would bring him some relief from his criticising instincts. He unavoidably became self-preoccupied or selfish, and aggressive and competitive. Angry red Adam Stork So our selfish, competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to savage instincts but to a psychologically upset state or condition. Basically suffering psychological upset was the price we conscious humans had to pay for our heroic search for understanding. In the words from the song The Impossible Dream from the musical the Man of La Mancha, we had to be prepared to ‘march into hell for a heavenly cause’ (lyrics by Joe Darion, 1965). We had to lose ourselves to find ourselves; we had to suffer becoming angry, alienated and egocentric until we found sufficient knowledge to explain ourselves. Craig : Wow Jeremy, I mean this is just fascinating. So Adam Stork—we humans—developed a conscious mind and unavoidably started warring with our instincts, an upsetting war which could only end when we could explain and understand why we had to defy our instincts, which is the understanding that you have just supplied, yes? Jeremy : Exactly, remember Adam Stork became defensively angry, egocentric and alienated because he couldn’t explain why he was defying his instincts, so now that we can explain why, those defensive behaviours are no longer needed and can end! That’s basically all there is to explain, that is the biological explanation of the human condition that so explains us that, as Professor Prosen said, it brings about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’! A vaccine for this terrible virus would be good, but infinitely more precious and needed is a vaccine for the human condition, a cure for it, and that’s what’s just been presented. Adam Stork - from living with the trauma of the human condition to living free of it Craig : This is such a simple story but so far-reaching in its ramifications—I mean it is world-changing is what it is, because it truly enables ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’! I mean that is just wonderful. Okay, I’m speaking with Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith.

military spending should be questioned

Military funding could feed the world

J. Roberts

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I remember when I was in college a while back, one of my professors showed our class a bar graph. The graph represented the amount in trillions of dollars that is spent worldwide on military funding each year.

Then he showed us a smaller graph that was about three quarters as big as the first one, which gave an estimate as to how many trillions of dollars it would take to provide, shelter, food, water and medicine for all the people around the world.

As opposed to investing in technology that serves only to kill one another, investing in the future of humanity seems to be a more practical endeavour.

I’ve been spurred to write this letter because I found out in the news that as many as 120 million people could be expected to die of starvation in the next year, due to the residual and harsh

realities of COVID-19.

I’ve heard of a few more compassionate and realistic strategies for the need of less nationalistic military funding, or even the need for such military at all.

One option is to allow for a more prominent and active role of the United Nations for providing a smaller ‘global’ military. if ever needed, such a military could resolve the conflict any trouble makers might cause.

That is as much funding as many of us would care for or expect to see in the modern and finite world that we live in presently.

As it stands, I was appalled a few years back when I happened to encounter a magazine that expounded on, glorified, and compared, the destructive capabilities of the armies of the United States and China.

I found it absurd that there are that many other people who would want to purchase such a magazine and evaluate such an ridiculous competition.

Such relationships are giving rise to an apparent and unfortunate sense of crude nationalism that has emerged recently in response to the challenges and stressors we are faced with on this planet.

As far as a more positive potential for humanity goes, I’ve also heard of the existence of what are known as “mercy ships.” These ships provide vital aid in the form of food and medicine from First World countries to assist in the health and well being of Third World countries.

I would love to see aircraft carriers and war ships converted to being of such service for our less fortunate brothers and sisters around the world.

Whatever our differences are, be they racial, sexual, cultural, religious, political or economic, they could and should be seen as being secondary to the need for us to band together now more than ever.

The fact is that we are all interconnected. What is neglected or harmed there actually has an effect on us here and so on and so forth.

We actually really rely on one another for our own continued survival and need to care for each other in a global sense as one family.

We need to do this just as we need to take care of the intricate, dynamic and threatened web of life that nature provides for us and is still able to sustain.

Jason Roberts,
Kelowna