Part 3:9 The awesome courage of the human race

Earlier I mentioned Joe Darion’s song The Impossible Dream, the lyrics of which describe so well the extraordinary paradox of our human situation of having ‘to march into hell for a heavenly cause’. More of that song should now be included because it provides such a wonderful description of humanity’s heroic journey to find liberating understanding. It begins: ‘To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe / To bear the unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go / To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar.’ Achieving freedom from the human condition has, until now, been an ‘impossible dream’ because only the arrival of understanding of the human condition could deliver that freedom, and finding that understanding required the work of many, many generations. Indeed, every generation since the conscious, self-managing state fully emerged some two million years ago has had to ‘die in the trenches’—continue the immensely upsetting/​corrupting but heroic search for knowledge, without ever being able to liberate themselves from the pain of the human condition. For all those generations liberation from the human condition was an ‘impossible dream’; every generation up until now has had ‘to fight the unbeatable foe’, ‘To bear the unbearable sorrow’ of this horrific state of upset/​corruption, and be prepared ‘to run where the brave dare not go’, be braver than even the bravest. We have had ‘To right the unrightable wrong’—try to achieve some form of validation of ourselves without being able to explain in first principle terms why we are good and not bad. We have had ‘to love pure and chaste from afar’—accept that we are corrupted but still be in love with, have faith in, aspire to the dream that humanity would one day return to the ideal, all-loving, upset-free state. We had to carry on the journey to find knowledge, ultimately the self-knowledge that would liberate us from our human condition. As Darion concluded, we had ‘To try when your arms are too weary, to reach the unreachable star / This is my quest, to follow that star / No matter how hopeless, no matter how far / To fight for the right without question or pause / To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause / And I know if I will only be true, to this glorious quest / That my heart will lie peaceful and calm, when I’m laid to my rest / And the world will be better for this, that one man scorned and covered with scars / Still strove with his last ounce of courage, to reach the unreachable star.’

There is a very famous parable or story that I understand originated with the Hottentot people of southern Africa that also beautifully describes the incredibly difficult, heroic journey humanity has been undergoing. Sir Laurens van der Post has written about it—in fact, his 1994 anthology Feather Fall is named after the parable. It starts with a hunter seeing in a pool of water the reflection of a great white bird, which is described as ‘the white bird of truth’, which we can now understand is the liberating truth about the human condition. After seeing this wondrous image of the white bird of truth the hunter sets out on a heroic journey to find it, leaving behind his friends and village—in effect, leaving behind his innocent childhood—to begin his ascent of this great mountain, at the top of which lives the great white bird of truth. As the hunter begins his lonely climb he can still hear in the distance the happy, joyous laughter of those he has had to leave behind—implying that as a result of his journey he has to suffer becoming corrupted and alienated from his original happy, gregarious, social innocent true self and world. As he ascends, gremlins begin to appear amongst the rocks, taunting him by saying, ‘You have become such an egocentric, angry evil person, why don’t you give up?’, or words to that effect. His doubts grow but still he struggles on. Eventually, as the mountainside becomes steeper, the hunter starts finding steps that have been carved in the rock face by others who have gone before him. He makes use of these steps but when they eventually run out he still doesn’t give up. Instead, he carves further steps, but as the years go by his energy wanes. Eventually in his old age he can go no farther and lies down to die, but just as he is about to die a white feather flutters down and comes to rest on his forehead, symbolising that the hunter has found some truth and added to the accumulation of knowledge that would one day lead to the finding of the full truth about the human condition, which is the great white bird of truth that resides at the summit of all human endeavour and which has now, after all the efforts of all the humans who have ever lived, at last been found.

It’s a story that crops up in the mythologies of many cultures—for instance, it is reminiscent of the Greek myth Jason and the Argonauts, in which the hero, Jason, sets out on a great adventure to find the ‘Golden Fleece’, which again is symbolic of the liberating understanding of the human condition. The myth of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table and their quest for the ‘Holy Grail’ is another expression of the same story of humanity’s search for liberating understanding of the human condition. These are fabulous mythologies that reveal very clearly the ordeal that humans have had to endure growing up in a world without understanding of the human condition and where all they could do was try and help find that all-important insecurity-of-self-ending understanding—and, thankfully, those efforts have been rewarded for the ‘Golden Fleece’, ‘The Holy Grail’ and the ‘White Bird of Truth’ have all finally been found.