ASPECT A

The need to live in denial of the human condition has not been totally universal amongst humans. The fact that people are variously exposed to the corruption in the world and thus variously corrupted Page 98 of
Print Edition as a result of that exposure means that there has always been a spectrum of denial or alienation in humanity, with some individuals suffering little alienation and others extreme alienation.

In the lead-up to his cave allegory Plato recognises these different degrees of denial or alienation when he talks of ‘four states of mind: to the top section Intelligence, to the second Reason, to the third Opinion, and to the fourth Illusion. And you may arrange them in a scale, and assume that they have degrees of clarity corresponding to the degree of truth and reality possessed by their subject-matter’ (p.278). ‘Intelligence’, the ability to confront integrative meaning and as a result think honestly, truthfully, effectively and thus intelligibly, is the least alienated state. To live in denial of integrative meaning, but not so in denial that your thinking was entirely alienated, deluded and dishonest, is the state where you could be trusted to be able to at least ‘reason’. Those more alienated but still able to think with some semblance of effectiveness were those who were capable of at least having an ‘opinion’. The most alienated were those people who were living with no ‘truth’ and not facing any ‘reality’ about their corrupted state, people who were mentally living a life of complete ‘illusion’.

It makes sense that at the relatively unalienated, uncorrupted end of the spectrum there would occasionally be individuals who were sufficiently sound and secure in self to be able to confront and think truthfully and effectively about the human condition.

This is a very brief summary of the answer to the question of how some people could be sound and secure enough in self to confront the issue of the human condition. However, this answer raises further issues that need to be addressed, and the purpose of the seven sections of ASPECT A is to respond to those questions.

Four particular questions that will be examined are:

 

 

1. When humans are corrupted what is it that is corrupted?

ASPECT A Section 1, ‘The difficulty of acknowledging the human soul and the spectrum of alienation, or denial of soul’, deals with this question. This section will explain that it is our soul that is corrupted and look at the difficulty humans have had acknowledging the human soul and the spectrum of denial of it.

 

 

2. Since the answer to the first question is that it is our soul that is corrupted, the question then is: What is our soul?

A2 and A3 deal with this question. A2, ‘Plato’s acknowledgment of the nature of our soul’, presents Plato’s acknowledgment of the Page 99 of
Print Edition nature of our soul. A3, ‘Recognition of the soul’s world in mythology’, looks at the recognition mythologies have given to the existence and nature of our soul.

 

 

3. How did we acquire our soul?

A4 and A5 deal with this question. A4, ‘The biological explanation for how we acquired our soul, our instinctive orientation to integrative, cooperative meaning’, presents a summary of the biological explanation of how we acquired our soul. A5, ‘The contrived excuses for humans’ divisive nature’, looks at the contrived excuses humans have used to avoid recognising the existence of integrative meaning and our soul’s orientation to that meaning.

 

 

4. What was the reason for this corruption of our soul that left humans variously alienated?

A6 and A7 deal with this fourth question. A6, ‘A brief description of how our soul became corrupted’, explains how our soul was corrupted. A7, ‘There were people who could live in the sun’s light, but they were unbearably condemning for the cave prisoners’, explains that there were degrees of corruption amongst humans, with some people sufficiently uncorrupted not to be condemned by the truth of integrative meaning and it is these people who have been able to safely confront the issue of the human condition.

A1: The difficulty of acknowledging the human soul and the spectrum of alienation, or denial of soul

The previous section described how humans are living in various states of corruption, but posed the question of what is it that is corrupted. The answer to this question is that it is the ‘soul’ of humans that is corrupted, but that again leaves other questions to be answered; what is our soul and how was it corrupted. To begin to answer these questions it is first necessary to appreciate that the subject of the human soul has been one of the many areas that humans have hitherto been unable to examine and have thus had to live in denial of.

It was pointed out that humans learnt that the only way to avoid condemning criticism of their corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated Page 100 of
Print Edition state was to deny the whole concept of cooperative ideality. If there is no ideal state there is no issue with human divisiveness, no dilemma of the human condition to become depressed about. It was also mentioned that there are many truths relating to an ideal state that humans have had to learn to live in denial of, the most profound and confronting of all being the truth of integrative, cooperative meaning.

It now needs to be explained that the second most important representation of ideality that humans have had to live in denial of has been the truth that they once lived in an utterly integrated, harmonious, cooperative, all-sensitive, loving state, the instinctive memory of which is what we have long referred to as our ‘soul’. In their corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated state, the existence of this loving, original instinctive self or soul criticised humans unbearably, leaving them no choice other than to avoid recognising our soul’s true meaning.

The extent of humans’ denial of their integratively-orientated instinctive self or soul can be gauged from the fact that it has been pushed so far beyond conscious awareness, has been so psychologically repressed, that it now resides deep in humans’ subconscious. From there this ‘collective unconscious’ self (as psychoanalyst Carl Jung termed our shared-by-all instinctive self) emerges only in dreams and on other occasions when our conscious self is subdued. As Jung wrote, ‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche [soul], opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness’ (Civilization in Transition, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.10, 1945). Both the truth of humans’ current numb, seared, alienated state, and the truth of all the beauty and magic of life that our species’ original instinctive self or soul is aware of, have been repressed and denied.

Compliant with the denial, science has denied the existence of our soul’s world, the fabled state of harmony and enthralment that humans once lived in before they became corrupted and alienated. Far from acknowledging that our ancestors lived innocently, sensitively and cooperatively, scientists have maintained the view that our ancestors lived competitively and aggressively. As will be described shortly, biologists especially have maintained the view that humans’ forebears were competitive, survival-of-the-fittest-driven, reproduce-your-own-genes-at-all-cost, selfish and aggressive beasts.

Not only has the true nature of our soul been denied but all truths Page 101 of
Print Edition relating to our soul’s world have also been denied. The concepts of innocence (the absence of corruption of soul) and of alienation (the presence of corruption of soul and resulting denial of anything relating to ideality) bring the issue of the human condition into focus and are thus concepts that most humans have found unbearably difficult to acknowledge.

To acknowledge human corruption and the resulting varying degrees of alienation has until now been impossible. Any differentiation only produced prejudice, condemnation and the insinuation that some people are good and others bad, when, with understanding of why humans became corrupted we are able to appreciate that no human is fundamentally bad or ‘evil’. Understanding the human condition, knowing the biological reason for humans’ corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated state, dignifies humans, makes the concept of ‘evil’ obsolete and lifts the ‘burden of guilt’ from the human race. Only with that dignifying explanation is it at last safe to acknowledge the cooperative integrative meaning of existence, the fact that humanity once lived cooperatively in accordance with this meaning, and that humans have since become variously corrupted, and thus variously alienated from that harmonious original instinctive state.

A2: Plato’s acknowledgment of the nature of our soul

An individual from the more innocent end of the alienation spectrum, Plato was of sufficient soundness (alienation-free) and security (unafraid of integrative meaning) to confront and describe the human condition, so it is not surprising that he was also able to acknowledge the existence of all aspects of ideality. As has already been described, he recognised in his world of ‘perfect forms’, in particular the ‘form of absolute Good’, the existence of integrative meaning. In his dialogue, the Phaedo, Plato also recognised that our soul is our species’ memory of a time when we lived ideally, harmoniously, cooperatively, lovingly and all-sensitively.

Of the more than two dozen dialogues Plato composed, The Republic and the Phaedo, written during his inspired middle period are considered his greatest works. The dialogue in the Phaedo commences Page 102 of
Print Edition with the assertion that humans are born with the ability to recognise what is ideal and what is not, that humans have an innate ability to know when something ‘falls short’ of, or ‘inadequately resembles’, or lacks ‘equality’ with what is ideal (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick). Plato went on to say that if we obtained ‘knowledge of these standards…these absolute realities, such as beauty and goodness…before our birth, and possessed it when we were born, we had knowledge, both before and at the moment of birth, not only of equality and relative magnitudes, but of all absolute standards. Our present argument applies no more to equality than it does to absolute beauty, goodness, uprightness, holiness, and, as I maintain, all those characteristics which we designate in our discussions by the term “absolute”’ (ibid). Plato was acknowledging that humans are born with not only what we now refer to as a ‘conscience’, an ability to recognise what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour, but with an awareness of what is beautiful and what is not.

Plato linked our innate awareness of ‘these absolute realities, such as beauty and goodness’ with our soul, saying, ‘it is logically just as certain that our souls exist before our birth as it is that these realities exist…[and our] soul is in every possible way more like the invariable [absolute entities] than the variable [non-absolutes].’ In an unambiguous statement Plato said that the ‘soul resembles the divine’ (ibid).

Interestingly, Plato also emphasised the immortality of the soul when he said that ‘a man’s soul…will exist after death no less than before birth’, because ‘that absolute reality…[such as] absolute equality [with goodness] or beauty [that our soul is imbued with]…remain always constant’ (ibid). With understanding of the human condition we can understand that humans’ corrupted state is, like our integratively-orientated soul, also part of the purpose of existence and is thus also eternally meaningful and thus eternally enduring—immortal.

As he does in The Republic, Plato emphasises in the Phaedo that effective inquiry and learning involve the recovery of awareness of the ‘absolute realities’ that our soul knows, stating, ‘what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge’ (ibid). Christ similarly saw the limitations to learning imposed by humans’ cave state of living in denial when he said, ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt. 11:25). As will be explained in the Resignation essay, since humans did not adopt an attitude of denial until mid-adolescence, children are free of denial, are honest in their thinking. ‘Great’ thinkers are simply people capable of thinking honestly. There are many sayings to the effect that genius Page 103 of
Print Edition is the ability to think like a child; the Chinese philosopher Mencius said, ‘The great man is he who does not lose his child’s-heart’ (Works, 4–3 BC, 4, tr. C.A. Wong). In the following quote Plato described the corruption of humans’ capacity to think truthfully: ‘when the soul uses the instrumentality [of denial] of the body for any inquiry…it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were fuddled…But when it investigates by itself [ie, free of the body’s intellect’s capacity for denial], it passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless, and being of a kindred nature, when it is once independent and free from interference, consorts with it always and strays no longer, but remains, in that realm of the absolute, constant and invariable’ (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick).

Plato’s acknowledgment that the ‘soul resembles the divine’ is echoed in one of the greatest (most honest) poems ever written, William Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807), in the wonderful line ‘But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home’. It is worth including more of this poem because of its extraordinary acknowledgment of humans’ past state of uncorrupted, alienation-free innocence. ‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and streams / The earth, and every common sight / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light / The glory and the freshness of a dream / It is not now as it hath been of yore / Turn wheresoe’er I may / By night or day / The things which I have seen I now can see no more // The Rainbow comes and goes / And lovely is the Rose / The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare / Waters on a starry night / Are beautiful and fair / The sunshine is a glorious birth / But yet I know, where’er I go / That there hath past away a glory from the earth.’ Wordsworth then described how nature and the innocence of youth reminded him of this lost paradise: ‘Thou Child of Joy / Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy! / Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call / Ye to each other make; I see / The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee / …While Earth herself is adorning / This sweet May-morning / And the Children are culling / On every side / In a thousand valleys far and wide’. Wordsworth is then reminded of his loss of innocence and the alienation that has set in, adding: ‘But there’s a Tree, of many, one / A single Field which I have looked upon / Both of them speak of something that is gone / …Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream? // Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar / Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness / Page 104 of
Print Edition But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home / Heaven lies about us in our infancy! / Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy / …And by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended / At length the Man perceives it die away / And fade into the light of common day / …Forget the glories he hath known / And that imperial palace whence he came.’ Wordsworth proceeded to say that it is only a denial-free thinker or a ‘prophet’ who can plumb the depths of the forgotten realm: ‘Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind / That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind / Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest / Which we are toiling all our lives to find / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave’. The ‘darkness lost, the darkness of the grave’ perfectly equates with Plato’s cave existence.

A3: Recognition of the soul’s world in mythology

Wordsworth’s acknowledgment of an innocent, cooperative past for humans is by no means unique. There is overwhelming evidence in all mythologies of the existence of a time in humans’ past when we lived in uncorrupted innocence, harmoniously and cooperatively. For example there is the story of the ‘Garden of Eden’ where humans lived before our, so-called, ‘fall from grace’. In Greek mythology there are references to a ‘golden age’ in humanity’s past, as seen in the following poem, Theogony, written by the famous 8th century BC Greek poet, Hesiod: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth / Of many-languaged men: they lived of old / When Saturn reigned in heaven, an age of gold / Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame / The hand’s, the foot’s proportions still the same / Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by / Wealthy in flocks; dear to the blest on high / Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ’midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands’ (tr. Elton).

In his best selling book of 1987, The Songlines, the explorer and philosopher Bruce Chatwin wrote: ‘Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttarakurus or “the Men of Perfect Virtue” of the Taoists. Pessimists Page 105 of
Print Edition often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability. The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal’ (p.227 of 325).

In The Heart of The Hunter, Sir Laurens van der Post acknowledged that, ‘There was indeed a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman in each of us’ (1961, p.126 of 233). D.H. Lawrence recognised that, ‘In the dust, where we have buried / The silent races and their abominations / We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life’ (Son of Woman: The Story of D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, 1931, p.227 of 402). Similarly Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted that ‘nothing is more gentle than man in his primitive state’ (The Social Contract and Discourses, 1755; tr. G.D.H. Cole, pub. 1913, Book IV, The Origin of Inequality, p.198 of 269).

If the reader would like more references to our lost state of innocence I suggest Richard Heinberg’s book Memories & Visions of Paradise. Considering the extent of denial in the world today it is an astonishing collection of evidence from many mythologies of belief in the existence of an integrated, cooperative past in humanity’s journey and of humanity’s current corrupted alienated state. The following is a sample from the 1990 edition of the book: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence…the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit, and as spiritual amnesia’ (pp.81–82 of 282).

With the human condition at last able to be explained it is finally safe to acknowledge the existence of our soul and the true world it is aware of. At last able to acknowledge our soul we are faced with the question of how we acquired it.

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Print Edition A4: The biological explanation for how we acquired our soul, our instinctive orientation to integrative, cooperative meaning

The question is, how did humans acquire their ‘soul’? As Bishop John Shelby Spong says in his 1992 book, Born Of A Woman, ‘If only human beings have souls [and not other animals], as the church has taught, one must be able to say when humanity became human and was infused with its divine and eternal soul’ (p.34).

The detailed biological explanation for how humans acquired an instinctive self or soul that is orientated to behaving cooperatively and lovingly is given in Beyond, in the chapter headed ‘How we Acquired Our Conscience’. What follows is a brief summary of that explanation.

As has been explained, the meaning or purpose of existence is the integration or development of order of matter. This development occurs as a result of the law of physics called negative entropy. In this process of developing larger and more stable wholes the parts of the developing whole must be able to develop the capacity for unconditional selflessness if the fully integrated whole is to develop. As Koestler said, in terms of behaviour, ‘the integrative tendency’ requires ‘coordination’. It requires that the parts of the new whole cooperate, which means behave selflessly, place the maintenance of the whole above maintenance of self. Put simply, selfishness is divisive or disintegrative while selflessness is integrative.

The process we refer to as genetic reproduction (more properly described as the genetic learning or genetic information-processing system) has been one of the main tools for this development of integration or order of matter on Earth. While genetics has enabled the development of a great deal of ordered matter—it has made possible the emergence of the great variety of ‘life’ on Earth—as a tool for developing order it has one particular limitation, which is that it requires traits to always be selfish. If an unconditionally selfless trait appears, such as the inclination to sacrifice yourself in defence of your group, then over time that trait self-eliminates, it cannot become established. Only selfish traits carry on.

(Those seeking to deny the truth of integrative meaning have made much of this inability of the genetic learning system to develop Page 107 of
Print Edition unconditional selflessness. Indeed, it is necessary to dedicate the next section to briefly dealing with all the contrived excuses for humans’ divisive nature. In that section it will be described how the fact that genes have to be selfish—even though they are committed to the task of integrating matter—has been used to infer that all life is essentially selfish, thus justifying human selfishness. It will be described how this particular contrived excuse—that genes are selfish because life is—has evolved through a number of stages of refinement, from ‘Social Darwinism’, to ‘Sociobiology’ and, most recently, to ‘Evolutionary Psychology’.)

The particular limitation of the genetic information refining or learning system is that it normally cannot learn or refine or develop unconditionally selfless traits because such genetic traits self-eliminate and thus cannot become established in a species. However, there was a way to overcome this genetic limitation to developing the order or integration of matter on Earth—through nurturing. While nurturing is a selfish trait (by nurturing and fostering the next generation—which has the parent’s nurturing trait—the nurturing trait is selfishly ensuring that it carries on from generation to generation), from an observer’s point of view it appears to be selfless behaviour. The mother is giving her offspring food, warmth, shelter and protection for apparently nothing in return. This point is significant, because it means that from the infant’s perspective, its mother is treating it with real love, which is unconditional selflessness. (With regard to unconditional selflessness being love, it was pointed out earlier that the old Christian word for love was ‘caritas’, which means charity or giving or selflessness.) The infant’s brain is therefore being trained or conditioned or indoctrinated with selflessness, and with enough training in selflessness the infant will grow to be an adult that behaves selflessly.

The ‘trick’ in this ‘love-indoctrination’ process lies in the fact that nurturing is encouraged genetically because the better infants are cared for the greater are their chances of survival, but there is an integrative side effect, which is that the more infants are nurtured the more their brain is trained in unconditional selflessness. There are very few situations in biology where animals appear to behave selflessly towards other animals; they normally selfishly compete for food, shelter, space and mating opportunities. Maternalism, a mother’s fostering of her infant, is one of the few situations where an animal appears to be behaving selflessly towards another animal. Page 108 of
Print Edition It was this appearance of selflessness that exists in the maternal situation that provided the opportunity for the development of love-indoctrination.

To develop nurturing—this ‘trick’ for overcoming the genetic learning system’s inability to develop unconditional selflessness—a species required the capacity to allow its offspring to remain in the infancy stage long enough for the infant’s brain to become indoctrinated with unconditional selflessness or love. Primates are especially facilitated for leaving offspring in infancy and thus developing love-indoctrination. Being semi-upright as a result of their arboreal heritage, their arms were free to carry a helpless, dependent infant. Species that cannot carry and easily look after their infants cannot develop love-indoctrination. Upright walking and its result, bipedalism, in humans is a direct result of the love-indoctrination process, which means bipedalism must have occurred early on in the emergence of humans, as fossil records now reveal.

There is a limiting factor in the development of love-indoctrination, which is that while the nurturing of infants is strongly encouraged genetically because it ensures greater infant survival, the side effect of training infants to behave selflessly as adults is that the selflessly behaving and even self-sacrificing adults don’t tend to reproduce their genes as successfully as selfishly behaved adults. The genes of exceptionally maternal mothers don’t tend to endure because their offspring tend to be too selflessly behaved. While substantial unconditional selflessness is able to be developed through love-indoctrination due to the greater initial survival of infants who have been well cared for, there was a limit to how much it could be developed genetically. What fortunately developed at this point of limitation was self-selection. In the coming section ‘A brief description of how our soul became corrupted’, it will be briefly explained how the love-indoctrination process liberated consciousness in our ape ancestors. It was the emerging conscious intellect in our ape ancestors that began to support the development of selflessness. As our ape ancestors gradually became conscious they began to recognise the importance of selflessness and as a result began to actively select for it. (While the integrative, selfless theme and purpose of existence has been denied by humans suffering from the human condition, it is an obvious truth to a conscious being who is not living in denial of it.) They could do this by consciously seeking out love-indoctrinated mates. These were members of the group who had Page 109 of
Print Edition experienced a long infancy and were closer to their memory of infancy (that is, younger). The older individuals became, the more their infancy training in love wore off; our ape ancestors began to recognise that the younger an individual, the more integrative he or she was likely to be. Our ancestors began to idolise, foster and select youthfulness because of its association with cooperativeness or integrativeness. The effect, over many thousands of generations, was to retard our physical development so that we became infant-like in our appearance as adults. This explains how we came to regard neotenous (infant-like) features—large eyes, dome forehead, snub nose and hairless skin—as beautiful. The physical effect of neoteny was that we lost most of our body hair and became infant-looking compared with our adult ape ancestors.

Since males were preoccupied with competing for mating opportunities before love-indoctrination, females were first to self-select for integrativeness by favouring integrative rather than competitive and aggressive mates. This helped love-indoctrination subdue the males’ divisive competitiveness. Without being aware of the process of love-indoctrination, primatologists have noted self-selection of integrativeness by females. ‘Male [baboon] newcomers also were generally the most dominant while long-term residents were the most subordinate, the most easily cowed. Yet in winning the receptive females and special foods, the subordinate, unaggressive veterans got more than their fair share, the newcomers next to nothing. Socially inept and often aggressive, newcomers made a poor job of initiating friendships’ (Shirley Strum, National Geographic mag. Nov. 1987). ‘The high frequencies of intersexual association, grooming, and food sharing together with the low level of male-female aggression in pygmy chimpanzees may be a factor in male reproductive strategies. Tutin (1980) has demonstrated that a high degree of reproductive success for male common chimpanzees was correlated with male-female affiliative behaviours. These included males spending more time with estrous females, grooming them, and sharing food with them’ (The Pygmy Chimpanzee, ed. Randall L. Susman, ch.13 by Alison & Noel Badrian, 1984, p.343 of 435). The bonobo or pygmy chimpanzees have the most matriarchal, female-centric societies of all apes and they are also the most peaceful, cooperative and intelligent of all apes. In fact, as is explained in Beyond, bonobos are living examples of what life was like in humanity’s ‘Garden of Eden’ stage, the time when humans lived utterly cooperatively and selflessly.

Historian Jacob Bronowski recognised the significant role played Page 110 of
Print Edition by self-selection when he stated: ‘We have to explain the speed of human evolution over a matter of one, three, let us say five million years at most. That is terribly fast. Natural selection simply does not act as fast as that on animal species. We, the hominids, must have supplied a form of selection of our own; and the obvious choice is sexual selection’ (The Ascent of Man, 1973).

Eventually, with love-indoctrination occurring over many generations, selflessness became instinctive or innate. This occurred because once unconditionally selfless individuals were continually appearing the genes ‘followed’ the whole process involved reinforcing it, including reinforcing selflessness. Similarly, when the conscious mind fully emerged and went its own way—embarked on its course for knowledge—the genes followed reinforcing that development. Generations of humans whose genetic make-up in some way helped them cope with the human condition were selected naturally, making humans’ alienated state somewhat instinctive in humans today. We have been ‘bred’ to survive the pressures of the human condition. The genes would always naturally follow and reinforce any development process—in this they were not selective. The difficulty was in getting the development of unconditional selflessness to occur, for, once it was occurring, it would naturally become instinctive over time.

It was through nurturing, the process of love-indoctrination and the accompanying self-selection of cooperativeness or selflessness, that humans were able to develop an instinctive orientation to behaving unconditionally selflessly and as a result become an utterly integrated cooperative, selfless, loving species. In our instinctive past, prior to becoming fully conscious and corrupted by the problem of the human condition, all humans behaved selflessly and considered the welfare of the group above their own. This instinctive memory of a loving, cooperative, alienation-free, all-sensitive past is what we term our soul, one expression of which is our conscience, the instinctive expectation within us that we behave selflessly, lovingly, cooperatively.

When Bishop Spong referred to ‘the church’ teaching that ‘only human beings have souls’, he is almost certainly referring to the Genesis passage in the Bible which says that ‘God created man in his own image’ (1:27). Since God is integrativeness, when humans became utterly integrated they were finally ‘in the image of God’ (ibid). Other animals that have not yet overcome the genetic limitation to developing unconditional selflessness and thus pure integration are not yet ‘in the image of God’, they don’t yet have an instinctive orientation to integrative Page 111 of
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It should be emphasised that although animals do not have an instinctive orientation to integrative meaning they are still a part of the Godly, integrative process, as are corrupted humans. There is such a thing as the ‘animal condition’, the stalled situation that most other animal species have found themselves in, of being unable to overcome the genetic limitation to developing order, of being unable to develop unconditional selflessness. They have to grow up and compete for mating opportunities, a horribly divisive activity. In the sense however that a ‘soul’ is that part of a being that is associated with, or belongs to, God, namely the integrative process, then all of life is soulful, meaningful and part of the integrative process.

The following wonderful quote, from Sir Laurens van der Post’s 1953 book The Face Beside the Fire, clarifies how all of life has participated fully in the great journey to develop order. Note that Sir Laurens acknowledges that there were races whose innocence was such that they could not cope with the new levels of corruption that emerged in the world and who died out as a result; in doing so, he fearlessly acknowledges different levels of alienation amongst humans and recognises that those more innocent races who died out also participated fully in the heroic journey to develop order on Earth. Thankfully, with the human condition reconciled, the more innocent and the more corrupt can live harmoniously, and before long corruption too will disappear from the human situation.

‘I was allowed to attend a victory parade, as it were, of all the life that has ever been. I saw all that has ever been come streaming through the long lanes and corridors of my blood, through their arch of admiralty, round the inner-square and then straight down past my own white lighted Hall. Out of the darkness that preceded Genesis and flood, it began with a glimmer and a worm of the unformed earth in love with the light to come. Yes! a worm with a lantern, a glow-worm with phosphorescent uniform, marched proudly at the head, and behind came great streams of being protozoic and pre-historic. Nothing was excluded and everything included, their small fires of being clearly lit, tended and well beloved. This, it was said, is the true, the noble heroic and unique crusade of the love of life. For look, among them not a brain but only matter tentatively and awkwardly assembled. Yet remark on their bearing and the trust with which they hurl themselves into the uncomprehended battle. Ah! tears of love and gratitude burned in my eyes at so urgently moving and life confiding a sight. To feel, at last, the burden that they carry for me in my own blood, to know at Page 112 of
Print Edition every second several of these reflected in white corpuscle and scarlet cell are dying unflinchingly in battle for my all, to know that giant lizard and lion as well as unicorn came after, and were hurled too into similar struggle and defence of the totality of all. I was allowed, too, to see the first man and registered the seismographic thrill of the marching column at the appearance of so skilled and complex a champion. I was allowed to speak to him and I touched his skin riddled with snake bite, his shoulder pierced by mastodon’s spike, his skull deep-scarred with sabre-tooth’s claw. And as reverently and tenderly I took his hand shaking with marshy malarial fever, I was moved to pity him by the evidence of such dread and unending war. But he would have none of it. He looked me fearless in the eye and in a voice that boomed like a drum in his stomach said: “Brother, it was worth it. Whatever they tell you, add this, it was worth it.”

I spoke to a Bushman half-eaten by a lion in the Kalahari, his only vessel a brittle ostrich egg with red and black triangles painted neatly on it, now broken and sand scattered. He looked in my grey eyes with the brown eyes of a people at dusk, slanted to bridge a chasm behind the face of a dying member of a dying and vanishing race. He too, my dying nomad brother, said: “Add, add quick before I go, ‘it was worth it’.” I spoke to an aborigine in the bight of the great gulf Tattooed with dung he said: “I vanish, but it was worth it.” In New Guinea, I met a stone-age Papuan, his black skin sheened with green after centuries in the jungle between basin and fall of water and spurting volcano, and he too said: “Doubt it not, it was worth it.” Everyone said, “Lovely gift of a life that we blindly trust burns with such loving fire in the dark that at any price, no matter how great, it is worth it.”

Yes, they all agreed and utterly convinced me, so that I can never doubt again. I wept when the great procession came to an end, for one and all, great and small—I loved them all. Yes, even to the worm that brought up the rear, with shaded night light and a nurse’s white, in its dress concealing a phial of the drug of the greater sleep made with a touch of the hand of God’s great, good night. Yes…I love them all; I believe them; I am ready for battle; and to continue at their head the journey of them all to the end of the road in my blood. At last, purified and complete, I am ready to awaken and defend my love’ (pp.292–294 of 312).

Page 113 of
Print Edition A5: The contrived excuses for humans’ divisive nature

As emphasised, while humans couldn’t truthfully explain their corrupted, divisive condition they had no choice other than to live in denial of the truth of their corrupted state. The main means for maintaining that denial was to deny there was an integrative, selfless purpose to existence. In fact humans deluded themselves that they were selfish because life was selfish. Rather than face the obvious truth of an order-developing, integrative, selfless, loving, cooperative purpose to existence, humans contrived excuses for their divisive selfish, aggressive and competitive behaviour.

The business of inventing or contriving excuses for humans’ divisive behaviour has gone through many stages of refinement. Humans’ original excuse for their competitive and aggressive behaviour was that ‘it is only natural because, after all, we are only animals and animals are always fighting and killing each other; animals are “red in tooth and claw”, so that’s why we are’. With the emergence of science this original misrepresentation of the genetic learning system as a divisive, rather than integrative, process was given a biological basis. This was Social Darwinism, the misrepresentation of Charles Darwin’s 1859 The Origin of Species theory of natural selection as being concerned with ‘the survival of the fittest’. As emphasised, the real concern or objective of genetic refinement, or ‘natural selection’ as Darwin originally termed it, was the integration or development of order of matter on Earth. Order is what was being learnt or refined or developed. In fact the word ‘development’ should replace the word ‘evolution’ in biology because evolution can, and has been, misrepresented as meaning change is undirected, meaningless and random, when it is not.

It should be explained that it was Darwin’s associates, Herbert Spencer and Alfred Russel Wallace, who persuaded Darwin to replace the term ‘natural selection’, that Darwin used in the first editions of his 1859 The Origin of Species, with the term ‘survival of the fittest’. They said the term ‘natural selection’ could be interpreted as implying the involvement of a personal selector. Darwin’s friend and great defender, Thomas Huxley called it an ‘unlucky substitution’ (Charles Darwin, Sir Gavin de Beer, 1963, p.178 of 290), and it certainly was. While a Page 114 of
Print Edition personal, interventionist God was not involved, God in the form of an integrative purpose to existence was. While Darwin’s idea of natural selection did not recognise the involvement of integrative purpose in change, the concept of natural selection did not preclude it. Natural selection simply recognised that some varieties of a species reproduced more than others. Whether those that reproduced more could be viewed as winners, as being ‘fitter’ or more worthwhile or ‘better’ than others, was not decided. Now that we can safely acknowledge integrative meaning, we can see that losing, in the sense of not reproducing, can be consistent with integration. Acts of unconditional selflessness, where an individual gives their life for the maintenance of the larger whole, and, as a result, does not reproduce, can be very meaningful, a fitter, ‘better’ way of behaving. As a denial-free thinker or prophet, Christ was able to acknowledge the truth of the importance of selflessness when he said, ‘Greater love has no-one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:13). Again, the old Christian word for love was ‘caritas’, which means charity or giving or selflessness. In this light, what Christ said can be interpreted as ‘greater selflessness has no one than to behave selflessly’.

Social Darwinism became further refined with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a text that claimed to be ‘the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior’, and asked readers in its final chapter to ‘consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet.’ Essentially, Wilson’s theory of Sociobiology proposed that human selfishness is due to humans’ need to perpetuate their genes.

The final refinement of this evasive, contrived excuse that ‘genes are selfish and that’s why we humans are’ has been the emergence in recent years of the theory of ‘Evolutionary Psychology’. This theory argues that even acts of altruism amongst humans can be explained in terms of genetic selfishness. In his 1994 book The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are—The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Robert Wright attributed a cooperative inclination in humans—our ‘morals’—to biological situations of reciprocity, to situations where animals cooperate for mutual benefit. He maintained that acts of selflessness amongst humans are really acts of biological selfishness, of our genes ‘saying’ ‘I’ll scratch your back on the condition you scratch mine’. With this theory, denial-compliant biologists finally found a means to misportray the cooperatively orientated and ideal-world-aware instinctive self or soul in humans as being nothing more Page 115 of
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In his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Edward O. Wilson took the art of denial to its absolute extreme point, suggesting that Evolutionary Psychology’s supposed ability to explain the moral aspects of humans means that biology and philosophy, the sciences and the humanities, could be reconciled. He talked about ‘the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities…of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge…to create a common groundwork of explanation’ (p.6 of 374), and went so far as to say, ‘The strongest appeal of consilience is…the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty’ (ibid. p.7). An extract from Consilience, published in the prestigious journal The Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 1998), and boldly titled ‘The Biological Basis of Morality’, was introduced thus: ‘Philosophers and theologians have almost always conceived of moral instincts as being transcendent or God-given. Is it possible, though, that ethical reasoning derives not from outside but from our very nature as evolving material creatures?’ To illustrate just how bold Wilson was in his claims to have made sense of the philosophical aspect of human life using biology, one of the headings used in the extract was ‘The Origins of Religion’. Religions have been the custodians—albeit using abstract, metaphysical terms—of the truth of the existence of the Godly ideals of life, and all the other great truths associated with those ideals, in particular the truth that within humans there exists a soul and spirit imbued with awareness of the Godly, integrative, ideal state. These truths can be explained biologically, and ‘the human condition’, the dilemma of the existence of good and evil in the human make-up, can also be explained biologically, but to use biological lies to explain them is an outrage; the ultimate example of deceit, dishonesty, delusion and alienation from the truth.

Having dismissed the human soul as merely a subtle form of selfishness, Wilson brazenly summarised by saying ‘Rousseau claimed [that humanity] was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, who were later corrupted…[but what] Rousseau invented [was] a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ (Consilience, 1998, p.37 of 374). The ‘stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology’ is in fact Evolutionary Psychology. It is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was stunningly accurate in his belief that humans have a pure, altruistic instinctive awareness within them. As emphasised, it is the ultimate lie to claim that the magic (integratively-orientated, non-alienated and thus all-Page 116 of
Print Edition sensitive) ‘child’ within us (our original instinctive self) is nothing more than a conniving, selfish, Machiavellian manipulator. Wilson, who is a professor at Harvard University, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, basically for being the lord of lying, the supremo of anti-soul—and, since Christ was the living expression of our soul, also a leading expression of the Antichrist. In the following quote, Randolph Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Michigan, expresses a justified feeling of alarm and revulsion towards the theory of Evolutionary Psychology: ‘The discovery that tendencies to altruism are shaped by benefits to genes is one of the most disturbing in the history of science. When I first grasped it, I slept badly for many nights, trying to find some alternative that did not so roughly challenge my sense of good and evil. Understanding this discovery can undermine commitment to morality—it seems silly to restrain oneself if moral behavior is just another strategy for advancing the interests of one’s genes. Some students, I am embarrassed to say, have left my courses with a naïve notion of the selfish-gene theory that seemed to them to justify selfish behavior, despite my best efforts to explain the naturalistic fallacy’ (The Origins of Virtue, Matt Ridley, 1996, p.126 of 295). The position of humans under the duress of the human condition has been that they would rather destroy ‘commitment to morality’ than face the truth of integrative meaning. Such has been the extent of human insecurity, and such has been the degree of alienation or lying or denial that has developed on Earth.

To summarise, genetic reproduction is an integrative process, a way of developing the order of matter on Earth. It is not a ‘survival of the fittest’, divisive process, as Social Darwinism, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology have taught. As a tool for integrating matter, the limitation of genetics is that it normally cannot develop unconditionally selfless traits. Unconditional selflessness—the ability to consider the good of the whole above the good of self—is the ultimate integrative trait for parts of a whole to have, and the inability to develop it is a serious limitation in the development of larger wholes.

The reason the genetic tool for developing order cannot normally develop unconditional selflessness is that for a genetic trait to carry on from generation to generation it has to be selfish. For example, if an animal is born with a genetic inclination to unconditionally selflessly give its life whenever its group is threatened, then, when it does give its life, that unconditionally selfless trait disappears. Unconditionally selfless traits normally cannot become established Page 117 of
Print Edition genetically. (The exception was the development of unconditional selflessness through love-indoctrination.) Selflessness can only develop genetically up to the situation of reciprocity, because reciprocity is basically a selfish trait. It is a limitation of genetic refinement that unconditional selflessness cannot normally develop. This inability does not mean that the meaning of existence is to be selfish, as these contrived excuses maintain.

A more comprehensive list of the contrived excuses that have been used for humans’ divisive behaviour include the original excuse that ‘animals are red in tooth and claw and that’s why humans are’; Social Darwinism, the need to compete for survival; B.F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Theory which argued that man is a slave to reward and punishment; Konrad Lorenz’s Theory which excused humans’ divisive behaviour by saying it is stereotyped and the product of past experiences—that it is instinctive; Robert Ardrey’s Theory which stated human competitiveness was due to an imperative need to defend their territory; Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology Theory, which argued that our selfishness is due to humans’ need to perpetuate their genes; Chaos Theory, with its emphasis on the world being chaotic rather than ordered; and Evolutionary Psychology, with its use of reciprocity to account for any acts of altruism in human behaviour.

A6: A brief description of how our soul became corrupted

The manner in which humans’ conscious search for knowledge corrupted their original, innocent, loving, cooperative instinctive soulful state, creating their corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour, is the central explanation presented in Beyond. What follows is a brief summary of that explanation.

Understanding how humans became corrupted—explaining the so-called ‘origin of sin’—depends on appreciating the difference between the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems.

What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we are fully conscious, able to understand the relationship between cause and effect. Consciousness is a product of the nerve-based learning system’s ability to remember. It is memory which allows understanding of cause and effect to develop. Once you can remember past events you can Page 118 of
Print Edition compare them with current events and identify common or regularly occurring patterns. This knowledge of, or ‘insight’ into, what has commonly occurred in the past enables you to make predictions about what is likely to occur in the future—and with feedback or ‘experience’ these predictions can be refined. Sufficiently developed, this capacity to understand the relationship of events that occur through time gives rise to the ability to self-adjust. Being aware or ‘conscious’ of how experiences are related puts the intellect in a position to manage events to its own chosen ends. It can wrest management of life from the instincts.

Humans became conscious some 2 million years ago. How this happened is explained in Beyond in the chapter ‘How We Acquired Consciousness’. Basically it was the development of a truthful mind, a mind trained in unconditional selflessness, which occurred following the development of love-indoctrination, that liberated consciousness in humans. In the explanation of ‘How we acquired consciousness’ in Beyond, what is revealed is that the human mind has been alienated from truthful, effective thinking—kept ignorant—twice in its history. The first time was when we were like other animals, genetically distanced from thinking selflessly. Normally unconditionally selfless behaviour (that is, outside the nurturing, love-indoctrination situation) led to the elimination of the individual who behaved that way, with the result that over time only individuals who were not inclined to think that way, individuals who had a genetic ‘block’ against such selfless thinking, survived. As soon as a mind begins to become conscious, able to understand cause and effect, it begins to realise that selflessness is a meaningful way of behaving, but such thinking becomes discouraged through natural selection, with the result that full consciousness can never develop. The human mind was kept from truthful and effective thought a second time when, approximately 1.5 million years ago, the duress of living with the human condition forced adults to psychologically live in denial of selfless-meaning acknowledging thought. This essay is primarily concerned with explaining how alienation has (deliberately as it turns out) kept the human mind ignorant, unable to think properly. With the advent of denial of the human condition, the human mind has retreated from consciousness into virtual unconsciousness. We are now nearly as mentally incognisant as animals. In fact there is an animated cartoon called Wallace & Gromit that plays on this state of affairs. Wallace is a lonely, sad—alienated—human figure whose dog Page 119 of
Print Edition Gromit is very much on an intellectual par with him in his world. They both have the same blank, stupefied expression and muddle their way through life’s adventures together.

 

 

 

 

Incidentally, the suggestion that it was 2 million years ago that the ancestral human mind was liberated from the situation that other animals are presently in, where they have a block in their mind stopping truthful, effective thinking, comes from many indicators. For instance, the spread of our human ancestors from their ancestral home in central Africa began approximately 2 million years ago. This ability to wander and, no doubt, wonder ‘what lay over the hill’ strongly suggests consciousness, the ability to self-manage, had emerged. There would also have been an emerging need for self-distraction from the human condition which new realms would have helped supply. Also, while brain size is only an indicator of intelligence, the sudden and rapid increase in brain volume of humans and their ancestors from 500 cc to 1400 cc where it is today, began around 2 million years ago. Interestingly anthropologists have long recognised that the average brain volume of humans has not significantly increased in half a million years, the rapid increase in brain volume having ceased at 1400 cc at this time. Anthropologists have not been able to explain this phenomenon, but with understanding of the human condition and an appreciation of the fact that the more intelligent a person is, the sooner and more defiantly do they challenge their instinctive self, we can now see that eventually a balance had to be struck between answer-finding but corrupting Page 120 of
Print Edition cleverness and soul-obedient soundness. That particular level of IQ or intelligence quotient seemingly sets a limit on how much brain power and therefore brain volume humans have been able to develop.

To return to the issue of how our soul became corrupted: prior to becoming fully conscious and able to self-manage—consciously decide how to behave—humans were controlled by and obedient to their instincts, as other animals still are. As novelist Aldous Huxley pointed out: ‘Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own…immanent law’ (The Perennial Philosophy, 1946).

Unlike the nerve-based learning system, the gene-based learning system is not insightful and cannot become conscious of the relationship of events that occur through time. Genetic selection gives animals adaptions or orientations—instinctive programming—for managing their lives, but those genetic orientations, those instincts, are not understandings. When our conscious mind emerged it was not enough for it to be oriented by instincts. It had to find understanding to operate effectively and fulfil its great potential to manage life. The problem is that when it began to experiment in the management of life from a basis of understanding in the presence of already established instinctive behavioural orientations, a battle broke out between the two.

Our intellect began to experiment in understanding as the only way of finding out the correct and incorrect understandings for managing existence, but the instincts, being in effect ‘unaware’ or ‘ignorant’ of the intellect’s need to carry out these experiments, ‘opposed’ any understanding-produced deviations from the established instinctive orientations. The instincts in effect ‘criticised’ and ‘tried to stop’ the conscious mind’s necessary search for knowledge. Unable to understand and thus explain why these experiments in self-adjustment were necessary, the intellect was unable to refute this implicit criticism from the instincts. The unjust criticism from the instincts ‘upset’ the intellect and left the intellect no choice but simply to defy the ‘opposition’ from the instincts.

The intellect’s defiance expressed itself in a number of ways. It attacked the instincts’ unjust criticism, tried to deny or block from its mind the instincts’ unjust criticism, and tried to prove the instincts’ unjust criticism wrong. Humans’ upset angry, alienated and egocentric state—precisely the divisive condition we humans suffer from—Page 121 of
Print Edition appeared. (Note, the dictionary defines ‘ego’ as ‘conscious thinking self’, so ego is another word for the intellect. The word ‘egocentric’ then means that the intellect became centred or focused on trying to prove the instincts’ criticism wrong; it became focused on trying to prove its worth, prove that it was good and not bad.)

This conflict was then greatly compounded by the fact that the angry and aggressive behaviour was completely at odds with humans’ particular instinctive orientation, which was to behave lovingly and cooperatively. From an initial state of upset humans then had to contend with a sense of guilt which greatly compounded their insecurity and frustrations, making them even more angry, egocentric and alienated. This escalating situation could only be ended by the dignifying, relieving understanding of why we became upset in the first place—an understanding that depended on the arrival of science and the ability to explain the differing natures of the gene-based and nerve-based learning systems.

A portion of Wordsworth’s astonishingly truthful poem, Intimations of Immortality, was included earlier. After describing the soul’s world and humans’ loss of it, Wordsworth intimated at the reason for our loss of innocence, writing, ‘High instincts before which our mortal Nature / Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised’.

Eugène Marais, who was the first to study primates in their natural habitat, described the emergence of the conflict between instincts and intellect in his remarkable 1930s book, The Soul of the Ape: ‘The great frontier between the two types of mentality is the line which separates non-primate mammals from apes and monkeys. On one side of that line behaviour is dominated by hereditary memory, and on the other by individual causal memory…The phyletic history of the primate soul can clearly be traced in the mental evolution of the human child. The highest primate, man, is born an instinctive animal. All its behaviour for a long period after birth is dominated by the instinctive mentality…As the…individual memory slowly emerges, the instinctive soul becomes just as slowly submerged…For a time it is almost as though there were a struggle between the two’ (written in 1930s, first pub. 1969, pp.77–79 of 170).

The biblical story of the Garden of Eden contains an acknowledgment that it was the emergence of consciousness and the resulting necessary search for knowledge that led to humans’ corrupted, ‘fallen’ state. In Genesis it says, ‘God did say, “you must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden…or you will die…[although it was also pointed out that] God knows that when you eat of it your eyes Page 122 of
Print Edition will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil…the fruit of the tree was…desirable for gaining wisdom”’ (3:3,5,6). Conscious humans had to defy their integrative meaning-orientated, Godly instinctive self—take the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge—in order to eventually become knowing or understanding of the Godly, integrative world.

In Zen and Buddhism there is acknowledgment that the corruption of humans’ innocent instinctive state was caused by the interference of the conscious mind. In Zen and Buddhism the loss of innocence is called ‘the affective contamination (klesha)’ or ‘the interference of the conscious mind predominated by intellection (vijnana)’ (Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis, D.J Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Richard Demartino, 1960, p.20).

This extraordinarily honest quote from the writings of Sir Laurens van der Post reveals the truth of just how corrupted humans have become, and of the estrangement they now feel: ‘This shrill, brittle, self-important life of today is by comparison a graveyard where the living are dead and the dead are alive and talking [through our soul] in the still, small, clear voice of a love and trust in life that we have for the moment lost…[there was a time when] All on earth and in the universe were still members and family of the early race seeking comfort and warmth through the long, cold night before the dawning of individual consciousness in a togetherness which still gnaws like an unappeasable homesickness at the base of the human heart’ (Testament to the Bushmen, 1984, pp.127–128 of 176).

In a quote from the writings of Carl Jung that was included earlier, Jung alluded to how much of the magic, true world humans lost access to when they became conscious. He wrote of ‘that cosmic night which was psyche [soul] long before there was any ego consciousness’ (Civilization in Transition, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol.10, 1945).

In Beyond there are numerous quotes from literature that recognise that the emergence of consciousness and the conflict that ensued with humans’ already established instinctive self was the cause of humans’ corrupted condition.

It is this biological explanation of humans’ corrupted condition that liberates humans from the sense of guilt that has plagued them for 2 million years, and caused them to have to live in a cave-like state of denial and alienation. The historic ‘burden of guilt’ has been lifted from the human race. We can at last understand that there was a sound (ie integrative) biological reason for why humans became divisive and corrupted.

Again, as was emphasised in the Introduction, the finding of understanding Page 123 of
Print Edition of humans’ non-ideal, upset, corrupted, divisive behaviour does not condone such behaviour, it does not sanction ‘evil’; rather, through bringing compassion to the situation, it allows the insecurity that produces such behaviour to subside, and the behaviour to disappear.

A7: There were people who could live in the sun’s light, but they were unbearably condemning for the cave prisoners

As explained, the corruption of the human soul began some 2 million years ago with the emergence of consciousness, yet we can expect it to only have become well entrenched roughly one million years ago. This means that the great majority of our species’ ancestry, from approximately 8 million years ago (when primates had become sufficiently adapted to bipedal, arms-free walking to be able to hold a helpless infant and thus develop love-indoctrination) to one million years ago, was spent living in a predominantly cooperative, loving state. Therefore our species’ instinctive heritage, and thus instinctive expectation, is essentially one of encountering a cooperative, loving world, a world that behaviourally is almost totally at odds with the world humans are now born into.

The corruption that began with the emergence of consciousness has been accumulating ever since. Each new generation of humans has entered a world that was already corrupt and their instinctive self or soul, as a result, has been compromised and corrupted by the encounter. The level or extent of corruption in the world has been increasing as each generation added to the existing corruption the corruption it incurred from its own conscious search for knowledge. While self-restraint could, to a degree, contain the corruption and its propagation, it was ultimately, only the reconciling, dignifying and ameliorating understanding of the reason for this corrupt behaviour that could end the cumulative process.

What this means is that all adults today are going to be corrupted to various degrees from encounters with the corruption already present in the world. It follows that those who have had less encounters in their upbringing with the corrupted angry, egocentric and alienated human-condition-afflicted behaviour of humans are going Page 124 of
Print Edition to be less corrupted than those who have experienced more. People who have been more sheltered from the corruption in the world during their upbringing, more nurtured in their infancy and childhood, are less soul-damaged, less departed from our species’ original instinctive orientation to the cooperative, integrative ideals of life and, as a result have had to use less denial of those ideals to cope with them.

With some people less corrupted than others, it also follows that amongst the millions of people on Earth, at any one time there were always going to be a few people who were sufficiently uncorrupted—sufficiently free of insecure competitive egocentricity, anger and alienation—not to be condemned by the integrative, cooperative, loving, selfless ideals of life, who thus did not have to live in denial of those ideals. If you are not at odds with the ideals you do not have to deny them. Plato hypothesised such innocence thus, ‘But suppose…that such natures were cut loose, when they were still children, from the dead weight of worldliness, fastened on them by sensual indulgences like gluttony, which distorts their minds’ vision to lower things, and suppose that when so freed they were turned towards the truth, then the same faculty in them would have as keen a vision of truth as it has of the objects on which it is at present turned’ (p.284).

Plato’s reference to ‘four states’ of effectiveness in thinking of the human mind was mentioned earlier when explaining the spectrum of denial in the world. These various states of denial or alienation and resulting effectiveness in thinking are a result of humans’ different encounters during their upbringing with humanity’s corrupting struggle with the human condition. Variously in denial and thus variously separated or alienated from the truth, humans have therefore been living in various states of dishonesty and delusion.

Those who were exceptionally fortunate in escaping encounters with the ‘worldly’ products of humanity’s necessary battle with the human condition, those who had few encounters with the anger, egocentricity and alienation that exists to various degrees within people, the very few who retained exceptional innocence, could face the ‘sun/fire’—face the truth of the cooperative, integrative ideals of life, or God, and the issue that arose immediately, of ‘why aren’t humans innocent?’—without feeling confronted by their own lack of innocence. Only innocent people have been able to confront the subject of the human condition with impunity. Given the extent of the corruption in humans now as a result of humanity’s long struggle Page 125 of
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In Plato’s symbolism, these people who could confront the integrative ideals were those who could live outside the cave in the illuminating sunlight. Historically individuals who were uncorrupted enough, sound enough, to confront the truth of integrative meaning and look into and talk truthfully about the human condition have been termed ‘prophets’. As Wordsworth so eloquently said: ‘Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep / Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind / That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep / Haunted for ever by the eternal mind / Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! / On whom those truths do rest / Which we are toiling all our lives to find / In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave’. Without the ability to recognise the issue of the human condition, and all the vastly differing states of corruption and its outcome, denial and alienation, it was not possible to demystify prophets; but now we can, and must. They are not supernatural beings, simply people at one end of the spectrum of alienation that existed in a world struggling with the dilemma of the human condition, with their own particular contribution to make in the human journey.

Moses was an innocent, unevasive, denial-free thinker or prophet, and, as it says in the Bible, ‘no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face’ (Deut. 34:10). Unlike most people, Moses was, to quote Isaiah, a person able to ‘delight in the fear of the Lord’ (Isa. 11:3). Jacob was another exceptionally innocent person and marvelled that he was able to confront the truth of integrative meaning and the resulting dilemma of the human condition and survive, saying, ‘I have seen God face to face and yet I am still alive’ (Genesis 32:30). Moses described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire on the mountain. [This was possible only because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire’ (Deut. 5:4,5). (Note the use of the fire metaphor again here for the condemning cooperative, integrative ideals, or God.)

Thus, there have always been rare individuals who could confront the truth of integrative meaning or God, individuals who could live outside the cave of denial in ‘the light of day.’ While some of them, such as Moses, lived among people who could tolerate them, their Page 126 of
Print Edition truthfulness was normally too confronting and condemning for those around them who were having to live in denial of the human condition. As a result, prophets were often persecuted. As it says in the Bible ‘was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?’ (Acts 7:52).

Plato’s Republic is concerned with the questions of ‘what is a just state?’, and ‘who is a just individual?’ (Encarta). In addressing these questions Plato argued that the achievement of a just society required an ideal type of leader, whom he referred to variously as ‘philosopher rulers’ or ‘philosopher kings’ or ‘philosopher princes’ or ‘philosopher guardians’, by which he meant ‘the true philosophers, those whose passion is to see the truth’ (p.238), or, to quote from the Encarta entry, individuals whose ‘minds have been so developed that they are able to grasp the Forms and, therefore, to make the wisest decisions’—individuals who are referred to in this and my earlier books as sound, denial-free, unevasive thinkers. The truth is the ideal leader is someone who can explain situations sufficiently clearly for people to be able to manage situations from their own understanding. The ideal leader is a guide and educator. The Encarta text continues, ‘Indeed, Plato’s ideal education system is primarily structured so as to produce philosopher-kings.’

While the ideal is to be able to live in the presence of the ‘sun’, or the ‘Form of the Good’, or the truth of integrative meaning—look at ‘God face to face’, and be able to think truthfully, effectively and thus intelligibly, the reality is that such people ‘whose passion is to see the truth’ have been very rare and their denial-free, unevasive truthfulness far too confronting for ‘normal’, human-condition-afflicted, soul-corrupted, angry, egocentric and alienated people. The fact is that most people have had the exact opposite of a ‘passion to see the truth’, their passion has been to avoid and deny it.

Plato argues that, ‘If you get, in public affairs, men who are so morally impoverished that they have nothing they can contribute themselves, but who hope to snatch some compensation for their own inadequacy from a political career, there can never be good government. They start fighting for power…[whereas those who pursue a life] of true philosophy which looks down on political power…[should be] the only men to get power…men who do not love it…rulers [who] come to their duties with least enthusiasm.’ Plato says that people who have returned from seeing clearly in the sun and become ‘used to seeing in the dark’ are greatly advantaged because ‘once you get used to it you will see a thousand times better than they [the cave prisoners] do and will recognize the various shadows, and know what they are shadows of, because you have seen the Page 127 of
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Plato’s idea, that he summarised when he said, ‘isn’t it obvious whether it’s better for a blind man or a clear-sighted one to keep an eye on anything?’ (p.244), is all very well, but it has been largely unworkable due to its extreme idealism. Ideally society would select for ‘philosopher rulers or guardians’, for prophets, for people who could confront ‘the Good’ and thus think truthfully, free of distortion. However, without the explanation that ameliorates the human condition and explains and dignifies corrupted humans, differentiating in society according to people’s soundness or level of alienation only led to prejudice, to the more corrupted and alienated being treated and made to feel that they were evil, bad, worthless and inferior. Only with understanding of the human condition, only with the biological explanation for why humans unavoidably became corrupted, does it become safe to acknowledge the different degrees of corruption and alienation among humans. To even acknowledge the existence of alienation while humanity lacked the biological reason for it, was unjustly and thus unbearably condemning of most people. It was almost impossible to mention anything to do with the human condition until it could be explained. Almost all humans had to live in a ‘dark cave’ of denial.

The problem with the concept of having ‘philosopher rulers or guardians’—prophets—as leaders of society or, in terms of education, of deliberately cultivating such leaders, was that it was only an ideal. It could not easily work in practice. The soundness of truthful thinkers or prophets was so confronting for everyone around them that as a consequence, instead of cultivating them through the education system and letting them lead society, they were normally not cultivated in education and, as will shortly be described, even eliminated from society.

Indeed, how much innocence and its soundness an individual could tolerate being confronted with, or a society could tolerate in its midst depended on that individual or society’s own level of soundness. The more corrupted and alienated they were, the more hurtfully condemning innocence was and the less they could afford to acknowledge innocence. Therefore, a relatively innocent and sound society could tolerate being led by prophets. The early Athenian society must have been composed of relatively innocent people because it elected only uncorrupted, innocent shepherds to run its society, people whose lifestyle kept them isolated from the corrupting world Page 128 of
Print Edition and kept them close to nature, the home of our instinctive self or soul, and thus reinforcing of that soul. Indeed the prophet Mohammed observed ‘that every prophet was a shepherd in his youth’ (Eastern Definitions, Edward Rice, 1978, p.260 of 433). Sir Laurens van der Post notes that in the turbulent period of Plato’s time Pericles, a close friend of Plato’s stepfather, ‘urged the Athenians therefore to go back to their ancient rule of choosing men who lived on and off the land and were reluctant to spend their lives in towns, and prepared to serve them purely out of sense of public duty and not like their present rulers who did so uniquely for personal power and advancement’ (Foreword to Progress Without Loss of Soul, by Theodor Abt, 1983, p.xii of 389).

Of course not being able to differentiate according to soundness or alienation has not stopped societies differentiating according to cleverness and egocentricity. The more clever and the more egocentric have almost always dominated innocence and its soundness. In fact innocence in all its forms everywhere has been ruthlessly, and often brutally, oppressed and repressed. The reality is that ‘might has ruled over right’. Countries and industries are typically run by the most powerful, not by the most sound. In education you cannot enter tertiary education facilities without passing exams that essentially test your level of mental cleverness or IQ. We do not have exams to test a person’s level of soundness or lack of alienation. (Incidentally, to say we do not know who is alienated and who is innocent is untrue. For example, to ignore, deny, repress and in the extreme persecute to the point even of crucifying innocence, as humans have done, they first had to recognise it. It would be as easy, indeed, probably much easier, to design exams that test for a person’s level of alienation as it has been to design exams that test for people’s level of IQ. The problem is not the ability to do so but the danger of doing so.)

The practice of allowing the clever and the powerful to rule has been permissible because to be made to feel inferior for not being clever or powerful was not anywhere near as psychologically devastating as having your alienation pointed out and exposed. Now that the human condition has been explained and we can at last safely acknowledge soundness without condemning those who are corrupted, soundness can, should and must come to the fore. As Christ anticipated, ‘the meek…inherit the earth’ (Matt. 5:5); ‘many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first’ (Matt. 19:30, 20:16; Mark 10:31; Luke 13:30). When Christ said, ‘The stone the builders rejected has become Page 129 of
Print Edition the capstone’ (Ps. 118:22; Matt. 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11; 1 Pet. 2:7) he also was referring to this time when innocence with all its soundness would come to the fore from its previously repressed and denied position. Sir Laurens van der Post referred to this biblical analogy when he anticipated this new situation, writing that, ‘It is part of the great secret which Christ tried to pass on to us when He spoke of the “stone which the builders rejected” becoming the cornerstone of the building to come. The cornerstone of this new building of a war-less, non-racial world, too, I believe, must be…those aspects of life which we have despised and rejected for so long’ (The Dark Eye in Africa, 1955, p.155 of 159). It should be emphasised that this coming situation does not mean that the less innocent are now going to be oppressed as the innocent have been. With understanding of the human condition now available, the corrupt anger, egocentricity and alienation produced by the battle with the human condition will subside and eventually disappear from the human make-up forever. While this is happening the innocent will be able to understand and thus be compassionate towards those who are more embattled, those whose instinctive self or soul has been upset from encounters with humanity’s necessary battle with the human condition.

With understanding of the human condition found, Plato’s ideal of society being led by soundness can finally come to fruition. In the new human-condition-understood, genuinely compassionate world, everyone will have a role based on the acknowledgment, rather than denial of each individual’s level of soundness. (The different roles in this new world are depicted in the final cartoon in Beyond under the heading ‘The Activities of the New World’. This cartoon is also reproduced in this book towards the end of the Resignation essay.)

While placing sound people in positions of leadership would seem the sensible thing to do, prior to finding understanding of the human condition the tragic reality was that, instead of leading society, innocence had to a degree to be repressed because of its unjust condemnation of those who were no longer innocent. The danger of excessive repression of innocence was that it led to an overly corrupt society, for while exceptionally innocent, truth-confronting thinkers or prophets threatened the world of denial, and thus were often persecuted and even murdered, they contributed the most soundness to society. They were in fact the strongest balancing influence a society could have.

Over the years, an effective means of reducing the condemning Page 130 of
Print Edition criticism of prophets was to assign to them a divine status and regard them as beings from some remote, ethereal realm, separate from the human world. If they were divine and not Earthly then humans could avoid hurtful comparisons with their own alienated selves, and could easily treat the prophets as figures to be revered, even worshipped. In fact, in pre-scientific times, religions were sometimes founded around the truthful words and lives of prophets. People deferred to the prophet’s truthful, sound state and were thus ‘born-again’ to ideality. Religions offered people an immensely valuable way of living meaningful lives despite their alienated state.

Even prophets who became revered as deities after their death were often subjected to persecution and martyrdom during their life because of their exposing truthfulness. As mentioned, the Bible refers to this process when it asks, ‘was there ever a prophet your fathers did not persecute?’ Like Plato, Christ used the metaphors of light and darkness to describe people’s hate of the exposing truth, when he said: ‘the light shines in the darkness but…everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed’ (John 1:5, 3:20). Christ also knew how persecuted prophets could be—before being murdered himself, he lamented, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets’ (Matt. 23:37).

In summary, there have always been a few exceptionally innocent people who could confront integrative meaning without being condemned by it, people we have historically referred to as prophets. While they could confront and think about the human condition—using Plato’s symbolism, they could think with ‘the aid of the sun’—their truthfulness has been extremely confronting and condemning for the rest of humanity.