25. Why and how did Consciousness emerge in humans?

We now need to examine the question of why and how consciousness developed in humans.

We can start by asking ‘why haven’t other animals become fully conscious?’ Since consciousness occurs at a certain point in the development of a mind’s efficiency in associating information, and since conscious intelligence is such an asset in managing situations, one would assume fully developed consciousness would have appeared in many species. The fact that it hasn’t prompts the real question: what has prevented its development in other animals—and why was it humans were able to reach consciousness?

It is true other animal species have been able to develop all manner of extraordinary mental abilities, many superior to our own, yet not full consciousness. For instance, in the USA the nutcracker bird buries around 30,000 nuts throughout the summer months, each in a different location, yet come winter and the cover of snow, it can recall the location of 90 per cent of them. The goby fish can memorise the topography of the tidal flats at high tide so that when the tide retreats it knows the exact location of the next pool to flip to when the one it is in evaporates. And then there is the male common canary which has a specific part of its brain expand dramatically every spring in order to learn new mating songs, then shrink again once the mating season ends.

As has been explained in Section 14 one of the limitations of the genetic device or tool for integrating matter is that it can’t normally reinforce selfless behaviour. In fact, it normally actively resists it.

For instance, whenever a female kangaroo comes into season, the males pursue her relentlessly. Despite both parties almost falling with fatigue, the chase continues. It is easy to see how this behaviour developed. If a male relaxed his efforts he would lose his chances of producing offspring. Self-interest is fostered by natural selection with the result that genetic selfishness has become an extremely strong force in animals. It is clear then that there would be no chance of a variety of kangaroo that considered others above itself developing. This is unless they could develop love-indoctrination and while kangaroos can look after a joey in its pouch, the pouch is more an external womb, allowing little behavioural interaction between mother and infant. It is the selfless treatment—the active demonstration of love—that trains the infants in selflessness or love. Also, marsupials have to spend most of their time grazing because grass is not very nutritious so there is relatively little time for social interaction between mother and infant and thus limited training in love.

Genetic refinement normally acts against any inclination towards selfless behaviour because selflessness disadvantages the individual that practices it and advantages the recipients of the selfless treatment—such is the meaning of selflessness. Selflessness normally can’t be reinforced by genetic refinement; in fact it is emphatically resisted by it.

Page 122 of
PDF Version It follows then that in terms of the development of consciousness, genetic refinement was, in effect, in total opposition to any altruistic or selfless thinking. In fact, genetic refinement developed blocks in the minds of animals to prevent the emergence of such thinking.

It is this block against truthful, selflessness-recognising-thinking in most animals’ minds that prevents them from becoming conscious of the true relationship or meaning of experience.

For instance in what are termed ‘visual cliff’ experiments, an apparently large drop that is in fact covered by glass or clear plastic, newborn kittens venture toward the edge of the ‘cliff’ yet prevent themselves from falling. Presumably, they have an instinctive orientation against doing so, for any kitten that did venture too close to a precipice invariably fell to its death, leaving only those that happened to have an instinctive block against such self-destructive practices. Natural selection or genetic refinement develops blocks in the mind against behaviour that doesn’t tend to lead to the reproduction of the genes of the individuals who practice that behaviour.

Just as surely as cats were eventually selected for their instinctive block against self-destruction, most animals have been selected with an instinctive block against selfless thinking. The effect of this block was to prevent the developing intellect from thinking truthfully and thus effectively.

As has been emphasised, selflessness or love is the theme of existence, the essence of integration, the meaning of life. While we humans have learnt to live in denial of the truth of selfless, loving, integrative meaning it is in fact an extremely obvious truth and one that is deduced very quickly if you are able to think honestly about the world. As has been mentioned, we are surrounded by integrativeness. Every object we look at is a hierarchy of ordered matter, witness to the development of order of matter. It follows then that if you aren’t able to appreciate the significance of selfless, integrative meaning you are not in a position to begin to think straight and thus effectively, you can’t begin to make sense of experience. All your thinking is coming off a false base and is therefore effectively derailed from the outset from making sense of experience. You can’t think with lies in your head, especially with such important lies as denial of selflessness-dependent integrative meaning. Your mind is stalled at a very superficial level of intelligence with virtually no ability to understand the relationship of events occurring around you.

To elaborate, any animal able to associate information to the degree necessary to realise the importance of being selfless towards others would have been at a distinct disadvantage in terms of its chances of reproducing its genes. Those that don’t perceive the importance of selflessness are genetically advantaged. Eventually a mental block would have been ‘naturally selected’ to stop the emergence of mental cleverness (at associating information). At this point in development, genetic refinement favoured individuals that were not able to recognise the significance of selflessness. The effect was that animals remained incognisant, unconscious of the true meaning of life.

Having evaded integrative meaning and the importance of selflessness, it’s not easy for us to appreciate that conscious thought depends on the ability to acknowledge the significance of selflessness. However, our own mental block or alienation is in fact the perfect illustration of and parallel for this block in animals’ minds. Unable to think truthfully/ straight we have been unable to think effectively. Alienation has rendered us almost stupid, incapable of deep, penetrating, meaningful thought.

One of the themes of this book is how our human-condition-produced alienation has deliberately kept the human mind ignorant, unable to recognise many obvious and very important scientific truths. The ability to think and find knowledge is not dependent on Page 123 of
PDF Version how clever a person is, how high their IQ is, as all our learning institutions stress. The average IQ of humans today is quite adequate for finding knowledge. The critical factor is how free of denial/ alienation a person is, not how high their IQ is. Consider how many insights into our human situation have already been presented in this book by not having to avoid human-condition-confronting truths. There have been breakthrough insights in almost every paragraph—and it should be emphasised that now that no one has to avoid the issue of the human condition all humans will be able to think honestly and thus effectively. The truth is the all-important liberating explanations in this book, in particular how the battle between our instinct and intellect produced the upset state of our human condition, and how love-indoctrination gave us our integratively orientated soul and, as will shortly be explained, liberated consciousness, are not clever discoveries but sound, denial-free revelations in the sense that these ideas consider subjects and truths all humans are aware of, but have been living in deep fear and denial of.

Even though some of the following quotes emphasising how seriously alienation has stopped the human mind from thinking effectively were included earlier in Section 13 to illustrate the danger of excessive denial in science, they need to be included again here.

Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott described how when in denial of a subject that subject ‘cannot be remembered because of its being associated with painful feeling or some other intolerable emotion. Energy has to be all the time employed in maintaining the repression, and…there is relatively little energy left for a direct participation in life’ (Thinking about Children, 1996, p.9 of 343). This inability to properly ‘participate in life’ infers an inability to think freely about life. It was pointed out in Section 13 that mechanistic science has fully conformed with humanity’s very necessary strategy of denial so that while it prided itself in being rigorously objective it has in fact been rigorously subjective, determinedly avoiding any truths that brought the human condition into focus. Winnicott made the point about the blindness of mechanistic science when he asked, ‘Can you see the one essential way in which science and intuition contrast with each other? True intuition can reach to a whole truth in a flash (just as faulty intuition can reach to error), whereas in a [mechanistic] science the whole truth is never reached’ (ibid, p.5).

Plato recognised the destructive effect our denial-compliant intellect has on our capacity to think effectively, stating: ‘when the soul [our integratively orientated original instinctual self] uses the instrumentality of the body [uses the body’s intellect with its preoccupation with denial] 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 [free of intellectual 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 [integrative meaning], constant and invariable’ (Phaedo, tr. H. Tredennick). Plato also spoke of the need to ‘put sight into blind eyes’ and identified what was required to end our historic ‘confused’, ‘dizzy’, ‘fuddled’ state of denial: ‘this capacity [of a mind…to see clearly] is innate in each man’s mind [we are born with an instinctive orientation to integrative meaning], and that the faculty by which he learns is like an eye which cannot be turned from darkness [the upset state of living in denial] to light [the truth] unless the whole body is turned; in the same way the mind as a whole must be turned away from the world of change until it can bear to look straight at reality, and at the brightest of all realities which is what we call the Good [integrative meaning or God]’ (The Republic, tr. H.D.P. Lee, 1955, p.283 of 405). Humans had to stop living in denial of integrative meaning, ‘the Good’, if they were to begin to think effectively. Explaining the human condition and ending the need to live in denial—having our mind ‘turned from darkness to light’—is the objective of this book.

While our capacity to see is, as Plato said, ‘innate’, denial and its alienating effects came about through our encounter with the upset, human-condition-afflicted, corrupt Page 124 of
PDF Version world. As this encounter began at birth and accumulated throughout our lives, so the extent of our insecurity about our corrupted state and associated block-out or alienation also increased throughout our lives, until eventually we were walking around free of criticism but totally in the dark in terms of access to truth and meaning. It follows then that we are least alienated from truthful, effective thinking when we are young. Sigmund Freud observed ‘What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.’ Christ recognised the mental integrity of the young when he said, ‘you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Matt 11:25). Albert Einstein said ‘every child is born a genius’, and Richard Buckminster Fuller said ‘There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others’, and R.D. Laing said ‘Each child is a new beginning, a potential prophet [denial-free, truthful, effective thinker]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.26 of 156). Many exceptionally creative people have made statements to the effect that genius is the ability to think like a child. For example, as one of the most accomplished artists of all time, Pablo Picasso (1881—1973) once said about his struggle to paint well, ‘It’s taken all of my life to have the mind of a child.’

The ‘Resignation’ chapter in A Species In Denial explains that historically when children reached the age of approximately 15 they went through a process of resigning themselves to a strategy of living in denial of the depressing issue of the human condition. It further explains how once they adopted this denial they lost the ability to think truthfully and thus effectively. Only pre-resigned children, or the very rare adult who was sufficiently nurtured and sheltered from upset in their upbringing to not have had to become resigned to a life of denial, can think effectively.

The extent of the alienation in adult humans now was made very clear in this quote from the writings of R.D. Laing: ‘We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state [p.12 of 156] …the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be. As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavour; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world [p.22] …The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man [p.24] …between us and It [the Godly, ideal state and the issue it raises of our inconsistency with it] there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded [p.118] …The outer divorced from any illumination from the inner is in a state of darkness. We are in an age of darkness. The state of outer darkness is a state of sin—i.e. alienation or estrangement from the inner light [p.116]’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967). In another of his books Laing spelt out the consequences of alienation: ‘We are dead, but think we are alive. We are asleep, but think we are awake. We are dreaming, but take our dreams to be reality. We are the halt, lame, blind, deaf, the sick. But we are doubly unconscious. We are so ill that we no longer feel ill, as in many terminal illnesses. We are mad, but have no insight’ (Self and Others, 1961, p.38 of 192). The term ‘asleep’ was also used by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792—1822) to describe humans’ current state: ‘Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream / Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream’; and in Wordsworth’s poem, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, where he describes our species’ loss of innocence—he wrote ‘of something that is gone…the visionary gleam…the glory and the dream’—he summarised that ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’.

For a written description of the confronting horror of the human condition we had Nikolai Berdyaev’s reference to ‘a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the valuable and the worthless’, Søren Kierkegaard writing of ‘the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; eternally to die, to die and yet not to die’, and Arthur Janov saying ‘there is unspeakable tragedy in the world…each of us being in a mad Page 125 of
PDF Version scramble away from our personal horror’. For an artist’s depiction of the alienated state of the human condition that is as honest as anyone has ever managed to write about it we can go to the paintings of the British painter Francis Bacon (1909—1992). His 1976 Study for Self Portrait (owned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia), below, features one of Bacon’s characteristic twisted, smudged, distorted—alienated—human faces which in this case happens to be his own, a nuance that significantly adds to the honesty of the painting. The figure’s arms appear tied behind his back while his entire body—knot in the belly, eyes asleep and all—is confined to a box. The painting represents the human predicament under the duress of the human condition and is reminiscent of Plato’s analogy in which humans are confined in chains to a cave-like prison.

Our alienated intellectual self is committed to avoiding and blocking out the truthful, beautiful, natural world to which our intuitive, instinctual self has clear access. Thus to think truthfully and thus effectively, to access all the truth and beauty the world has to offer, to create and behave naturally without inhibition or distortion, requires freedom from the intellectual state of living in deep denial and alienation. Necessary as it has been, alienation has massively thwarted humans’ real potential. Schopenhauer recognised this when he wrote: ‘The unpremeditated, unintentional, indeed in part unconscious and instinctive element which has always been remarked in the works of genius owes its origin to precisely the fact that primal artistic knowledge is entirely separated from and independent of will, is will-less’ (Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1970, p.158 of 237).

Laing described how humans are so alienated and our capacity to think so limited that only ‘an intensive discipline of un-learning’ can reconnect us with the true world: ‘Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of un-learning is necessary of anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love’ (The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise, 1967, p.23 of 156). As is emphasised throughout this book, this ‘un-learning’, this dismantling of alienation, depended on finding the greater dignifying understanding of the human condition.

Isaiah in the Bible described the extent of humans’ alienation when he said, ‘“You will be ever hearing, but never understanding; you will be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” This people’s Page 126 of
PDF Version heart has become calloused [alienated]; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes’ (Isaiah 6:9,10, footnote). The Russian philosopher George Gurdjieff described the alienated state truthfully when he wrote: ‘It happens fairly often that essence dies in a man while his personality and his body are still alive. A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead’ (In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, 1950, ch.8, p.164).

That humans have been prepared to pay the price of such deadening alienation, as these quotes reveal, offers clear insight into just how painful the dilemma of the human condition has been. Deep, meaningful thinking has been so painful for humans we have learnt to avoid all but superficial thoughts, as Australian comedian Rod Quantock pointed out when he said, ‘Thinking can get you into terrible downwards spirals of doubt’ (‘Sayings of the Week’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 July 1986). Aldous Huxley summarised the situation of our refusal to make sense of the world when he said, ‘We don’t know because we don’t want to know’ (Ends and Means, 1937, p.270). Basically mindlessness saved us from depressing mindfulness.

While adults will readily intellectually focus on a safely sectioned-off area of inquiry or activity, such as solving a maths equation, or mastering a computer problem, or debating whether God has been destroyed by the big bang theory of the origins of the universe, or ordering our wardrobe, or polishing our car, or making a cake, or even sending man to the Moon, we won’t go beyond those safety limits and risk encountering anything to do with the issue of ‘self’, the depressing subject of the human condition. We will even read a book such as this one that is full of world-saving insights into the all-important issue of the human condition and write a review of it dismissing it on the basis of such complaints as ‘bad grammar’, ‘unnecessary underlining emphasis in quotes’, ‘the “canary’s brain” doesn’t “expand” during the mating season, only one small area of it does’ (this ‘fault’ has now been rectified), ‘it is a hodge-podge of incoherent, impenetrable repetition and hyperbol’, ‘there is nothing new in it’, ‘this book must be some sort of religious propaganda [because it dares to demystify such concepts as God]’, ‘who is funding all this bad, pseudo science?’ etc, etc (from WTM records)—basically be, as Christ said, ‘blind guides…[who] strain out a gnat [small insect] but swallow a camel’ (Matt. 23:24). The result of all this evasion is an immense disparity between our superficial intellectual outer world and the miles-deep inner world that we won’t go near. As Albert the alligator in the old Pogo comic strip said: ‘The inner me? Naw, got no time fer him…he goes his way, Ah go mine’ (mentioned in Charlton Heston’s autobiography, In The Arena, 1995). The real frontier is not outer space but inner space. This extraordinary, indeed mad, situation was well summarised by General Omar N. Bradley when he said, ‘The world has achieved brilliance…without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants’ (Armistice Day Address, 10 Nov. 1948, Collected Writings of General Omar N. Bradley, Vol.1). As will be described in some detail in subsequent sections of this book, we will apply all our vigour to protesting an environmental cause or the rights of an indigenous race or the demand for peace, or any one of any number of other politically correct causes, but we will not look at the nightmare of angst in ourselves; the real devastation and issue of our own condition and beyond that, the human condition that needs to be addressed if we are to bring about a caring, equitable and peaceful world—because the fact is no matter how much we try to restrain and conceal our upset eventually our world will become an expression of us and thus as devastated as we are. We have to fix ourselves to fix the world. The truth that will be revealed later in this book is that the main function of politically correct causes is to allow us to feel that we are doing good when we are actually avoiding what is required to make a difference, namely confront the issue of the human condition. Our life is preoccupied with maintaining our many delusions and false ways of making us feel good about ourselves and with all manner of escapisms from reality rather than with meaningful thinking and Page 127 of
PDF Version progressive actions as we claim it is. The human condition is the all-important issue that has to be looked at to free ourselves from our condition, yet it is the one issue we refuse to look at. As psychoanalyst Carl Jung has said, ‘Man everywhere is dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble’ (Jung and The Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post, 1976, p.239 of 275). The human condition is the elephant in our living rooms that we pretend not to see; the all-important issue that we assiduously practice denying. As R.D. Laing said, ‘Our alienation goes to the roots…We are mad, but have no insight [into the fact of our madness]’.

The point is when it comes to thinking truthfully and thus soundly, humans are now almost as mentally incognisant as animals. In fact the popular animated cartoon Wallace & Gromit plays on this state of affairs. Wallace is a lonely, sad—alienated—human figure whose dog Gromit is very much on an intellectual par with him in his world. Both wear the same blank, stupefied expression as together they muddle their way through life’s adventures.

Wallace & Gromit by Nick Park and
Bob Baker, produced by Aardman Animations

Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788—1860) said, ‘the discovery of truth is prevented most effectively…by prejudice, which…stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land’ (Essays and Aphorisms, tr. R.J. Hollingdale, 1970, p.120 of 237). The greatest ‘prejudice’ of all in our upset human situation has been our prejudice against any truths that bring the issue of our corrupted human condition into focus and the most important of all those confronting truths is the truth of integrative meaning and its theme of selflessness. Humans’ current immensely alienated, superficial, virtually mentally dead state is a result of having blocked out from our minds so many important truths, in particular the real significance of selflessness or love in our world.

What is being proposed is that the human mind has been alienated from the truth twice in its history. Once when we were like other animals, instinctively blocked from recognising the truth of selflessness, and again in our species’ adolescence when we became insecure about our divisive nature and were forced to choose to live in a dark cave of denial of the significance of loving selflessness and the truth of integrative meaning.

While humans have gradually retreated from consciousness into virtual unconsciousness because of our insecurity about our non-ideal, ‘fallen’, human-condition-afflicted state, we were, to our knowledge, the first animals to become fully conscious. The question then that needs to be asked is how were humans able to overcome this block that exists in the minds of other animals and achieve this consciousness.

The understanding of how nurturing was able to develop moral instincts in our human forebears allows us to answer this crucial question. The reason we were able to become Page 128 of
PDF Version fully conscious is that, quite by accident, the nurturing of selfless instincts breached the block against thinking truthfully by superimposing a new, truthful, selflessness-recognising mind over the older, dishonest, selfless-thinking-blocked one. Since our ape ancestors could develop an awareness of cooperative, selfless, loving meaning they were also able to develop truthful, sound, effective thinking and so acquired consciousness, the essential characteristic of mental infancy.

To use a comparative example, common chimpanzees are in mental infancy and demonstrate rudimentary consciousness, making sufficient sense of experience to recognise that they are at the centre of the changing array of events they experience. They are beginning to relate information or reason effectively. Experiments have shown they have an awareness of the concept of ‘I’ or self and, as mentioned earlier, are capable of reasoning how events are related sufficiently well to know that they can reach a banana tied to the roof of their cage by stacking and climbing upon boxes.

In the case of bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees, evidence suggests they have been able to develop the nurturing of selfless, moral instincts to such a degree that they are now the most intelligent or conscious animals next to humans. This level of consciousness or intelligence is evident in this quote: ‘Everything seems to indicate that [Prince] Chim [a bonobo] was extremely intelligent. His surprising alertness and interest in things about him bore fruit in action, for he was constantly imitating the acts of his human companions and testing all objects. He rapidly profited by his experiences…Never have I seen man or beast take greater satisfaction in showing off than did little Chim. The contrast in intellectual qualities between him and his female companion [a common chimpanzee] may briefly, if not entirely adequately, be described by the term “opposites” [p.248 of 278] …Prince Chim seems to have been an intellectual genius. His remarkable alertness and quickness to learn were associated with a cheerful and happy disposition which made him the favorite of all [p.255] …Chim also was even-tempered and good-natured, always ready for a romp; he seldom resented by word or deed unintentional rough handling or mishap. Never was he known to exhibit jealousy…[By contrast] Panzee [the common chimpanzee] could not be trusted in critical situations. Her resentment and anger were readily aroused and she was quick to give them expression with hands and teeth [p.246]’ (Almost Human, Robert M. Yerkes, 1925).

So how did the process of nurturing overcome the instinctive block? It makes sense that at the outset the brain was relatively small with only a small amount of cortex, the matter in which information is associated. These brains had instinctive blocks preventing the mind from making deep meaningful/ truthful/ selflessness-recognising perceptions. At this stage however, these small, inhibited brains were trained in selflessness, so although there was not a great deal of unfilled cortex available, what was available was being inscribed with a truthful, effective network of information-associating pathways. The mind was being taught the truth and given the opportunity to think clearly, in spite of the existing instinctive ‘lies’ or blocks. While at first this truthful ‘wiring’ would not have been very significant due to the small size of the brain, it had the potential for greater development.

Thus the mind was trained or programmed or ‘brain-washed’ or ‘indoctrinated’ with the ability to think in spite of the blocks working against it. It had been stimulated by the truth at last. Of course it must be remembered that in this early stage of the development the emphasis was on training in love, not liberation of the ability to think, which was incidental to Negative Entropy’s push for our forebears to become an integrated group of multicellular animals.

The development of thought—the incidental by-product of love-indoctrination—would have been gradual. The association cortex didn’t develop strongly until thinking became an absolute necessity in humanity’s adolescence when we had to find Page 129 of
PDF Version understanding in order to defend ourselves against ignorance. As was explained in Section 17, adolescence is the time when the search for identity takes place and in the case of the human race, this identity crisis was to understand itself, particularly understand why it was divisively rather than cooperatively behaved. It is not surprising then to learn that the large association cortex is a characteristic of Adolescentman Homo which emerged around 2 million years ago.

Incidentally, there would also not have been a strong call for language until the adolescent state emerged some 2 million years ago when the battle of the human condition developed, and with it alienation. The australopithecines or Childman lived from 5 million years ago to 2 million years ago and were instinctively coordinated and instinctively empathetic with little need for language. It was only when we became variously alienated in self and thus variously alienated from each other that there emerged a strong need to try to defend and explain ourselves to one another. Anthropological evidence supports this assertion that language emerged with the onset of Homo 2 million years ago. According to Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, the study of brain cases in fossil skulls for the imprint of Broca’s area (the word-organising centre of the brain) suggests ‘Homo had a greater need than the australopithecines for a rudimentary language’ (Origins, 1977, p.205 of 264).

As part of this explanation for language, is it not likely that infants stopped being silent when mothers stopped being able to properly respond to them because of their now 2 million year developed alienated condition? For instance even the infants of relatively innocent, less alienated races of humans today, such as the Matabele of South Africa and the Australian Aborigine, rarely cry. Also is it not likely that motherese language developed as a way for alienated humans to try to pacify their distressed innocent infants?

Traditionally (meaning, for the purposes of this book, ‘during the time when humans had to find ways of denying confronting truths’), the long primate infancy was said to have developed so infants could be taught survival skills; that is, they could have passed onto them learnt traditions or culture that is important for survival. Evidence however indicates that learning wasn’t strongly required nor promoted until adolescence—after the extended infancy. The long infancy was solely for the development of integration. Moreover, the ‘need to learn survival skills’ argument implies that survival was an issue, but for the training in love to develop there had to be ideal nursery conditions, which in itself translates to an environment free of survival pressures. For instance, selfless training and consciousness are more developed in bonobos than in the common chimpanzees as a result of the extra comfort and security of the bonobos’ historic environment.

The following quote about the comparative comfort of the bonobos’ environment was included in Section 17 but is included once more with slightly different emphasis: ‘we may say that the pygmy chimpanzees historically have existed in a stable environment rich in sources of food. Pygmy chimpanzees appear conservative in their food habits and unlike common chimpanzees have developed a more cohesive social structure and elaborate inventory of sociosexual behavior. In contrast, common chimpanzees have gone further in developing their resource-exploiting techniques and strategy, and have the ability to survive in more varied environments. These differences suggest that the environments occupied by the two species since their separation by the Zaire [Congo] River has differed for some time. The vegetation to the south of the Zaire River, where Pan paniscus [bonobo] is found, has been less influenced by changes in climate and geography than the range of the common chimpanzee to the north. Prior to the Bantu (Mongo) agriculturists’ invasion into the central Zaire basin, the pygmy chimpanzees may have led a carefree life in a comparatively stable environment’ (The Pygmy Chimpanzee, ed. Randall L. Susman, ch. 10 by Takayoshi Kano & Mbangi Mulavwa, 1984).

This observation would seem to indicate that common chimpanzees, having to live in more variable and less food-rich environments, have the greater need for intelligence. Page 130 of
PDF Version Only nurturing however can liberate that intelligence, and, as has been described, the bonobos are the more conscious or intelligent of the two species.

It was mentioned in Sections 18 and 23 that Allott, Drummond, Fiske and McCollister all believed our increase in intelligence and the emergence of our large brain accompanied the extended infancy and increase in nurturing. It can be understood now how the increased intelligence and larger brain in our forebears came after, and not during, the longer infancy, nurturing phase of our development.

An understanding of how consciousness and the large brain emerged depends firstly on being able to recognise the truth of integrative meaning and its theme of unconditional selflessness—and from there why animals would have developed blocks in their minds preventing selfless, truthful, effective thinking and thus consciousness—and from there how the nurtured training of selflessness in humans would have liberated truthful thinking and thus consciousness—and from there how the emergence of consciousness would have led to a battle with our instinctive self—and from there how the alienation of our human condition that resulted from the battle would have demanded a more developed, intelligent, bigger brain in order to both understand and defend ourselves. Incidentally, what has been described here is clear evidence of how if you are living in denial of the truth there is no chance of making sense of our world and place in it—as the mountain high pile of books that have been written about consciousness without managing to penetrate the subject are witness to.

In summary, the processes of nurturing love-indoctrination and the selection by females of non-aggressive, cooperative males as mates not only gave us our moral, instinctive orientation to behaving cooperatively—our soul—it also liberated consciousness in our forebears. Since nurturing is largely a female role and females controlled the selection of cooperative mates, it could be truthfully said that the female gender created humanity.

As was explained Section 17, throughout humanity’s infancy and childhood, a period of time that lasted from 12 to 2 million years ago, nurturing played the most important role in the group. It was a matriarchal society in which males had to support this focus on nurturing and protect the group from external threats. As was also explained in Section 22, humanity’s matriarchal structure came to an end when the threat of ignorance from our instinctive self emerged during its adolescence and males, in their role as group protectors, went out to tackle the threat. At this point, the patriarchal society came into being.

Incidentally, another consequence of love-indoctrination was that it freed our hands to hold tools and carry out innumerable tasks. In Section 17 it was explained that the more love-indoctrination developed and the longer infants were kept in infancy and the more dependent they became, the more we had to stay upright in order to hold and care for them. This freedom of our hands from walking proved extremely useful later when the intellect needed to assert itself, because it could direct the hands to manipulate objects. A fully conscious mind in a whale or a dog would be frustrated by its inability to implement its understandings.

As was also explained in Section 17, it appears that the love-indoctrination process also gave us our relatively long life which has been of such great benefit in accumulating knowledge. If we only lived to the age of 30, which is considered a long life for many animals, instead of the 70 plus years we do, we would likely not have had sufficient time to properly assimilate in our minds all the nuances of the human condition.

It can be seen that love-indoctrination was an extremely fortuitous development.

Incidentally, people wonder how we can know that other species aren’t fully conscious like we humans are. The fact is, as all good animal trainers—such as ‘horse Page 131 of
PDF Version whisperers’ and ‘dog whisperers’ who seem to have such an uncanny ability to control horses or dogs that they appear to be ‘whispering’ instructions to them—know, the secret to managing and training non-human animal species is to recognise that their (and this applies to both the males and females) great preoccupation is in achieving dominance, moving up the ‘pecking order’ whenever they can, and that once you think about their behaviour from that basis you are in a position to effectively interpret and thus manipulate their behaviour. Humans’ fundamental preoccupation however is with being loved (treated unconditionally selflessly) and giving love, a preoccupation we mistakenly project onto other animals, especially our pets, resulting in all the problems we have in effectively managing other animals. Controlling our pets primarily requires dominance, not love, as the famous ‘dog whisperer’ Cesar Millan teaches. Other large animal species are still essentially driven by a preoccupation with competitive dominance whereas humans are essentially driven by a very deep appreciation of cooperative love (this despite the recent overlay of our upset angry, egocentric and alienated state), and the only way to have overcome the competitive, each-for-his-own limitation of genetics that still controls the lives of other animal species and become orientated to unconditional selflessness or love, as we humans clearly have, and as a result of that orientation become fully conscious, is to have been able to develop the nurturing, love-indoctrination process. If other animal species had achieved full consciousness they would not still be stranded in a world preoccupied by dominance hierarchy but would be preoccupied by giving love and being loved as we humans in truth are.

To return to the story of the emergence of the upset state of our human condition. It has now been explained that, unlike birds, our species’ original instinctive orientation was to behaving cooperatively, and that that orientation to selfless cooperation liberated our brains to become fully conscious. We now need to consider how the emergence of our fully conscious state in the presence of our particular instinctive orientation to cooperative ideality greatly compounded the upset we experienced from defying our instinctive orientation.