21. Summary of the nurturing, Love-Indoctrination process

In summary, all the evidence indicates that it was through nurturing, the process of love-indoctrination, and the accompanying mate selection of cooperativeness, that humans were able to develop an instinctive orientation to behaving unconditionally selflessly and, Page 101 of
PDF Version as a result, become a totally integrated multicellular species. The evidence shows that in our instinctive past, prior to becoming fully conscious some 2 million years ago and as a result upset and afflicted by the burden of the human condition, all humans were selfless and considered the welfare of the group above their own welfare. An instinctive memory within us of this upset-free, loving, cooperative, moral, innocent, alienation-free, all-sensitive, heavenly childhood state is what we have termed our ‘soul’, one expression of which is our ‘conscience’, the instinctive expectation within us that we behave morally; that is, selflessly, lovingly and cooperatively towards all of existence. These explanations and the evidence for them show humans do have genuinely altruistic instincts—that our selfless moral nature is not derived from reciprocity which is a subtle form of selfishness but is concerned with behaving in a truly unconditionally selfless way.

In his 1992 book Born Of A Woman, Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote, ‘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). When Bishop Spong refers to ‘the church’ teaching that ‘only human beings have souls’, he is almost certainly referring to the Genesis passage in the Bible, which states that ‘God created man in his own image’ (1:27). We can now understand that since God is integrativeness when our human forebears became totally integrated they were finally ‘in the image of God’ (ibid). Non-human animals who 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 meaning or God, like our human instinctive self or soul does. This is not to say that other animals aren’t completely part of God or negative entropy or integrative meaning’s great plan of developing the order of matter on Earth. Other animals are of course fully involved in that heroic venture. In fact they suffer from ‘the animal condition’ of not being able to develop unconditional selflessness and of having to relentlessly compete with each other as a result—a condition as harrowing in its own way as the human condition.

The overwhelming evidence is that it was through the process of love-indoctrination and the accompanying mate selection that humans were able to develop an instinctive orientation to behaving unconditionally selflessly—an aptitude for ‘runaway kindness’ as Geoffrey Miller acknowledged. As stated, the instinctive memory of this time of living completely cooperatively is what we term our soul.

It should be emphasised again here how confronting the truth of a soulful, loving, integrative past has been for upset humans. A good measure of just how unbearable it has been was given earlier when it was pointed out that while ‘soul’ and ‘love’ are two of our most commonly used words, in any language, mechanistic science has no definition or interpretation of them. In fact, as Robin Allott said about mechanistic science’s attitude to love, ‘Love has been described as a taboo subject, not serious, not appropriate for scientific study’, and as Ronald Conway said about mechanistic science’s attitude to soul, ‘Soul is customarily suspected in empirical psychology and analytical philosophy as a disreputable entity’. The truth is love is the very theme of existence, the most important activity on the planet—that is how ‘serious’ and ‘appropriate for scientific study’ it really is. In the case of our soul, if we go back to ancient times when humans were less upset and thus less insecure and thus living less in denial and thus less alienated we can find ready acknowledgment of the truth of our all-loving instinctive self or soul. For example, around 360 BC Plato wrote his dialogue Phaedo in which he talked about humans having ‘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 Page 102 of
PDF Version absolute beauty, goodness, uprightness, holiness, and, as I maintain, all those characteristics which we designate in our discussions by the term “absolute”’. 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]’. With unequivocal clarity Plato said the ‘soul resembles the divine’ (tr. H. Tredennick). Since the divine, ideal, heavenly state is living in accordance with integrative meaning then humans once lived in that state—and will be able to again return to it now that the dignifying, liberating understanding of the human condition has been found.

As with the word ‘soul’, the word ‘psyche’, which also means soul, is another commonly used word in our everyday language and is also part of the scientific vocabulary with entire disciplines in science such as psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy derivative of the word. While ‘Soul is customarily suspected in empirical psychology and analytical philosophy as a disreputable entity’, it is actually recognised in the term ‘psychology’. The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology states, ‘psyche: The oldest and most general use of this term is by the early Greeks, who envisioned the psyche as the soul or the very essence of life’ (1985). The word psyche actually comes from the Greek word meaning ‘breath’. Able to now understand that our soul was perfectly instinctively orientated to the Godly, cooperative, selfless ideal state we can see that our soul did represent ‘the very essence of life’ and that its expression within us was therefore the ‘breath’ of life.

It was pointed out in Section 11, ‘But what was humans’ original instinctive orientation’, that while mechanistic science has denied the existence of a time when our forebears lived innocently, in a loving, harmonious and cooperative state, there is ample recognition of this period in the mythologies and religions of the world. Quotes from religious texts such as Christianity’s story of the Garden of Eden were referred to. Powerful quotes from the 8th century BC Greek poet Hesiod’s poem Theogony, and from Richard Heinberg, Bruce Chatwin, Laurens van der Post and D.H. Lawrence were also included to evidence how not only mythologies but also exceptionally fearless/ honest/ prophetic thinkers of recent times have recognised our species’ idyllic past.

The marvellous quote, ‘But trailing clouds of glory do we come’, from William Wordsworth’s 1807 poem, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, was also included. As a way of summarising our individual journeys and also our species’ journey from innocence to upset I have included more of this awesomely honest poem: ‘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 proceeded to describe 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 [gathering] / On every side / In a thousand valleys far and wide’. He 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 Page 103 of
PDF Version nakedness / 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.’

Thankfully with understanding of the human condition found humanity is freed from its ‘prison-house’ and can return to the ‘imperial palace’ from ‘whence’ we ‘came’. Clearly, now that we are able to safely admit the nurturing, love-indoctrination origins of humanity we can at last—and must—acknowledge how important a part nurturing of our offspring is going to play in this recovery. Before including a section on the importance of nurturing it is first necessary to further context how nurturing became compromised by explaining the different roles men and women have played in humanity’s great battle to vanquish ignorance and find the liberating understanding of our species’ fundamental goodness.