Step 5
The Unevasive or True Story of the Life of a
Human During Humanity’s Adolescence

The whole story has now been told. What remains is to fill it out. An effective way to begin this might be to take up the story of the eight-year-old boy. This is a legitimate comparison. Since the prime mover or main influence in the maturation of both an individual human and humanity as a species was what was happening in the mind, both underwent the same maturation stages. The reason it is the male’s position that is described is that the priority concern throughout humanity’s adolescence was this spiritual or mental fight/battle to defy/overcome the external threat to humanity of ignorance which, as group protectors was a responsibility that fell to males. Since this battle to defy ignorance was humanity’s priority concern it meant women had to help men. Women were ‘man’s helper’ (Gen 2:18). Everyone and every other need was subordinate to the priority concern of winning this battle. We were a patriarchal or male role prominent or dominated society. It should be stressed immediately this does not mean the recent feminist movementPage 42 of
Print Edition was not legitimate and necessary. It was, as will shortly be explained.

We left the boy at the birthday party making his first experiments in mind-based management. He has already discovered that self-managing when there are no understandings or answers is not at all easy. Sadly from there things only become worse. What ushers in his adolescence is the sobering realisation that the full implication of trying to manage life without understanding means a life of complete chaos and upset. He has to resign himself to this fate; he has to find the courage to accept what he cannot escape. From here on, more and more courage will be asked of him. From a happy child he becomes a sobered adolescent. Most unhappily of all he cannot discuss his problem with others. Unable to defend the battle we were participating in none of us could afford to admit to it, so we could not even talk about it. We could offer each other only sympathy, superficial comforts and possibly a distracting and mood-lightening story. At about the age of sixteen the adolescent is at the height of his silent battle to come to terms with his fate. It will take him another five years of internal wrestling to finally climb on top of his initial depression and realise that, well, while he will undoubtedly end up defeated, at least he has the adventure of the battle to look forward to.

By the time he turns twenty-one he has long since learnt not to think about the prospect of his inevitable defeat. He has developed a totally ‘positive’ attitude, which really means he has learnt to block out the negative truths. He has been able to arm himself sufficiently well with evasion, with a positive attitude, to commit himself to the battle. In fact he has done such a good job of blocking out any negatives he is raring to go. He reasons that while he might eventually go under he is determined to make a good fight of it. He is cavalier and swashbuckling. He has plenty of strength and resilience — plenty of rock and roll.

What has really happened is that, through extreme resignation, his life has been reduced to looking forward to the excitement of the adventure entailed in the journey through life underPage 43 of
Print Edition the oppression of the human condition. ‘The adventure’ of this journey is seeing exactly how the battle will unfold for him. He might know that he will be defeated but he does not know how that defeat will take place. What is in truth a very small positive has, through sufficient blocking out, been made into an all-consuming wonderful positive. Such is his courage — but it has taken twelve years of mental effort on his part to make these necessary but horrible preparations. For instance, he has had to block out possibly 70 per cent of his awareness of the beautiful world he inhabited as a child. To have to ‘see’ the beautiful world that he can no longer be a part of would make his life unbearable. (Of course we have always to remember that the greater truth is that while he is actually going to his soul’s and mind’s death he is doing so in order that, one day, the beautiful world might be permanently restored to everyone. Humanity had to lose itself to find itself! In the next 20 years of battle the remaining 30 per cent of these memories will also be obliterated and he will be left walking in a terrible darkness. This is his real prospect. The courage of humans who had to face it has been so immense it is something that is, and possibly will be for all time, out of reach of appreciation.)

In the story of the maturation of humanity, the equivalent of the sobered teenager who lived through the resignation stage of adjustment to the human condition was Soberedman, the first of the Homos anthropologists know as Homo habilis; he lived from two million years ago to one and a half million years ago.

But we were up to the stage where the boy has become a young man of twenty-one about to set out on his ‘life’s adventure’. With a big kiss from Mum and a slap on the back from Dad he leaves home ‘to see what life holds for him’. From a sobered teenager he has become an adventurous twenty-one-year-old.

His initial task of self-managing his life has long since been transformed into a battle to establish his worth — to establish that what he is doing is not bad. Ultimately the only way this can be done is by finding the first principle biological explanation of the difference between a mind-based and a genetic-basedPage 44 of
Print Edition learning system — a task which will take the combined effort of all humanity some two million years to achieve. So all our twenty-one-year-old can hope to ‘achieve’ in his single lifetime is to keep the effort going and possibly contribute a few clues towards the finding of the full truth one day in humanity’s future. While this is the larger view of his life the view from his position is, as mentioned, that he wants to establish his worth. He wants to express himself — to satisfy his ego — to keep his self-esteem intact as much as possible. To do this he has to find whatever ego reinforcement he can from whatever situations he encounters.

In our evasive jargon he has to ‘achieve as much as he can’. As well he can try to repel any implication that he is not worthy by aggressively counter-attacking the quarter from which such an ‘attack’ on his credibility comes and/or by blocking the criticism from his mind. When these means for propping up his ego begin to fail, as they must eventually, he resorts to trying to escape from the battlefield. At this stage, when battle fatigue has set in, he starts to feel the need for material rewards and distractions. (Unable to recognise exhaustion as admirable in the past, material rewards became our way of having the honours due to us for our courage and effort which led to our exhaustion bestowed upon us. For example, when we were exhausted we could dress in glitter and have huge chandeliers in our house to give ourselves the fanfare we knew was due us but the world in its ignorance would not supply.) From being confrontationalist he becomes escapist and increasingly superficial. He abandons any hope of winning and now concerns himself only with finding relief and bestowing glory upon himself.

This has taken the story a little ahead of itself. The young man’s twenties and early thirties are mostly spent refining the devices for coping. He settles into life under ‘the human condition’. Our ancestral equivalent is Adventurousman, whom anthropologists know as Homo erectus. He lived from one and a half million years ago to half a million years ago. It was Homo erectus who adventured out from our ancestral home in AfricaPage 45 of
Print Edition around one and a quarter million years ago. During his one-million-year reign Homo erectus mastered the many techniques for coping with the human condition which we now take for granted and euphemistically refer to as ‘human nature’. It was Homo erectus who perfected what we know of as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Contrary to accepted opinion, the hunting in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was not for food. This evasive belief has so far protected us from the critical partial truth of the extreme aggression involved in hunting. In fact research shows that 80 per cent of the food of existing hunter-gatherers, such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, is supplied by the women’s gathering.¹ If providing food were not the reason, why then were the men hunting?

Hunting was men’s earliest ego outlet. Men attacked animals because their innocence, albeit unwittingly, unfairly criticised them. By attacking, killing and dominating animals men were demonstrating their power, which was a perverse way of demonstrating their worth. If men could not rebut and thus win against the accusation that they were bad at least they could find some relief from the guilt engendered by demonstrating their superiority over their accusers. The exhibition of power was a substitute for explanation. This ‘sport’ of attacking animals, which were once our closest friends, was the first great expression of our upset. Anthropological evidence suggests that large-scale big game hunting began during the time of Homo habilis and became well established early in the reign of Homo erectus. With big game hunting came meat eating, which would have revolted our original instinctive self or soul since it involved eating our soul’s friends. But our spirit wasn’t to be put off and in time, as we developed our increasingly upset and driven (to find ego relief) lifestyle we became somewhat physically dependent on the high energy value of meat. Nevertheless, while using the meat for food could justify the effort of hunting, the hunting was Page 46 of
Print Edition really all about the boy leaning across the birthday party table and punching the innocents in the mouth.

Next men turned on the unwitting but critical innocence of women and destroyed that. Men invented sex, as in ‘fucking’ or destroying, as distinct from the act of procreation. What was being ‘fucked’ or destroyed was women’s innocence. To explain as briefly as possible how this happened: It was the arms-free facility of primates that made it possible for them to hold and carry a helpless infant and in so doing allowed the development of an extended infancy period. An extended infancy period meant that infants could be exceptionally trained in selflessness or love. While ‘mother’s love’ or maternal selflessness was actually genetically selfish (as will be fully explained in Part 2, a limitation of the genetic learning tool was that a genetic trait had to reproduce to survive) it appeared as selfless behaviour to an observing brain, so by prolonging infancy an infant’s brain could be trained or indoctrinated in love, a process which throughout this book is called ‘love-indoctrination’. The ‘trick’ in this process of ‘love-indoctrination’ was that it allowed selfless or co-operative or integrative behaviour to be learnt in spite of ‘gene selfishness’. The unconditional selflessness required in developing an integrated whole or group could not be learnt genetically except through this remarkable process of love-indoctrination. While in fact the mother is genetically selfishly looking after her own reproduction by looking after her infant, in appearance maternalism is unconditionally selfless behaviour on the part of the mother towards her infant, so all the infant experiences and is thus trained in is pure selflessness. Science being evasive of integrative meaning could not recognise this integrative process of ‘love-indoctrination’ and actively evaded it, claiming maternalism was nothing more than a mother protecting her helpless infant. We have had to live with the quite unbearable fact that during the two million years of humanity’s adolescence we have been unable to love our infants as much as we were able to during humanity’s infancy and childhood. The way we made itPage 47 of
Print Edition bearable was to evade the whole significance of nurturing in our history and in our personal lives.

The recently advanced theory of sociobiology sought to excuse divisive human behaviour on the grounds that it was due to the genetic need to be selfish. This was one of our latest scientific evasions. The unevasive truth is that one of the integrative limitations of genetic learning was that genes had to be selfish. The significance of love-indoctrination was that it allowed integration to be learnt in spite of this limitation.

It was through love-indoctrination that we acquired our original instinctive training or orientation in love mentioned earlier. It was the way our conscience acquired its orientation to integrativeness. Over many thousands of generations our maternal training in selflessness became genetically reinforced, it became an instinctive expectation in us. (Although it has to be remembered that while we became instinctively trained or indoctrinated with love, while we learnt how to love, significantly, we did not learn why we should love.) Initially the way the process of love-indoctrination was genetically encouraged was by ‘naturally selecting’ more maternally capable mothers; once initiated the genes could then reinforce selfless training. On their own genes could not develop selflessness but once there was love-indoctrination to train individuals in selflessness the genes could then follow the training process, reinforcing it. Later, when the mind went its own ‘corrupted’ way during humanity’s adolescence, the genes would similarly follow along behind it, as it were ‘reinforcing’ what was happening. If sufficient generations of humans decide to want to hunt animals gradually there will occur genetic selection for and thus adaption to hunting. Genes would naturally follow and reinforce any development. The difficulty was in getting developments to occur, not in making them instinctive because that was automatic. In Part 2 this process of love-indoctrination will be looked at again within the full biological description of our development.

In the case of the instinctive reinforcement of love-indoctrination eventually self-selection was to play a part inPage 48 of
Print Edition leading the genes. We came to recognise and seek as mates individuals who would make our group more co-operative (or integrative). The right sort of individuals were those who had spent the longest period in infancy (and therefore received the longest training in love or selflessness) and those who were closest to their memory of this infancy training period. The physical features that signalled these traits were the neotenous, or childlike, features of large eyes, snub nose and domed forehead. Long ago we sought (‘selected for’, in Darwinian terminology) those features now regarded as cute and beautiful in a human.

 

 

These pictures of a juvenile and adult chimpanzee show the greater resemblance humans have to the baby and illustrate the principle of neoteny in human development. They appear in the book, The Mismeasure of Man (1981), by Harvard scientist, Stephen Jay Gould. Gould is one of the few scientists in the world who has been actively trying to resist and even expose the evasion of science. (In the case of Mismeasure he is referring to intelligence testing which was an evasive aspect of our academic system that will also be mentioned later in this book.) Gould’s explanation for neoteny (where rates of development slow down and juvenile stages of ancestors become the adult features of descendents) is that ‘We retain not only the anatomical stamp of childhood, but its mental flexibility as well’ . . . that ‘flexibility of behaviour are qualities of juveniles, only rarely of adults.’ . . . that ‘Humans are learning animals.’ Gould correctly recognises neoteny as having played a significant part in our development. As Gould says, ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’. However Gould incorrectly thinks the change occurred so we could learn. As has now been explained the cause of our neoteny was the process of love-indoctrination and the reason for love-indoctrination was to become trained in love or integrativeness. Neoteny did not occur so we could become ‘mentally flexible’ or ‘learn’. Mentally clever man, Homo, appeared well after we were becoming neotenous. Neoteny occurred as a consequence of love-indoctrination and love-indoctrination occurred becausePage 50 of
Print Edition we needed to be integrative. It was integrativeness (co-operation) and neoteny that went hand in hand; our intellect developed later on. A fortunate but nevertheless accidental consequence of being trained in integrativeness by love-indoctrination was that our mind was liberated to think effectively. (As mentioned earlier, this liberation of conscious thought or effective reasoning in primates will be fully explained in Part 2.)

 

 

These two pictures are from an article titled The Rare Pygmy Chimp by Paul Raeburn which appeared in the June 1983 edition of Science 83 magazine. The rounder eyes, smaller ears and less protruding jaw of the adult pygmy chimp (top) indicate that this species has developed more love-indoctrination than the common chimp (bottom). Although the researchers who wrote the article were unaware of the process of love-indoctrination, they said the pygmy chimps were frequently seen ‘... standing upright and walking on two feet [the more we had to hold a helpless infant with our arms during love-indoctrination the more we had to learn to walk upright]. They are known to share their food [they are trained in selflessness], and unlike common chimps, they frequently mate face to face [reflecting a greater awareness and thus capacity for affection]. . . . [Also, they] are much less aggressive than common chimps . . . Social groups are also more stable among the pygmies, who seem to get along with each other better [they are more integrated] . . .’. The authors also point to behaviour which suggests that females play a greater role in directing groups, in contrast with common chimp society, where the males dominate. (In the pygmy chimp matriarchy is replacing pre-love-indoctrination male dominance. The reasons for male dominance conventions will be explained in Part 2.) With one of the female pygmy chimps the authors found that ‘you frequently have the feeling that she is trying to communicate about things in the past [an indication of the emergence of consciousness] . . .’

It is obvious that these rare pygmy chimps are going to bePage 52 of
Print Edition absolutely invaluable for gaining an insight into humanity’s infancy stage of development.

It can be seen that it was maternalism that made us human. Throughout humanity’s infancy and childhood, a period that lasted from twelve to two million years ago, women’s role of nurturing the infants was the most important one to the group. Men had to be in support of it. Women had to devote all their attention to the loving of their infants if integratively trained and thus co-operative adults were to occur. Until it became instinctive, love-indoctrinated co-operation was extremely hard to develop and maintain which, incidentally, is why there are many primate species still stranded in the mind’s infancy stage of development. The chimpanzee and other apes are still in mid-infancy where humanity was about eight million years ago. Love-indoctrination required ideal nursery conditions which means our description of the luxurious Rift Valley of Africa, where humanity spent its infancy and childhood, as the ‘cradle of mankind’ was particularly apt.

Succeeding at love-indoctrinating infants was a difficult task requiring all women’s attention. With women so preoccupied nurturing, men had to support them. Men were subservient to the needs of women at this stage. The support men could give was to shelter and protect the group from outside threats such as marauding leopards.

What happened two million years ago was that a monster ‘leopard’ — a monster threat to the group — appeared. It was the threat of ignorance, ignorance on the part of our conscience (and, by association, all things innocent) of our need to attempt to understand existence and master self-management.

As group protectors it was men’s role to meet this threat and, though they did not know it then, it would take two million years to vanquish. So great was this threat that it became humanity’s dominant concern. If understanding could not be found, if our innocent conscience’s efforts to stop our search for understanding could not be fought off, all future development of humanity and of the development of order on earth would be stalled. (ThisPage 53 of
Print Edition was the larger view. As has been explained the view from each man’s position was that he had to try and realise his mind’s potential or ‘achieve as much as he could’.) At two million years ago, after ten million years of being a female role dominated or matriarchal society, the threat of ignorance turned humanity into a male role dominated or patriarchal society.

Not responsible for the fight to defy the ignorance of innocence, women’s innocence became a victim of that fight. Women’s innocence, like that of the animals, represented a defiance of the need to search for understanding, leaving men no choice but to either defy/oppress/destroy/attack that defiance or abandon the search. Unlike the animals, the destruction of women’s innocence didn’t entail destruction of women themselves. They couldn’t be destroyed because they reproduced men. Instead sex, originally for procreation, became perverted, ‘misused’ by men as a means of attacking the innocence of women. This violation of women’s innocence, this ‘misuse’ of them, this rape, made women as soul-destroyed as men but it brought them into harmony with men’s desperate battle to defy ignorance. Women were adapted to the battle. Women came with men on the long march through humanity’s adolescence, bringing them the only warmth and ‘comfort’ they would know. Civilised sex (as opposed to rape) became, in the grander sense, an act of love — an act of compassion, sympathy and support.

This oppression of women was a horrible situation. It needs to be explained more fully so it can be clearly understood. Not responsible for the fight against ignorance and so not partaking in the battle itself women could not know what that fight involved. Consequently if they were not oppressed they could naively impose their innocence. The effect of this would have been to deny humanity its need to be, to a degree, free to search for understanding. For example, if women had had their way, in their innocence, they no doubt would have stopped the men’s ‘bloodthirsty’ ‘sport’ of hunting animals. Denied expression for their embattled egos — for their conscious thinking self or mind’s need to, in some way or other, win against their innocentPage 54 of
Print Edition conscience’s unjust criticisms of their efforts to master self-management — men could not have coped. The eight-year-old at the birthday table had to have some way of retaliating against the criticism from the innocents. He had to do something to defend himself. He could not be expected to just sit there and take it. If he were expected not to retaliate in any way then he could not be expected to be inclined ever to take the cake again, in which case he would never gain understanding. Men had to be allowed to express their egos and it can be seen that they would have to have extremely powerful egos if they were to have the necessary determination their job of championing the mind demanded. Their ego had to be strong enough to defy the innocence of the whole world because the whole world was an innocent friend of our soul, not a friend of our corrupt and apparently bad mind. But women did not and could not be expected to understand this battle. They could understand the search for truth but not the battle involved in that search. This extract from a newspaper article illustrates the problem: ‘Shirley MacLaine can’t find a man to love. ‘The 48 year old actress [said] she longs for a “close and warm relationship”, but hasn’t met a suitable partner. “Most men I meet seem to be too involved in trying to be successful or making lots of money”, she said. “I feel sorry for all of them. Men have been so brainwashed into thinking they have to be so outrageously successful — to be winners — that life is very difficult for them. And it’s terribly destructive, as far as I am concerned, when you are trying to get a serious relationship going.” ’² What alternative was there but oppression? (It should be immediately stressed that this was another situation requiring balance. Too much freedom for women and they would stifle the search for understanding; too much oppression and they would become too dispirited and, as will shortly be explained, too soul-destroyed to effectively nurture a subsequent generation.)

Page 55 of
Print Edition The only alternative to oppression was that men explain themselves to women but the great tragedy was that this was not possible. Men could not admit their inconsistency with integrative meaning until they could defend it — least of all to an innocent who could only interpret a failed attempt to explain upset as an admission of ‘badness’. Here is a quote from a magazine that makes the point: ‘One of the reasons that men have been so quiet for the past two decades, as the feminist movement has blossomed, is that we [men] do not have the vocabulary or the concept to defend ourselves as men. We do not know how to define the virtues of being male, but virtues there are.’³

Feminists did not free themselves just because men stayed quiet as this quote suggests. The feminist movement was far more meaningful than that. The more men fought to defeat ignorance and protect the group (which was humanity) the more they became angry, egotistical, alienated and superficial and so the more they appeared to make the situation worse. The more men tried to protect us from danger the more they seemed to expose us to danger! In the end they became completely ineffective or inoperable, paralysed by this paradox. At this point women had to take over the day-to-day running of affairs and try to nurture a new generation of soundness. Women, not oppressed by the towering responsibility and extreme frustration that men felt, could remain effective. As well, when men crumpled women had to take over or the family, group or nation involved would perish. A return to matriarchy, such as we have recently been seeing on earth, was a sign that men in general had become completely exhausted. However it was not true matriarchy, because men could not afford to stand aside completely. They still had to stay in control of the fundamental battle, they still had to remain vigilant of the threat of ignorance. While some elements in the recent feminist movement, on sensing power coming women’s way, took the opportunity to get even Page 56 of
Print Edition with men for men’s oppression of them, the movement in general was most necessary and valid.

Throughout the battle to find understanding women were being forced to suffer the destruction of their soul, their innocence, at the same time having their trappings of innocence cultivated. Originally, as explained earlier, cute, youthful, childlike features were sought, were considered ‘beautiful’, because they indicated a potentially integrative person, they were the hallmarks of innocence. Later, when ignorance became a threat, men sought such ‘beauty’, such signs of innocence, for sexual destruction. We evasively described such looks as ‘attractive’. It was an evasive description because we were avoiding saying that what was being attracted was destruction, through sex, of women’s innocence. Because all other forms of innocence were being destroyed this cultivation of the beautiful object of innocence in women was the only way men were able to cultivate innocence during humanity’s adolescence. Women’s beauty became men’s only equivalent for the beauty of their lost pure world. As the writer Albert Camus once said, ‘women are all we [men] know of paradise on earth’. It was little wonder men fell in love with women. The ‘mystery of women’ was that it was only the physical image or object of love that men were falling in love with. For their part women were able to fall in love with the dream of their own ‘perfection’ — of their being truly innocent. Men and women fell in love. We abandoned the reality in favour of the dream. It was the one time in our life when we could be transported to ‘how it could be’ — to paradise.

This process of the destruction of women’s souls and the cultivation of their image of beauty has been going on for two million years. Lust and the hope of falling in love have almost ruled our lives. So much so the famous psychoanalyst Freud was misled into believing sex did rule our lives. However in truth the battle to find understanding always remained. Men and women became highly adapted to their roles. While men’s magazines are full of competitive battleground sport and business, women’s magazines are full of ways for women to be ‘attractive’.

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Print Edition Each generation of women had a very brief life (in innocence) before individually they became soul-destroyed through sex, after which they had to try to successfully nurture another generation into existence — all the time trying to conceal from that new generation the destruction that was all around the women and — after being soul-destroyed through sex — in them.

Women’s tasks of having to inspire love when they were no longer love, were no longer innocent (how could they be having been dragged by men through the horrors of humanity’s adolescence for two million years), to ‘keep the ship afloat’ when men crumpled and to attempt to wholesomely love another generation into existence — and all this with men dominating, and, as well, not being able to explain why they were dominating, what they were actually doing and why they were so upset and angry — was an altogether impossible job yet women did it and have done it for two million years! It was because of women’s phenomenally courageous support that men, when civilised, were chivalrous towards them, holding doors open for them and giving them their seat in a bus. While men had an impossible fight on their hands at least they had the luxury of knowing what was going on.

The more men searched for and progressed towards understanding, the more angry, egocentric and alienated they became, the more they were upset by innocence, the more they were destructive of women’s innocence, the more they became upset with themselves, the more they needed to find relief from that upset. (Interestingly the many paradoxes involved in this upset state of the human condition are perfectly described on an old poster for the movie The Treasure of Sierra Madre. The blurb reads ‘Humphrey Bogart storms the terror-swept goldlands — a new high in high adventure. The nearer they got to their treasure [understanding], the farther they got from the [integrative] law! And the more they yearn for their women’s arms [sexual release], the fiercer [the more upset they became with themPage 58 of
Print Edition selves and thus the more] they lust [and search] for the gold [liberating answers] that cursed them all.’)

The point to be made here is that women’s exhaustion development was tied to men’s. Women had to try and ‘sexually comfort’ men but also preserve as much real innocence in themselves as they could for the nurturing of the next generation. Their situation, like men’s, got worse at an ever-increasing rate. The more women ‘comforted’, the less innocence they retained, the more the next generation suffered, the more that following generation needed ‘comforting’, etc. If humanity’s battle had gone on another few thousand years all women would have ended up like Marilyn Monroe, complete sacrifices to men, at which point men would have destroyed themselves and the species because there would have been no soundness left (in women) to love/nurture a fresh generation. Olive Schreiner in her novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), made the same point. When talking of men persuading women to have sex she said (through her female character) men say ‘ “Go on; but when you [men] have made women what you wish, and her children inherit her culture, you will defeat yourself. Man will gradually become extinct . . . Fools!” she said!’

The convention of marriage was invented as one way of containing this spread of exhaustion. By confining sex to a life-long relationship, the souls of the couple could gradually make contact and be together in spite of the sexual destruction involved in their relationship. Brief relationships kept souls repressed and spread soul repression. Sex killed innocence. During humanity’s adolescence that was what sex was all about, although it was also one of the greatest distractions and releases of frustration and, on a higher level, an expression of sympathy, compassion and support — an act of love. Once again we see the paradox of the human condition at work. By repressing sex and sexual attraction, such as the custom of all-over covering of women in Moslem societies, we could restrict the spread of sexual destruction but, as with humanity’s exhaustion in general, not stop it completely. Only the arrival of the full truth or the answers could haltPage 59 of
Print Edition the development of exhaustion. For women to be genuinely liberated, men’s upset had to be resolved. To do this the true defence for our mistakes had to be found — as it now is. All our upsets unravel from the source or original upset which was ‘the taking of the cake’ — humanity’s effort to master self-management.

In Olive Schreiner’s novel she goes on to say (again through her female character) that: ‘ “If I might but be one of those born in the future; then perhaps, to be born a woman will not be to be born branded.” . . . “It is for love’s sake yet more than for any other that we [women] look for that new time.” She had leaned her head against the stones, and watched with her sad, soft eyes the retreating bird. “Then when that time comes,” she said slowly, “when love is no more bought or sold, when it is not a means of making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a strange sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found. Then, but not now. —” ’ This future that women have dreamed of has arrived. Men’s battle is won — is over. The source ‘dragon’ of all our dragons is slain. The ‘devil’ who/which, when we were innocent, was the coercion from the evasive world to abandon and thus compromise our ideals, or, when we were exhausted, was the false implication from the ideals that we were bad, is overcome. We now have the truth about ourselves. Our identity is found.

It should be pointed out here that the destruction of innocence, such as the destruction of animals and corruption of women just described, has been going on at all levels. Humans also destroyed the innocent soul in themselves by repressing it. All forms of innocence unfairly criticised humans, so all forms of innocence were attacked by us. The wearing of dark glasses ostensibly as sunshades was often an effort to alienate ourselves from the natural world that was alienating us — was an attack on the innocence of the daytime.

The paradox was that having destroyed innocence men would end up wanting to rediscover it. The truth was men were havingPage 60 of
Print Edition to repress and ‘hurt the one they loved’. To quote an exceptional modern day prophet or unevasive thinker, Sir Laurens van der Post, from his book, The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958), ‘I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest in us all.’ While women’s oppression has been extreme so has men’s and men have yearned for freedom from their oppressor, ignorance, as much as women have yearned for freedom from their oppressor, men.

(Incidentally, it was impossible for a woman to be a prophet. Women could be exceptionally honest, often, in their naivety, more honest than men, as Olive Schreiner was, but not appreciating the threat of ignorance they were not in a position to reconcile the upset on earth because at its base the upset was caused by the threat of ignorance. For example Olive Schreiner called men ‘fools’ and Shirley MacLaine thought they must be ‘brain washed’. Women certainly knew of upset but they did not understand it. Women were unaware of the threat of ignorance. The female equivalent of a male prophet was an exceptionally innocent mother capable of giving a son only pure love and thus producing a prophet. The primary role of women was nurturing.)

Having to assume the day-to-day running of affairs as men everywhere became exhausted made it difficult for women to give children the nurturing they needed. With men exhausted and women working this was becoming a serious problem for humanity because it would produce an even more exhausted generation. Now that the battle to get the truth up is won the whole situation can change and all importance be placed on nurturing a break-free generation.

Another dangerous distortion in nurturing was the tendency for parents when exhausted to transfer their ego needs onto their children and try to make them winners. Children are not competitive. Ego doesn’t manifest until adolescence. Parents’ efforts to ‘jump-start toddlers in pre-school hot houses’ and ‘train themPage 61 of
Print Edition to be geniuses and super-kids’⁴ was a sign of the arrival of the ego desperation that came with complete exhaustion. The more the mind searched for understanding the more it was criticised (by the conscience) and so the more it tried to win against the false implication that it was bad. It was our intellect or intelligence that was under siege — that was insecure. The more exhausted we became the more we tried to champion the intellect. In the end nothing but intellectual supremacy could be tolerated and we excessively repressed our soul. We became unbalanced.

Parents were not the only ones with excessively insecure egos or intellects. On a much larger scale our whole academic system placed excessive emphasis on the need for I.Q. in inquiry. Everywhere the need for more I.Q. was being stressed when what was required was more soul — was more soundness of self. To make the point, the minimum I.Q. requirement for entrance to any university in the world we like to name was a level that was too high for effective inquiry into the truth. How could this be? Once the boy took the cake at the birthday party and was criticised the only thing that would relieve the criticism was understanding. As soon as he took the cake the race was on to find understanding to stop the criticism, so suddenly there was a need for I.Q. or intelligence to find that understanding. Our mind or ego, or effectively each of us, became driven to find relief.

While the brain size of the australopithecines was not much bigger than Infantman (such as chimpanzees), there is a sudden increase in brain size in the first of the Homos, Homo habilis. That dramatic growth continues through Homo erectus and Homo sapiens finally to plateau off in Homo sapiens sapiens. Anthropologists have long wondered why this growth stopped. The reason is that in Homo sapiens sapiens a balance was struck between the need for cleverness and the need for soundness. The average I.Q. of people today is that amount which is safely conscience-subordinate. Too much I.Q. and we diverged too Page 62 of
Print Edition quickly and too far from our soul and all the ideals it knows; too little I.Q. and we were too conscience-obedient. We needed both the guidance of our conscience and our intellect’s capacity for insight. While we recognised that insight and I.Q. were related we evasively failed to recognise that alienation and I.Q. were also related. The more intelligent we were, the sooner we took the cake, the sooner we repressed our soul and all the absolute truths (such as integrative meaning) along with it. With access to integrative meaning repressed it was impossible to think straight. Trying to make sense out of existence while avoiding integrative meaning was like trying to discover how a car worked having decided not to look under the bonnet at the engine. On the other hand too little I.Q. and we would never take the cake and never understand.

The average I.Q. of humans today was the ideal or most balanced I.Q. for inquiry into the truth, not the exceptionally high I.Q. that our academic institutions evasively sought. Ideally the exceptionally ‘clever’ should have been excluded from inquiry just as we excluded those who were exceptionally lacking in ‘cleverness’ or I.Q. Like the egotistical parents, academia was behaving extremely insecurely. Humanity had become dangerously over-exhausted. By excessively repressing soul/soundness/innocence in inquiry we were denying instead of cultivating the arrival of the liberating full truth. The answers would come from back down the road towards the world of soundness/innocence/soul. Intellectualism was a cul-de-sac in development.

A leading academic recently said that ‘Biology has not made any real advance since Darwin’⁵. In Darwin’s autobiography he says ‘When I left school I was for my age neither high nor low in it; and I believe that I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.’ It was mentioned earlier that trying to make sense out of existence while avoiding integrative meaning was Page 63 of
Print Edition like trying to understand how a car works having decided not to look under the bonnet at the engine. The extent of the limitation of this blindness becomes abundantly clear when the reader sees just how much mystery has been cleared up in this book simply by living with instead of evading integrative meaning — simply by ‘looking under the bonnet’.

It was in evading the truth that cleverness was necessary. It was our ability to evade what was really so obvious that was so brilliant. It is the story of The Emperor With No Clothes — where it took the sheer simplicity/innocence of a small boy to break the spell and expose the truth — and also the story of David and Goliath, where it took a small boy in all his simplicity and innocence to walk out and destroy the monster of our evasions which is Goliath. As Christ said (and this quote will be mentioned again very shortly) ‘You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’. The strength that was required to find the understandings in this book was the ability to defy our evasions, which, in the final analysis, is innocence or soundness, not cleverness. Through evasive, cleverness-stressing, mechanistic inquiry it was possible for humanity to find the pieces of the jigsaw of explanation but the pieces had to be presented upside down to hide the pictures of the hurtful partial truths they represented. (For instance, science discovered the law that explains development — The Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics — but presented that hurtful partial truth evasively by stressing only its divisive direction towards entropy or disorder and calling the whole process aimless ‘evolution’ instead of purposeful development.) The ability to assemble these ‘jigsaw pieces’ to reveal the full truth required innocence because only innocence of hurt could look at the hurtful partial truths without being hurt. (For example, if you are not upset/divisive you don’t have to evade integrative meaning.) The jigsaw could not be put together to reveal the full picture without looking at the pieces picture-side up. The full truth could only be found by confronting instead of evading the hurtful partialPage 64 of
Print Edition truths. The full truth could not be found using evasions/‘lies’/‘untruths’.

Humanity had to progress towards the truth evading any hurtful partial truths along the way. In the end this meant we had accumulated a mountain of evasion that only someone innocent and thus unevasive could dismantle. The army of humanity had made all the preparations it could. It had to await the appearance from among its ranks of an exceptional innocent — a David to go out and slay Goliath — to go out and overcome all the evasions in our evasively presented insights and reveal the full truth they contained and free us. But the problem was we were repressing innocence, denying its involvement.

By cultivating intellectualism we overshot the mark. We passed over our most effective thinkers. Sir Laurens van der Post has made the same point. He has been quoted as saying that some of the most anonymous people are among the greatest he has known, one of them being a Zulu who cannot read or write⁶. Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who wrote the Little Prince mentioned earlier) has been quoted as saying that the three greatest human beings he had ever met were three illiterates, two Brittany fishermen and a farmer in Savoy. He added, ‘mistrust always the quick and brilliant mind’⁷. Christ warned us about intellectualism most determinedly almost 2,000 years ago but we did not heed him. He called the intellectuals of his day: ‘You brood of vipers! . . . You blind guides’ (Math 23) and said ‘You [God] have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children’ (Math 11:25). He begins his most important speech, ‘The Sermon on the Mountain’, thus: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. Spirit was our original description for intellect. Even Einstein, whom we regard as an exceptional intellect, recognised the need for introspective guidance to accompany the intellect. He said ‘Science without religion is Page 65 of
Print Edition lame, religion without science is blind’⁸ and in his obituary is enshrined a quote of his which says ‘the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research’. Introspection or holistic subjectivity with its requisite degree of soundness was as important in inquiry as research or mechanistic objectivity with its requisite degree of cleverness — the soul and the mind had equally important roles to play. We failed to heed the advice of even our intellectual heroes. We would listen to no one!

Actually it should be acknowledged here that science has been beginning to admit the dangers of being too mechanistic/evasive. Harvard scientist Stephen Jay Gould was mentioned earlier as one of a few scientists actively trying to resist and even expose the evasions of science. Another that could be mentioned is Charles Birch, former Professor of Biology at Sydney University in Australia. For instance Professor Birch has said:

 

 

‘There are two ways of trying to understand nature. One is to reduce living organisms to next to nothing, such as atoms or their parts and then try to build up a world from these so-called building blocks. This is reductionism. . . . [It] is the dominant mode of science and is particularly applicable to biology as it is taught today. It leads to a materialistic or mechanical view of life which fails to do justice to what each one of us knows about being alive, namely, being creatures who feel and respond and have hopes, fears and purposes. A view or model of livingness that leaves out feelings and consciousness is an emasculated view of life. I believe it has grave consequences. . . .

In the name of scientific objectivity we have been given an emasculated vision of the world and all that is in it. The wave of anti-science and the profusion of cυlts and sects in our day is an extreme reaction to this malaise of materialism, mechanism, substance thinking or what you will.

I believe biologists and naturalists have a special responsibility to put another image before the world that does justice to the unity of Page 66 of
Print Edition life and all its manifestations of experience — aesthetic, religious and moral as well as intellectual and rational.’⁹

 

Nobel Laureate biologist Jacques Monad in his book, Chance and Necessity (1970), gave a similar warning when he said:

 

 

‘In the course of three centuries, science, founded upon the postulate of objectivity, has won its place in society — in men’s practice, but not in their hearts . . . the choice of scientific practice . . . has launched the evolution of culture on a one-way path; on to a track which nineteenth-century scientism saw leading infallibly on to a vast blossoming for mankind, whereas what we see before us today is an abyss of darkness.’

 

It was no wonder the creationist alternative became established to counter science’s overemphasis on Godlessness or denial of integrativeness. We had to come up with something to counter science’s entrenched blindness. The only way we have had to maintain and preserve the absolute truths was to enshrine them as metaphysical concepts within our various old religions. By bringing science further and further to the fore and making these metaphysical truths increasingly remote and not of our world we left no effective presence of the absolute truths in our midst. Evasion was all dominating. In earlier times we had more respect for religion, which kept the door to the absolute truths open. Religions were the custodians of the truth while academia was the custodian of evasive insights into the truth. We needed a balanced presence of both but this was not maintained. Religions may have been remote with their mystical explanations but science was equally as remote and mad with its evasive explanations and this equality of craziness was not reflected by a balanced presentation of the two views. Science in its ego came to portray itself as being totally rigorous, responsible and sound when it was nothing of the sort. Science was Page 67 of
Print Edition choked up with a mountain of evasion — a ‘pack of lies’. It was extremely false.

The following quote illustrates what has been said here about the rise of creationist explanation to balance Godless science. The author, Dr. Gish, is the associate director of The Institute of Creation Research in San Diego. When he said the following he was advocating teaching Creationism in school:

 

 

‘What has happened in our society in the last half century or so is that our young people in the colleges, universities and schools have been taught the theory of evolution as an established fact.

They’ve been taught that evolution is an exclusively naturalistic theory, and that God is not necessary. God, by definition, is excluded from the process. When the student hears this, he thinks we start with hydrogen gas and our only destiny is a pile of dust. Therefore there is no one to whom he is responsible. The teaching of the theory of evolution had caused the moral deterioration of modern society. Today we have a rampant drug culture, legalised pornography, and abortion . . . now, we might ask ourselves why have these changes occurred.’¹⁰

 

The part that says ‘our only destiny is a pile of dust’ is a reference to the evasive emphasis of science on entropy, which implies disintegration is our destiny or meaning. Blaming science for all our woes was unfair although we can see in retrospect that Dr. Gish was correct in making his point strongly. Charles Darwin, in his book commonly referred to as the Voyage of the Beagle (1839), expressed a similar concern when he said: ‘If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.’¹¹

Professor Birch has said: ‘Scientists tend to detach from the bigger view of things but science won’t survive until science develops a stronger conscience’¹².

Page 68 of
Print Edition The problem was that to develop a stronger conscience — to stress soundness without defence for our lack of soundness — unfairly added to our sense of guilt. The truth is humanity in its insecurity was capable of recognising every talent except soundness. Christ said, ‘foxes have holes and birds of the air nests but the Son of Man [those made ‘in the image of God’ — those unseparated from their soul or instinctive self — those unexhausted and thus capable of being integrative and thinking integratively — the exceptionally sound] has no place to lay his head’ (Math 8:20). We did not want to know about the sound or soundness. The world of the sound, the way they thought, what they could see and the way they felt, went unrecognised on earth. The sound among us, like the soundness (our soul) within us, were ignored and repressed into anonymity. They were alone with their soundness, unwanted. We can appreciate this when we realise how repressed our soul itself has been. After two million years of repression our soul was as lonely within us and as cast out as a lost bird in an empty desert or sea. To quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge describing our ‘soul in agony’ in his poem The Ancient Mariner:

‘Alone, alone, all alone

Alone on a wide, wide sea!’

When this book was about to be typeset for printing, the author’s mother found the following passage which just has to be included even though it is rather lengthy because it is so expressive of all that has just been said. It appears at the start of the introduction to a book titled, Simone Weil, An Anthology (1986), edited and introduced by Sian Miles. It reads:

 

 

‘Simone Weil completed her last work in 1943 when at the age of thirty-four she died in an English sanatorium. Two weeks earlier she had written to her parents:

“When I saw [Shakespeare’s] Lear here, I asked myself how it was possible that the unbearably tragic character of these fools had not been obvious long ago to everyone, including myself. The tragedy is not the sentimental one it is sometimes thought to be; it is this:

Page 69 of
Print Edition There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself — and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie.

In Lear it is striking. Even Kent and Cordelia attenuate, mitigate, soften, and veil the truth; and unless they are forced to choose between telling it and telling a downright lie, they manoeuvre to evade it. . . . Darling M., do you feel the affinity, the essential analogy between these fools and me — in spite of the Ecole and the examination successes and the eulogies of my ‘intelligence’ . . . [which] are positively intended to evade the question: Is what she says true?’ And my reputation for ‘intelligence’ is practically equivalent to the label of ‘fool’ for those fools. How much I would prefer their label.” Since then she has become known as one of the foremost thinkers of modern times, a writer of extraordinary lucidity and a woman of outstanding moral courage.’

 

Our soul had no friends amongst humans today. All it had was the knowledge of, and enthusiasm for the utterly beautiful world where it came from which, in spite of its repression, represented a more powerful force than any other force on earth — nothing man has created can remotely compare with the beauty and happiness of our lost world. In recognition of this power the word enthusiasm is derived from the Greek word ‘enthios’ which means ‘God within’. The problem in the first place was that our soul was unfriendly towards our mind. It unjustly criticised our necessary efforts to master self-management which meant we had to be tough enough to repress it or fail to fulfil our responsibility to learn self-management. Our soul cast out our mind which left our mind no choice but to retaliate and cast out our soul. As an expression of our soul the sound also represented unjust criticism of us. Soundness reflected critically on our lack of soundness — a position we were unable to defend. The full truth is that those of us who were sons of upset were just as much sons of God as those of us who were sons of righteousness or thePage 70 of
Print Edition image of God or integrative or sound. We could not acknowledge the integrativeness/Godliness of the sound until we could explain that the exhausted were also Godly. We could not recognise, cultivate or institutionalise soundness until we could defend exhaustion. We could not recognise our soul until we could defend our mind. The existence of soundness/our soul was a hurtful partial truth that we had to evade. As has been mentioned we cultivated a mechanistic/objective/evasive approach to inquiry. We could not cultivate a holistic/subjective/unevasive approach. Like the end of the oppression of women, the end of the oppression of soundness — of our soul, of our original beautiful world — depended on the end of the oppression of our intellect by ignorance.

Prophets, women, animals, nature and all other forms of innocence had to suffer repression and persecution. There was no other way. The intellect/spirit had to succeed, had to achieve its goal. However excessive repression of women and prophets — of the ability to nurture innocence and of innocence or soundness itself — and the intellect would actually fail to achieve its liberation from criticism. Excessive exhaustion, particularly alienation and superficiality, and we would never find the truth. Such a situation of extreme ‘lostness’ has been occurring on earth. For example: ‘according to a new book, Women and World Religions, oppression of women . . . is due to womb envy on the part of men’¹³! Any more superficial and we would take seriously the Monty Python answer that ‘the meaning of life is the number 42’. Our planet has been awash with superficial answers. The word superficial means the opposite of deep or profound. The desire not to ‘dig deep’ is what alienation is. So the earth was awash with alienation. Now that alienation can be defended the sound can be acknowledged for their soundness. The priority now that we are at last defended is to nurture soundness and to bring the sound to the forefront of our development to clear up Page 71 of
Print Edition any remaining evasion, alienation and superficiality and lead us out of our development cul-de-sac.

To free ourselves from our embattled state we had to become secure in our understanding that our intellect and the exhaustion that it gave rise to was not bad — that all humans are equally good. It can be understood now that we all fought equally hard for humanity with the different stages of exhaustion from fighting accounting for the differences in our behaviour. In truth the exceptionally sound were not ‘great’ as van der Post and Saint-Exupery claimed, only exceptionally innocent and therefore capable of being exceptionally sound and unevasive. They were just new to the battle. If a fresh player runs onto the football field three-quarters of the way through a game and makes some hard and straight runs with the ball it doesn’t mean he is a better player than the others, only that he is less exhausted. Humans are differently exhausted but no human is superior or inferior to another. We were all equally good soldiers for integrativeness — for God — with the only difference being that some of us had been fighting for God longer than others — some of us have been more heroic than others — some of us have been searching for understanding and battling the accompanying unfair criticism from our soul longer than others.

Having been through a period of intellectualism humanity will now go through a period of ‘soulism’ to clear up any remaining evasions. The situation now is that the exhausted can go into therapy (instead of into even more egotistical, futile, false and upsetting pursuits as has often been the case) since therapy is now at last possible, and the sound can go into inquiry since they no longer represent criticism of the rest of us. Effectively organised at last (after all, the practical way to play a game of football is to have the fresh players on the field and the exhausted ones off the field resting), we will quickly mend ourselves and our earth. When all our evasions are cleared up there will be no further need for our soul. The intellect will then be free to realise its full potential as the master tool that it is. It is the nerve-based learning system, or mind, that can knowingly integrate thePage 72 of
Print Edition universe. Also, while humanity will now start to close its cities down (in truth cities were not functional centres as we evasively claimed, they were hideouts for alienation and places that perpetuated/bred alienation — to quote the Australian historian Manning Clark ‘the bush [wilderness] is our source of innocence; the town is where the devil prowls around’¹⁴) and go back to nature to rehabilitate its soul and become sound again, it shouldn’t ‘throw out the baby with the bathwater’ and lose all the knowledge it gained in inquiry such as in the field of high technology. While our energies were often horribly misdirected and our creations often as extremely distorted as we were, nevertheless, in our mad and driven state, we did cover a lot of valuable ground in inquiry that will be needed when we set about integrating the universe.

This time the story has got a long way ahead of itself. In progressing through the stages of adolescence we were up to the so-called ‘hunter-gatherer’ lifestyle that was perfected by Homo erectus. It was during the ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence that we refined all our conventions for coping with the human condition that we now take for granted, such as marriage to contain sexual destruction. We settled into the long and painful journey to find understanding, although at the end were racing against the onset of total exhaustion. As an indication of the increasing speed at which exhaustion was developing, Adventurousman, Homo erectus, existed for a million years but Angryman, who was Homo sapiens, lasted only half as long, from half a million years ago to fifty thousand years ago — before maturing into Sophisticated (in exhaustion) man who is us, Homo sapiens sapiens, and now, only fifty thousand years later, Sophisticatedman is giving rise to Triumphantman, or Godman. The emergence of Triumphantman signals the end of humanity’s search for its identity, which was its adolescence, and the arrival of humanity’s adulthood where it has to implement that identity and knowingly manage the development of order of matter.

Page 73 of
Print Edition The hardships and confinement of life during the ice ages contributed to the speeding up of this progression because these periods dramatically accentuated the difficulties encountered by humans co-existing under the strain of the human condition. As has been mentioned before, isolation from encounter with the battle minimised the spread of exhaustion. If we were each alone with our level of exhaustion we would not be criticised by the fresher souls or corrupted by the more battle-worn. It was because of this truth that we often said we ‘had to make an effort’ if we were to go out and be social. The closer humans lived together during humanity’s adolescence and/or the more difficult the living conditions the greater the occurrence and spread and thus increase in upset. An ice age represented one very long trying winter. In fact out of each of the great ice ages the next more exhausted stage of man appeared.

To return to our twenty-one-year-old (Homo erectus on the anthropological scale) who went out into the world to learn — to apply himself — to ‘achieve as much as he could’. He gets a job and starts to master it, so beginning to play his part in humanity’s quest for understanding. Gradually ‘life’s compromises’ (the compromises he has to make to his soul) change him from an idealist to a realist. Gradually he comes to experience to the full extent the difficulty of practising self-management without an adequate defence for the mistakes that result. Through experience he learns sympathy for the highly imperfect real world. Because of the compounding effect of upset he becomes increasingly embattled and, in the end, desperate. From his position of sympathy towards the real world he becomes an outright supporter, attacking anything ‘ideal’. By his late thirties he is in a rage of anger and viciously determined to win against the unfair criticism he is experiencing. He becomes totally embattled or ‘punch drunk’. On reaching this state of absolute hate and destructiveness he begins to hate even himself.

Still lacking the exonerating answers that could relieve his anger, all he can do is learn to discipline himself, contain his rage. Through bitter experience he learns to rein in hisPage 74 of
Print Edition expressions of upset. Nearing forty years of age, he learns to civilise his upset. When humanity became civilised it hadn’t eliminated its upset only learnt to contain it. Civility didn’t solve upset, it only disguised it. The anger was still there, only repressed and restrained. Instead of expressing what he feels our forty-year-old learns to ask acquaintances politely how they are faring and talk about harmless things such as the weather.

Such civilities, while they made living together possible, were an extreme form of pretence — of being what we were not. This falseness, while highly destructive to any young innocents looking on, was far less so than expressing the real upset. We had no choice but to become sophisticated (in evasion and repression). Angryman, Homo sapiens, lived out the upsets that were mostly repressed into only fantasies in us, his descendant, Sophisticatedman (Homo sapiens sapiens). For example it was during the life of Homo sapiens that we needed to ‘lock up our daughters’ as the saying goes, for he lived out the sexual destructiveness that we, Homo sapiens sapiens, have long since learnt to repress, to civilise.

All these stages of exhaustion during a mental lifetime are now partially instinctive in us. We have become adapted to the battle. For example, of 100 men trying to restrain their anger we could expect a few to have a nature (a genetic make-up) that in some way would make it easier for them to do so, so they would make the adjustment and cope and thus survive better. In each generation, this would have been the case, so the genes, as it were, followed the mind, ‘reinforcing’ the adjustments the mind was making. In this way all the adjustments described have been partially genetically built into us and, to a degree, appear automatically as we reach the ages where they are needed. Being so pre-adapted to cope we have often hardly realised the psychological adjustments we have been making as we grew (actually died in both soul and spirit) — except obliquely when we talked about generation gaps and acknowledged the wildness of youth, etc. These stages of adjustment account for the way people of particular ages have been only really able to find empathy withPage 75 of
Print Edition others of almost their exact age. A lot of awareness and, with it, knowledge has been age-locked.

Not only were there different stages with ages, there were also different instinctive types of lives to cope with whatever degree of exhaustion we might have to adjust to when we were born. The stages with ages being described are the average mental lifetime, the main one that we are adapted to. However, we could be born into the midst of the battle and have to start our life from a position already well down the exhaustion curve. The offspring of the boy who took the cake will grow up with a father angry, egocentric, alienated and superficial. Since this is not the sort of loving behaviour our soul expects and unable to be told why this ‘mistreatment’ is occurring the souls of the offspring will become upset also. In this way the ‘sins’ (the critical biblical description we had for our upset behaviours) ‘of the father’ will be passed on from generation to generation (see Ex 20:5). Or we could be born into a sheltered recuperative corner of the battlefield and start our life from a position of exceptional innocence. Inevitably in the thousands of generations that led to us every variety of life possible under the human condition would have been encountered and the fact that our ancestors survived to produce us means they must have had what it took to cope, therefore we can expect to be similarly adapted. We are the product of a great deal of genetic refinement. The subtlety this introduces is that while the type of life we would live would largely be chosen by the degree of ‘nurture’ in our upbringing there was a lot of ‘nature’ involved in that life. Through generations of experience, life at every level of exhaustion has refined its own ways of coping and maximising its position. It was as if there were a basket of different lives within us ready for use. Depending on what level of exhaustion we encountered when we were young — what rung on the exhaustion ladder we stepped off from or started our life from — an appropriate life would be drawn out for use. As occurred with different stages with ages so people of similar types of lives were better able to ‘identify’ (understand and thus sympathise) with each other. But these kinds ofPage 76 of
Print Edition subtleties have to be explored in the full version of this book, not here in the condensed version.

Like the alienation within ourselves the alienation between different generations, ages and lives will be ended now that exhaustion can be explained and defended. We can begin to truly communicate with each other. To date, our wonderful forms of communication have often served only to communicate or spread exhaustion. Now they can be used to heal exhaustion. For example, we can now begin to talk about what is really going on inside ourselves instead of having to talk about our latest pair of ‘attractive’ blue shoes or our latest business ‘takeover’ or just the weather. Able to defend and explain ourselves to each other we will be able to understand each other. Everyone will be able to understand — to identify with everyone else. In truth we have each been terribly alone within ourselves. It is why we have often identified with such lonely places as the sea and the desert. At the other extreme, our inability to identify with each other — our alienation from each other, our insecurity about the fact of our goodness — was the basis of racism.

The author Germaine Greer once made the comment that ‘growing like ageing went in leaps and bounds’. We will discover that a good deal of our ageing, like our state of health, was tied to our exhaustion development — was psychosomatic. So growing with, or adapting to the human condition and ageing to some extent have been related. Because of our now instinctive preconditioning we did not notice that we were advancing down the ever-steepening (deteriorating) exhaustion curve in leaps and bounds. Only occasionally when we were able to look back, such as happened when we heard music or smelt smells associated with our youth, did we get a glimpse of just how much deterioration had taken place. Nostalgia is defined as ‘yearning for what is past or inaccessible; sentimental evocation of past happiness’.

However, to return to our middle-aged, civilised man. Civilising his upset can only slow its increase, not stop it or reverse it. So he becomes even more lost from the ideal world. It is at this stage, as he enters his early forties, that he discovers religionPage 77 of
Print Edition (where we preserved the absolute truth of integrativeness) and is able to be born again into the world of our soul. By adhering to the absolute truths enshrined in his religion he is able to once again be an effective force for integrativeness in spite of his divisive, embattled state. He is reborn into effectiveness although his grasp of the ideals often reveals a strange unfamiliarity with them. For instance in his ‘born-again’ idealism he decides to support the remote ‘save the seals’ campaign, when, were he really sound, he would grapple with the much closer to home real problem — the non-ideal human condition. He has to satisfy his need to be ideal without confronting his exhaustion or, by association, humanity’s real exhaustion. (As was explained earlier to be ‘born-again’ depended on abandoning or escaping our embattled state not on confronting it.) He is evasively unevasive. It is in many ways symbolic idealism. The unevasive, genuinely ideal way to end the devastation on earth was to confront our evasions and get to the full truth and thus fix the source of our upset — was to get the truth up — was to defy evasion not add to it. The problem was within ourselves not in the Arctic. Our born-again idealist overlooks the problem in himself, in his home and in his city where there is virtually no ideal/soundness/nature — or seals — left at all! In his evasion he ‘strains out a gnat but swallows a camel’ (Math 23:24).

Given the hope many people have been placing in causes such as the so-called ‘Green Movement’ to repair our earth the point made in this last paragraph needs to be emphasised. While we have had to evade the fact, the devastation of our planet and more importantly the deprivation and suffering of its people was entirely due to the human condition of upset — was due to our egomania, aggression and superficiality/blindness/alienation. Study any example closely enough, mental illness, famine, war, nuclear proliferation, corruption, air pollution, soil erosion, rainforest or wildlife destruction, to name a few, and we will see that this is true. Trying to solve these problems in any way that did not address the fundamental underlying problem of our upset was an evasion of the real problem and ultimately couldPage 78 of
Print Edition not succeed. It was inevitable that our earth would end up as exhausted as we were. We could delay the debilitating process but not stop it. Only the finding of the answers/understandings that appease our upset could stop the devastation of ourselves and our planet. Our remaining wilderness areas are going to be vital for the rehabilitation of our souls but to save them we have to tackle the problem of our upset human state or condition. Believing that we could repair the earth without confronting our upsets, that we could set about developing a so-called ‘steady state’, or ‘ecologically sustainable society’, as Herman Daly, Professor of Economics at Louisiana State University, proposed in his book, Steady State Economics, was another evasion of the real problem. Believing that we could learn to discipline and contain our human greed, indifference, anger, aggression, insensitivity and destructiveness without tackling the source of these upsets was a giant self-deception, was a falseness that contributed further falseness. This truth can be admitted now, our false hopes and beliefs abandoned and the real problem of our upset addressed. The unevasive thinker or prophet Carl Jung, in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (published many years ago now in 1933), was making the same point when he said: ‘It is becoming more and more obvious that it is not starvation, not microbes, not cancer, but man himself who is mankind’s greatest danger; because he has no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating in their effect than the greatest natural catastrophes.’

It should be mentioned that along with the exceptionally exhausted born-again idealists, such remote causes as the ‘save the seals’ campaign also attracted the exceptionally innocent and the exceptionally unaware who did not know of the real problem of the human condition. The realm of idealism was populated by both the exceptionally innocent and the exceptionally exhausted and because of the need that has existed until now to be evasive they were left undifferentiated.

To return to our born-again idealist he now also smiles all thePage 79 of
Print Edition time because he is now ‘good’ and no longer hurt but if he was truly unhurt he would be worried about the world.

Strange as born-again idealism has often been, the born again idealist had a most important role to play. In an utterly exhausted world where true soundness had almost all been spent those ‘born-again’ to the ideal world were virtually the only source of integrativeness left to balance exhaustion’s divisiveness. To be born again was highly responsible behaviour. Those among us who were irresponsible and lacking the necessary courage were those who held onto their angry, divisive selves and refused to be born again when they eventually became utterly spent.

This phenomenon of abandoning our embattled state and its world and embracing the ideal world has been expressed in different ways throughout our history. One of the most recent has been the adoption of the ideal future, the so-called New Age movement. It is important to realise that this movement, like the ones before it, practised artificial ‘transformation’, providing the same refuge traditional religions did, and was not a real transformation. As has been explained, a real transformation depended on confronting our blocks or alienations — depended on being unevasive — depended on finding understanding — depended on being able to think our split selves back together. Our real freedom lay back through our blocks not through abandoning them and distancing ourselves from them. New Age magazines and books typically chose ‘positive’ image cover illustrations such as a smiling ‘healthy’ girl back-lit with sunlight shining through leaves or nature-sympathetic pictures of rainbows. These images, like the contents of the books, were promoting a false freedom. A confrontation with our upset selves would look at the truth of our upset not evade it — would be illustrated by what the New Agers would term ‘negative’ image pictures such as artist Francis Bacon’s horrific but truthful portrayals of the human condition. What the New Agers saw as ‘positive’ was actually a ‘negative’ in terms of achieving liberation from our upsets. In the main, the New Age movement wasPage 80 of
Print Edition concerned with escaping to the future without traversing the path that takes us there. In the words of Jacob Bronowski from his book, The Ascent of Man (1973), ‘I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the west by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into — into what? Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about, Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception and mystery. They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself.’

The New Age movement was advocating a false freedom and was mostly being led by false prophets or alienated/‘blind guides’ (Math 23:24). Exhaustion/alienation could not investigate alienation — could not reveal the truth. If it could it would not be alienated. Only innocence could investigate and liberate us from alienation. Ultimately it was necessary for the exhausted to admit their state and cultivate innocence, not deny their exhaustion and in so doing further deceive and thus repress innocence which added to our psychosis/evasion/denial. Now that we have the defence for our condition we can at last do this. We can afford to end all our deceptions/falsehoods. We can abandon all the false props and false ways of coping that sustained us this far. We can go into true therapy instead of into pseudo therapy and further escape.

We have to distinguish between true prophets and false prophets — between the sound and the born again. The two have constantly been lumped together with the latter trying to imitate the former although the truth is they are from the opposite ends of the exhaustion or departure curve. Because of this confusion it has been easy to discredit a true prophet by implying he is a mystic and concerned with the occult — by implying he is strange or psychotic or over-exhausted instead of sound. The aspect of the deception or disguise of their exhaustion aside, it was true, as stressed above, that the strange idealism/honesty of the born again did represent an extremely valuable source of idealism/honesty in a world almost devoid of it.

Page 81 of
Print Edition The New Age movement was a sign of desperation of desperate need for relief — of a world that had become over-exhausted. Compared to the pseudo confrontations with our exhaustions being put forward by the New Agers — such as so-called ‘channelling’ (where ‘mediums’ supposedly talked with people from the past) and a ‘wheat grass juice diet’ and ‘re-birthing immersion therapy’ and ‘miraculous self-esteem achieved through reading and thinking mantras of positive thoughts’, and ‘healing the earth by holding hands and humming’ and ‘Zen-like [evasive] esotericism’ — the real truth/idealism is unmistakeable. With our evasions at last confronted, torn down and replaced with the compassionate but nevertheless shocking full truth, as they now are in this book, it is only a matter of time before we come to recognise it. The full truth comes like rolling thunder. We have known this for a long time. For instance it is perfectly described, albeit somewhat emotionally (as is the character of introspection or subjectively found insights that have had to fight their way up through all our evasions), in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. For instance, see Mathew 24:24-35, which in part says: ‘false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect. See I have told you ahead of time. So if anyone tells you, “there he is, out in the desert,” do not go out, or, “Here he is, in the inner rooms,” do not believe it. For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man [the unevasive truth].’ The reason traditional religions with their emphasis on guilt/badness, confession/apology and the need to ask for forgiveness have become unpopular is that we had become over-exhausted and desperate for relief from criticism. We have become completely embattled, incapable of accepting or admitting any negatives about ourselves. While the so-called ‘humanism’ of the more recent movements was legitimate (because humans were not fundamentally guilty), they could develop a lack of discipline and honesty that less-exhaustion-adapted traditional religions,Page 82 of
Print Edition such as Christianity, maintained with their emphasis on acknowledging our embattled state.

It should be added here that trying to escape to the future and in general crying out for it, even demanding it as the New Age movement was doing, was not of itself going to produce the New Age. While such desperation sought innocents/prophets it was not conducive to producing them. The nurturing of innocence required an environment that was free of battle-exhaustion, desperation and insecure superstitious nonsense. In truth the New Age was another declaration of hope. In the Sixties it was called the Age of Aquarius. Each age had its own ego — its own need to be fresh and unique — its own need to ‘reinvent the wheel’. The New Age and the Age of Aquarius are new terms for a two-million-year-old hope, a hope described in the Bible as the dream of heaven. Similarly ‘future shock’ is a new term for ‘judgement day’ and ‘collective unconscious’ a new term for ‘soul’ and ‘lateral thinking’ is a re-description of ‘imagination’.

However, to return to our story. Following his early-forties religious period our soldier enters the post-battle stage of his life. During his twenties he fought the battle of idealism where he tried desperately to hang onto the ideal world, during his thirties he fought the battle of realism, to defend the imperfect real world. In his forties he finally arrives at an overview of the whole journey. Through experience he finds, if not understanding, since that is dependent on still-to-be-found insights, then an awareness of the truth. He arrives at that state of compassion of sorts we term wise. He still cannot clearly explain it all but at least and at last he does know — does understand the human condition.

As a way of summing up the life of a human during humanity’s adolescence it should now be possible to interpret our music’s description of it. If we listen to a Beethoven symphony we can hear how lonely our soul is within us and how muffled yet still determined our will or spirit is. In young people’s music we can hear the relative innocence, optimism and defiance of youth. They still have plenty of fight and resilience, plenty ofPage 83 of
Print Edition ‘rock and roll’, In more mature music like Beethoven’s that strength is no longer so relentless but comes in surges of optimism and conviction. Above all, classical music reveals a compassion, expressing the fact that humanity’s journey away from itself through the wilderness was something necessary and beautiful. This is a truth which stood above the terrible suffering, pain and atrocities involved.

The composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, recently wrote a requiem inspired, he said, by the story of a Cambodian boy who had been forced by soldiers of Pol Pot to kill his sister. To rise above that sort of pain and still love the world has been the predicament of humanity. We have been through so much horror and yet the greater truth remains that we are still sublimely beautiful beings. How much agony must we humans have been in to be capable of that degree of brutality. We have been terribly undefended and unloved on earth.

In such rare instances of compassion, as sometimes appeared in our music, we have been able to find great truth, peace and serenity. In our music we could hear it all. We have not been able to talk in plain truth but we have been able to talk indirectly, and music is an excellent evasive language, nothing being admitted out of place. Our music said that with monstrous courage humanity was going to win the world’s fight (to find understanding and reconcile our spirit with our soul) — and it has.

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¹ Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers by Lee and De Vore, 1976, Page 115.

² From Sydney’s Daily Mirror newspaper, December 14, 1982.

³ Article by Asa Baber in Playboy magazine, July 1983.

⁴Time magazine, April 7 1986.

⁵ Charles Birch, retired Challis Professor of Biology at Sydney University, in conversation with this author on March 20, 1987.

⁶ From article by John Murche in The Weekend Australian newspaper, June 27, 1987.

⁷ From War Within and Without, 1980, by Anne Lindbergh, page 30.

⁸From Out of My Later Years, 1950.

⁹ From the Australian Natural History magazine, Volume 21 Number 2, 1983.

¹⁰ From the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, January 8, 1986.

¹¹ Taken from the half-title page of Stephen Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981.

¹² From the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, November 12, 1983.

¹³ From the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, July 2, 1987.

¹⁴ From the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, February 18, 1985.