Part 8:8 How our particular instinctive orientation greatly compounded our upset

It is now necessary to return to the imaginary example of our conscious bird, Adam Stork, who unavoidably became upset when he challenged his instinctive orientation, and consider what actually happened when humans became fully conscious. As has now been explained, our original instinctive orientation was to behaving in a completely integrated, unconditionally selfless, fully cooperative, harmonious, loving, Godly, moral, ideal way.

Having this particular instinctive orientation meant that when we humans became upset from searching for knowledge—that is, angry, egocentric and alienated—that response in itself offended our instinctive self, greatly compounding our upset. When our imaginary fully conscious bird Adam flew off course from his instinctive flight path and became angry, egocentric and alienated that upset behaviour wasn’t at odds with his instinctive flight path; however, when we humans began searching for knowledge and became angry, egocentric and alienated that upset behaviour was very much at odds with our particular cooperative, selfless, loving instincts. Not only have we humans been condemned for defying our instincts, we have also been condemned for responding in a way that further offended our instincts, making them even more critical of our behaviour. Worse still, our upset response wasn’t at odds with just any instinctive orientation: we were challenging the actual integrative meaning or purpose or theme of existence itself, since that is what our particular instincts’ cooperative, loving behaviour is consistent with. Metaphorically speaking, we were defying God! Yes, as initially pointed out in Part 3:4, when we humans set out in search of knowledge we encountered a situation that was much worse than that faced by our imaginary Adam Stork, we were faced with a diabolically upsetting situation.

What this situation meant overall was that from an initial state of upset we humans then had to contend with a sense of extreme guilt and it was this heightened sense of extreme guilt that very greatly compounded our insecurity and frustration, making us immensely angry and egocentric and very much needing to live in denial of any confrontation with the problem of our corrupted condition. We had to live totally separated or alienated from our true situation, (metaphorically) hidden deep in a dark cave where no exposure of ourselves was possible—as Plato so accurately described our terrible predicament.

Extrapolate this situation over the two million years since our species became fully conscious and the struggle against our perfectly orientated but ignorant instinctive self emerged and it is not hard to comprehend how much hurt, frustration and anger has developed in humans. Indeed, imagine living just one day with the injustice of being condemned as evil, bad and worthless when you intuitively knew—but couldn’t explain—that you were actually the complete opposite, namely awesomely wonderful, good and meaningful. How tormented and furious—how upset—would you be by the end of that day? So yes, extrapolate that experience over two million years and you will begin to get some appreciation of just how much anger there must actually be inside ourselves! While we have, as will be described shortly, learnt to significantly restrain and conceal our phenomenal amount of upset—‘be civilised’ as we term it—it follows that we must, under the surface, be boiling mad with anger, and that sometimes, when our restraint can no longer find a way to contain it, that anger must express itself. We can now, at last, understand humans’ capacity for astounding acts of aggression, hate, brutality and atrocity.

At this point, a whole book could be included to evidence humans’ capacity for atrocity, but that is really unnecessary because we all know that propensity too well. Instead, the brief description of how angry we became that was provided in Part 7:2, and the following passage will suffice—it is an account of some of those killed during World War I: ‘The flowing blood of these murdered men, ten million gallons of steaming human blood could substitute for a whole day the gigantic water masses of the Niagara…Make a chain of these ten million murdered murderers, placing them head to head and foot to foot, and you will have an uninterrupted line measuring ten thousand miles, a grave ten thousand miles long’ (Roumania Yesterday and To-day, Mrs Will Gordon, 1918, p.251 of 270). In more recent history, we have been witness to extreme examples of humans’ capacity for inhumanity in the attempted genocides that took place in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s. And, as we can now understand, this capacity for inhumanity exists in us all—as the Australian author Morris West so bravely acknowledged in his memoir, A View from the Ridge: ‘brutalise a child and you create a casualty or a criminal. Bribe a servant of the state and you will soon hear the deathwatch beetles chewing away at the rooftrees of society. The disease of evil [now able to be understood as upset] is pandemic; it spares no individual, no society, because all are predisposed to it. It is this predisposition which is the root of the mystery [of evil that is now explained]. I cannot blame a Satan, a Lucifer, a Mephistopheles, for the evils I have committed, the consequences of which have infected other people’s lives. I know, as certainly as I know anything, that the roots are in myself, buried deeper than I care to delve, in caverns so dark that I fear to explore them. I know that, given the circumstances and the provocation, I could commit any crime in the calendar’ (A View from the Ridge: The Testimony of a Pilgrim, 1996, p.78 of 143).

Clearly it is an understatement of the grandest proportions to say that thankfully the ‘caverns so dark’ where the ‘mystery’ of our grotesquely upset human condition lies have at last been ‘explore[d]’ and the greater dignifying, liberating, ameliorating explanation for that condition found.

To restate the fundamentals of the all-important understanding: the inherent problem was that our instincts had no sympathy for our pursuit of knowledge and would have stopped that search if possible. But the reality was that we had no choice but to defy our perfectly integratively orientated, ‘Godly’, all-sensitive instinctive self or soul, the voice of which was our conscience, and suffer its unjust and thus upsetting criticism, massively compounding as that upset was of our conscience. The poet Alexander Pope acknowledged the pain of the criticism emanating from our conscience when he wrote, ‘our nature [conscience—is]…A sharp accuser, but a helpless friend!’ (An Essay on Man, Epistle II, 1733). It was a sentiment echoed by William Wordsworth in his great poem, Intimations of Immortality: ‘High instincts before which our mortal Nature / Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.’ Albert Camus was another who felt the pain of the criticism from the naive, ignorant, innocent state when he wrote, ‘[can] innocence, the moment it begins to act…avoid committing murder [?]’ (L’Homme Révolté, 1951, [pub. in English as The Rebel, 1953]).

Considering then how unjustly hurtful our instinctive self or soul’s world has been it is little wonder we learnt to psychologically block it out, deny and bury it to the point where we now refer to it as ‘the child within’ and the ‘collective unconscious’. Sir Laurens van der Post wrote about the repression of our soul when he acknowledged that ‘Human beings know far more than they allow themselves to know: there is a kind of knowledge of life which they reject, although it is born into them: it is built into them’ (A Walk with a White Bushman, 1986, p.142 of 326). Our conscious, intellectual self banished our soul to our subconscious where it only now occasionally bubbles up in dreams and on other occasions when our conscious self is subdued, such as when praying or meditating. As Carl Jung wrote, ‘The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche [soul], opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego consciousness’ (Civilization in Transition (The Collected Works of C.G. Jung), Vol.10, 1945).

The truth is, there is immense upset within us humans from living for so long with the injustice of being condemned as evil when we intuitively knew we weren’t but couldn’t explain why we weren’t. The length of time we have had to live with the injustice is critical because the more we searched for knowledge the more we offended our instincts and the more they criticised us and the more upset we became by that criticism and the more that upset angry, egocentric and alienated response fuelled the criticism from our instincts etc, etc. It was an ever-escalating situation that could only be resolved by finding the relieving, ameliorating, dignifying understanding of the reason for why we became upset in the first place.

For two million years our conscious intellect has been seen as the villain of the piece and our soul the epitome of goodness, but the truth that we can finally explain turns out to be the exact opposite in the sense that it was our instincts’ unjust criticism that caused us to become upset. As mentioned in Part 3:5, this paradoxical turn of events in which our ‘good side’ is revealed to have been the ‘bad side’ is the theme of Agatha Christie’s famous play The Mousetrap. First performed in 1952, The Mousetrap is just another ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery and yet it has become the longest running play in history and is still going strong to this day. All enduring myths and stories contain truths that resonate. In the case of The Mousetrap, the police inspector involved in the murder investigation, held up as the pillar of goodness and justice throughout the play, is revealed at the very end to be the culprit. This is the essential story of humanity where the apparent ideals of the soul’s selfless, loving world are revealed, at the very last moment, to have been the unjustly condemning villains. As with so many aspects of the human condition, the truth was not as it appeared. We discover at the very end of our journey to enlightenment that conscious humans, immensely corrupt as we are, are good and not bad after all. In fact, not only are we good, we are the heroes of the whole horrible tragedy.

In G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 book The Man Who Was Thursday, a policeman representing the ‘good’ side has to infiltrate and expose the sinister members of a quintessentially corrupt organisation, but consecutively each of the apparently corrupt members are also revealed to be forces for good commissioned to fight evil. Again, it is a story of the essential paradox of the human situation: that which was apparently ‘bad’—humans in our competitive and divisive state—turns out to be ‘good’, and that which was ‘good’ turns out to be the cause of our ‘sin’.

As initially emphasised when the explanation of the human condition was first presented, while the underlying elements involved in the battle that produced our upset human condition of our instinct and intellect have long been recognised within our mythologies and by profound thinkers, it is only through the insights that science has found in the last century about the different ways the gene and nerve based learning systems process information—specifically, that genes can give species orientations but only nerves can understand experience—that the clarifying, dignifying, ameliorating explanation of why our intellect had to challenge our instinct was made possible. Only understanding could liberate us from the sense of guilt that has plagued humanity for two million years, and caused us to have to live in an extremely angry and egocentric state and dwell in a dark, truth-denying and soul-oppressing, effectively dead, cave-like state of denial, delusion and alienation.

The historic ‘burden of guilt’ has finally been lifted from the human race by science. Although science has been evasively mechanistic—dangerously so lately—its practice of painstakingly investigating and accumulating knowledge about the mechanisms of the workings of our world has finally liberated humanity from the ignorance of our instincts. Of course, the greater truth is that science is only the peak expression of all humans’ courageous struggle to defy and ultimately defeat ignorance. In reality, it is ‘on the shoulders’ of eons of human effort that our species’ freedom has finally been won.

Science has made it possible for all humans to win the freedom they have fought so valiantly for two million years to achieve. We can at last understand that there was a sound (that is, integrative) biological reason for why humans became divisively behaved and soul-corrupted. Sir Laurens van der Post made the essential point about our predicament when he said, ‘how can there ever be any real beginning without forgiveness?’ (Venture to the Interior, 1952, p.16 of 241). Forgiveness was the key but it had to be forgiveness at the most profound, deepest level of our psychosis; forgiveness found through understanding of the dilemma of our human condition—understanding that would allow all humans to know that while we are all variously upset we are all fundamentally good and not bad or evil.