4. Summary of the Concept
HE unspeakable suffering, misery, torment, anguish and damage that we have inflicted on ourselves and our fellows on this planet—the animals, plants, soil, sea, rock and air—were unavoidable consequences of our conscious mind's or intellect's necessary search for knowledge.
It helps relieve the guilt we have suffered to know that any species developing a mind from an instinct-controlled state to an intellect-controlled state would have to go through the stages we have been through. Just as a child must grow through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and only then reach adulthood, so our species has had to develop through these stages.
In infancy, consciousness appears and we discover self. In childhood, we play with the power of free will that emerging consciousness brings. In adolescence, the stage humanity has been in for 2 million years, we discover the responsibility of free will and go in search of the understanding we need to successfully self-adjust. It is when we undertake this search that a battle with our instinctive self develops.
To summarise what happened.
As consciousness emerged in our human ancestors and we began to experiment in self-management it makes sense that a conflict would have developed with our already established instinctive self. We can imagine our instincts dictating that we seek water and shelter in the familiar river valley below but our intellect wanting to see what lay beyond the ridge. Our intellect could give in to our instincts' demands but to do that would mean never gaining knowledge. We, our conscious self, had no choice but to defy our instincts and persevere with our experiments in self-management. We were in the difficult situation of having to live with instincts that resisted our search for knowledge, that in effect didn't want us to search for knowledge, that in effect said we were bad to experiment in self-management.
The difficulty was that we were unable to explain and thus understand why we had to do what we were doing. It's only now, through the achievements of science, that we can explain that while genes can orientate only nerves can understand and that therein lay the source of the battle that produced our divisive human condition. An orientation to life is not sufficient once a nervous system has developed the power of conscious free will. A conscious mind has the responsibility to understand its world. The human condition arose from the different ways the gene and nerve-based learning systems process information. The former isn't insightful while the latter is.
Unable to explain this and defend ourself against the implied criticism emanating from our instinctive self we had no choice but to defy our instinctive self. This defiance took the form of resisting, countering and avoiding the implied criticism from our instinctive self. We retaliated against the implied criticism (became angry), we sought self-affirmation wherever we could find it (became egocentric) and we evaded, denied and blocked out the implied criticism (became alienated).
The inevitable consequence of becoming conscious beings was that we became angry, egocentric and alienated. In short we became divisively behaved.
The problem then was that the aggression of anger, the selfishness of egocentricity and the dishonesty and insensitivity of alienation were traits inconsistent with the universal ideals of love, selflessness and cooperation that our instincts had become orientated to, and therefore expected us to conform to. From being at odds with instinctive orientations that, for example, wanted us to stay in the river valley, we had suddenly become at odds with the cooperative ideals of life itself, at odds, if you like, with 'God'!
This was an extremely upsetting situation. The unjust feeling that we were bad had suddenly become greatly compounded. Since the deeper truth was that we were not bad, but while we were still unable to explain why we were not bad, all we could do was become more defensive, be even more retaliatory, become even more angry, egocentric and alienated.
Tragically we had entered an escalating vicious cycle where divisiveness fuelled more divisiveness, a process that could only be relieved by finding understanding of why we had become divisively behaved in the first place. Unravelling our psychosis begins with understanding how our experiments in self-management in the presence of an ignorant instinctive self led to our upset divisive state or condition.
To end the upset adolescent state and enter adulthood the intellect has to find the understanding that explains it is not bad or guilty for searching for knowledge. Adolescence is the time of the search for the intellect's or conscious mind's identity—specifically for finding understanding of why the intellect is good and not bad. Finding this understanding, as has now happened, allows the upset to subside. Humanity is about to leave the turbulent insecure adolescent stage and enter the peaceful maturity of secure adulthood.
To disarm our upset it has been necessary to explain what we have previously only been able to feel. The expressions of frustrated and, at times, exalted (momentarily relieved) ego associated with the human condition are clear in the photographs overleaf.
We now know the source of our
deep-seated egocentricity and anger
'I saw [President] Sukarno on a pilgrimage to his mother in Eastern Java whom he had not seen for many years. As he knelt at her feet to receive her blessing, I found myself profoundly stirred. More, I…was nearly choked by the collective emotion of the crowd of seventy thousand who had followed him and were sobbing with relief because the suppressed and accumulated longing of centuries to see someone of their own kind leading them again now had found a living symbol at last. But again, where did such volcanic forces in the human being come from?
…I suspected that we would never know how to set about dealing with these…forces until we knew more of their origin, nature and areas of growth.' (Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976.)
GEOFF BULL
Carlton coach Ron Barassi exalts in his team's victory in the 1970
Victorian Football League grand final, one of the most memorable ever.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ferdinand Marcos with his wife Imelda defies the world from the balcony of the Presidential Palace after taking the oath of office as president of the Philippines on 25/2/86. Elsewhere in Manila on the same day, the representative of the People's Revolution, Mrs Corazon Aquino, was also being sworn in as president. The following day Marcos and his family fled the Philippines.
CAMERA PRESS LTD
Nazi Rally in pre-war Germany.
PHOTO : JOHN BURNEY, COURTESY THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN, 23-24/6/84
Sir Robert Muldoon, New Zealand Prime Minister and the leader of the right wing National Party, defies the ideals, giving anti-apartheid demonstrators who confronted him in Melbourne on 22/6/84 'a mark of C-minus: Could do better'.
GARY GRAHAM
Australian boxing champion Jeff Fenech takes a punch from American Steve McCrory in Fenech's successful 1986 defence of his IBF world bantam-weight title.