Page 34 of
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In summary, all evidence indicates that it was through nurturing, the process of love-indoctrination and the accompanying mate selection of cooperativeness that humans were able to develop an instinctive orientation to behaving unconditionally selflessly and, as a result, become a totally integrated multicellular species. The evidence is that in our instinctive past, prior to becoming fully conscious, thoughtful and aware, some 2 million years ago—and, as will be explained in Part 4, corrupted by the burden of the human condition—all humans behaved selflessly and considered the welfare of the group above their own welfare. This instinctive memory within us of a loving, cooperative, moral, innocent, alienation-free, all-sensitive, heavenly childhood state is what we have been terming our ‘soul’, one expression of which is our ‘conscience’, the instinctive expectation within us that we behave morally, that is selflessly, lovingly and cooperatively. These explanations and the evidence for them show humans do have genuinely altruistic instincts; that our moral nature is not a subtle form of selfishness but true unconditional selflessness.

In his 1992 book, Born Of A Woman, Bishop John Shelby Spong said, ‘If only human beings have souls [and not other animals], as the church has taught, one must be able to say when humanity became human and was infused with its divine and eternal soul’ (p.34). When Bishop Spong refers to ‘the church’ teaching that ‘only human beings have souls’, he is almost certainly referring to the Genesis passage in the Bible, which says that ‘God created man in his own image’ (1:27). We can now understand that since God is integrativeness, when humans became totally integrated they were finally ‘in God’s image’. Animals that have not yet overcome their genetic limitation to developing unconditional selflessness and thus pure integration are not yet ‘in God’s image’. They don’t yet have an instinctive orientation to integrative meaning or God, like our human instinctive self or soul does. This is not to say that other animals aren’t completely part of God or integrative meaning’s great plan of developing the order of matter on Earth. Other animals are of course fully involved in that heroic venture. In fact they suffer from ‘the animal condition’ of not being able to develop unconditional selflessness and of having to relentlessly compete with each other as a result —a condition as harrowing in its own way as the human condition.