An Imperfect Species

What is the future of homo sapiens? The species has been extant for about 100,000 years, but in the course of that time, the conditions of its survival have radically changed. It now numbers six and a half billion persons, possesses technologies of global reach and global destruction, is so tightly interconnected globally that the mistakes of individuals can determine the fates of millions, and its leadership is consistently making mistakes of judgment.

In Northern Ireland they refer to the 1970s, 80s and 90s as “the troubles”. We are in the time of planetary troubles now. That is to say, we are encountering a series of problems whose solutions lie just outside our grasp. We fail to solve them not because we lack the technology or the science, but because we lack the self-awareness that enables us to find the causes of our problems in ourselves. (Actually, George Frost Kennan proposed something like this in 1946, but he was shouted down.) Tools of self-awareness do exist, but our culture has put a taboo on them.

From its beginnings until the early twentieth century, the members of this species never really questioned the core conditions of their survival: a resourceful adaptability in tool-making and an ever-increasing creativity in the performance of violence. Although consciousness was the critical element in both of these capacities, the dominant role of consciousness was to enhance the predatory powers of the organism. The cultivation of consciousness in and of itself proceeded in isolated enclaves led by socially marginal individuals.

So, among homo sapiens there is an age-old tension between its animal impulses and the reach of consciousness. At the present moment, that tension stands at the crux of its pursuit of survival.

Some scholars find symbols of consciousness of the human soul as 'the core sustaining essence' of the self in its relationships over 1.4 million years ago in the lower paleolithic age (Oldowan Era). More mainstream archeology dates the earliest symbols of consciousness much later, but in either case, questions of consciousness are part and parcel of human origins themselves. For the past 40,000 years an important vehicle of handling consciousness has been communities’ investment in religion.

In 1964 the sociologist Robert Bellah published a seminal article in Harvard University's usually purely quantitative professional journal, The American Sociological Review entitled "Religious Evolution" in which he outlined a theory of religious development in which the overall dynamic is a change in the degree of freedom of personality and society in relation to the environing conditions. In order to see this process, he examined the history of religion. The oldest religion in the world still being practiced today is that of the Australian aboriginals, and their culture is about 40,000 years old. If we compare this religion to the other religions we find around the world, we see fundamental changes over time. Bellah puts it this way:

"At each stage of religious evolution the freedom of personality and society has increased relative to the environing conditions. Freedom has increased because at each successive stage the relation of man to the conditions of his existence has been conceived as more complex, more open and more subject to change and development. The distinction between conditions that are really ultimate and those that are alterable becomes increasingly clear though never complete."

(I have given a detailed account of the evolution of consciousness described in the work of Bellah and Ken Wilber in my book The Secular Spirit – elsewhere 0n this site.)

But this increasing awareness of the “really” ultimate conditions of human existence never dislodges predatory emotional perspectives from their primacy of place in human behavior. Most frequently religion supports the in-group identity that is the basis for predatory competition. So, the history of homo sapiens is actually the history of the tension between the predatory animal self and the self of pure consciousness, between the fear of immediate physical extinction and the awareness of unnamable existence.

If the dominance of predatory emotional agendas continues in the present age, the survival of the species is distinctly threatened.

Of Oil Spills, Blue Fin Tuna and Nuclear Bombs.

A certain recent pattern of events -- starting with World War I and becoming more pronounced at the turn of the twenty-first century – indicates that the structure of human consciousness has to radically change if homo sapiens is to survive much longer. To put it most starkly, we will need a much more enlightened leadership in the world than we have now, if we are going to sustain ”civilization” for another hundred years. And by “enlightened” I mean a vivid awareness of the actual conditions of human existence, awareness of how things actually are.

By now we are all aware of the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. Some people say it was a failure of equipment, but how can a failure of equipment not be a failure of the consciousness that made the equipment? Somebody was not paying attention to what they should have been paying attention to.

A November 2006 article in Science reported on a study of global fisheries employing 53 years of fishery data. The authors predicted that by 2048 the ocean would be empty of fish. Essentially there would be nothing left to catch. Already fishing stocks had collapsed in 29 percent of the world’s fisheries, and noted a 90% depletion in the stock of blue fin tuna since 1950.

Two years later, the authors proposed that a management strategy for fisheries called “catch shares” may be the answer for preserving fish stocks. As opposed to “open access” fisheries—the normal catch-all-you-can system—the catch share initiative grants each fisherman a fixed percentage of the fishery’s total allowable catch. Such shares can be bought and sold like stock in a corporation. As the fish population recovers and the total allowable catch is raised, the price of each share goes up. Instead of simply catching fish from one day to the next, catch shares are built to make shareholders keep a constant eye on the future health of the fish population

This calls for a radical worldwide change in the practices of the fishing industry. We shall of course watch the proposal with great interest. Its success requires a surrender of the predatory instincts of participants in the industry.

As for nuclear bombs, the news media follow the quest of Iran to possess one, and the intentions of Iran are deeply suspected throughout the world. Furthermore, the tribal jihadists of central Asia are known to be trying to steal a bomb, and their intentions are less ambiguous than those of Iran. Of course, in the territory of the former Soviet Union and its neighbors, there are plenty of nuclear warheads as candidates for theft.

Then we have AIDS and other diseases, climate change, human trafficking, drug production and consumption, and recent economic collapses stemming from predatory behavior on Wall Street and failures of social responsibility in the Euro sphere. There are plenty of social and natural forces to create the tipping point between expansion and collapse of the species.

Predatory Emotional Agendas

The documentation of predatory emotional agendas is vast and detailed. It would be a serious gilding of the lily to try to present its full scope here. The point to be made, however, is that the problems of the present age are not failures of reason or technology, but purely emotional failures. In the West there was a period of completely positive evaluation of reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the period of time that saw the great expansion of science into all aspects of human life, and which was collectively called "the Enlightenment". In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the critique of rationality became more and more vocal, and it revealed that that Enlightenment is not the enlightenment we need now. In the relationship between rationality and emotions, rationality is the servant and emotions are clearly the master of human behavior.

Just to put the most extreme case of recent history on the table, Adolf Hitler was fond of the word "harsh". He repeatedly insisted that his programs be carried out "with the greatest harshness". The grand scale of Nazi psychopathology is a phenomenon which the human race has still not fully comprehended. Only sixty years in the past, the horror has still not subsided sufficiently for us to grasp it.

Therefore, The Holocaust is not just a phenomenon of concern to the Jews. It is of concern to the human race itself. One way to frame it is that The Holocaust was a laboratory specimen of rationality at the service of pathological human emotions. Therefore it is an example not only of emotional pathology becoming state policy, but also of the moral ambiguity of rationality itself.

For if you go to Auschwitz and observe the immense piles of eyeglasses and other human detritus there with this peculiarly clinical inquiry in mind, you must be impressed by how very well organized it all is--starkly highlighting the diseased emotions it was serving. It is not what happened to the Jews that is the main lesson of Auschwitz, but what can happen to us all if our rationality is unhinged.

Two other phenomena of the middle of the twentieth century have called our attention to the problem of rationality. One is the stock market crash of 1929 and the following Great Depression. This collapse of an advanced 'rational' economic structure suddenly revealed the illusory nature of the 'advancement'. The other is the bombing of Hiroshima in 1946. It brought to the surface of our consciousness for a moment the immensely destructive potential of the highest forms of human rationality if they are detached from personal and social health. And actually, Hiroshima is the capstone of the mid-twentieth century critique of rationality, for it brought us face to face with the extinction of our species by our own hand.

And I cannot resist presenting one small item from ecological history:

"Given the fact that the [North American] continent has never supported a more impoverished mammal fauna in the last 50 million years than it does at present and that the existing fauna is unbalanced, appropriate introductions [of species] are more likely to be beneficial than deleterious.
The one great exception to this concerns our own species. It alone has caused massive extinctions on immigrating to the New World, not once but twice. As we have seen, the first humans to enter the New World appear to have exterminated most of North America's large mammals. The arrival of a new kind of human, with different technologies and ways of doing things, would repeat the catastrophe all over again.
In the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the new York Zoological Society in the early twentieth century, 'nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States . . . an earthly paradise is being turned into an earthly Hades; and it is not savages nor primitive men who are doing this, but men and women who boast of their civilization'. It was a cry heard over and over throughout North America, yet for a century it seemed as if nothing could stop the slaughter. This is the sad story of the economic machine that ate the life of a continent, and it was not just animals that were fed into its maw, but people and cultures too."  [The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, by Tim Flannery. NY Grove Press 2001, 298-299; 302-303.]

Enlightenment

The enlightenment of which I speak is the result of an introspective inquiry that is generally referred to as meditation. But I must immediately add a huge cautionary note. The practice of meditation has been cultivated by many traditions, but all of them have the crippling defect of being completely sectarian. The worst of them are merely exercises of controlled fantasizing – an escape from reality via the trance of imaginary fixation. But the best of them invariably mix in sectarian cultural elements with authentic basic principles. (In Soto zen you cannot obtain enlightenment unless you meditate facing the wall!)

So I want to make it clear that the meditation I value is neither Christian, nor Buddhist, nor Hindu nor Daoist, nor any other historical form. But having studied a number of them I have concluded that there is a core basic principle involved in meditation that can be practiced stripped of all sectarian trappings.

I have found the comment of Chogyam Trungpa very useful: “In order to start on the path, make friends with yourself. Start sitting.” (Trungpa has his own serious excursions into sectarianism, so even though I admire his basic insights, I abandon his teaching after about page three.) In my own colloquial chatter, I express this principle as “Just shut up for a minute and listen to yourself.” Jelaluddin Rumi’s observation that “the cure for pain is in the pain” is also extremely on the mark. I also like the way this principle came up in a conversation I once had with a Buddhist friend: “Let’s go over to Muir woods and do nothing.” I also find this principle in Step 4 of the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, “A searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

Meditation vs. Thinking

The several traditions that have discovered the essence of healthy introspection now include schools of psychotherapy and trauma treatment in western psychology. They all involve the use of “the felt sense”. The term was first coined by Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, and further developed by Peter A. Levine (Waking the Tiger), Hakomi trauma treatment, and in recent times by numerous other practitioners.

Gendlin offers a baseline description in his book Focusing (1981):

"The felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one. Physical. A bodily awareness of a situation or person or event. An internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time – encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail."

Peter Levine claims:

"Western culture does not teach us to experience our instinctual voice. We are taught to read, write, calculate, etc. but rarely do we come across a school that teaches anything about the felt sense. It never gets mentioned at home, on the street, or anywhere else for that matter. Most people use this sense every day, but very few of us consciously acknowledge it, and even fewer cultivate it. It is important to remember that the felt sense is a wonderful and very important human capacity." (Waking the Tiger, 72-73.)

So, one of the first matters to get clear in introspective work is to realize that meditation is not thinking. It is not an activity limited to the neo-cortex, but includes sub-cortical activity. “It doesn’t matter what the treatment is as long as people are paying attention to the body and working with the nervous system directly to help bring back self-regulation. And the most self-regulating of all systems are the lower brain structures that govern life in the body.” [Raja Selvam, Santa Barbara Graduate Institute]

Many Buddhist sources are aware of this:

"Thinking is one of the main difficulties we encounter while learning to meditate. Most of us have lived so much of our lives in our heads that it comes as a beautiful gift to be fully aware of the vividness of internal sensations and stimuli from the external world as they impact the senses. The early Buddhist texts make a clear distinction between two principal kinds of thought. The first type of thought is called vitakka-vicâra (directed thought (vitakka) and evaluation (vicâra).) Another very different kind of thinking is papañca, "proliferation". It is obsessive thought, strings of associations that run on and on, fantasy and concept formation that lead the mind away from things just as they are experienced. Papañca is the monkey mind of Zen imagery.
The state that is the final goal of Buddhism is beyond language, but Buddhist texts say that the careful, clear use of language - Right Speech - is indispensable along the way. Takuan's [Takuan Soho (1573-1645) Renzai Zen abbot] "sound of no sound" will not be lost through a meditative investigation into the nature of thought. In fact, learning to understand the origin of those many voices which vibrate within the ear leads us back to it." (www.meditationproject.org)

This agreement of many traditional systems and contemporary trauma treatment is what has led me to conclude that the very essence of "spiritual work" is trauma treatment. When you are successful in neutralizing trauma imprints, you become open to your ultimate self-hood. Your ultimate self-hood is transitory. Paul of Tarsus was right about one thing at least, “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the mind of man” what we are in store for when we die. Or, as Shunryu Suzuki put it, “When you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful.”

We Westerners sometimes think of the goal of spiritual work as "enlightenment". But some Buddhists call this awareness of one’s ultimate self-hood simply “sanity.” I think this is a very happy shift in terminology. It makes the experience less exotic, more normal, more accessible, which it should be, since its primary quality is simply an awareness of how things actually are. This awareness is the natural birthright of all human beings.

Trungpa makes this wry comment in The Myth of Freedom: " The play between hesitation and impulse is beautiful to look at. So delightful in itself is the approach of sanity."

There is this really basic question about the best foundation for "spirituality". The organized Christianity I experienced uses what are essentially sedatives. Think: ritual (the Mass being the centerpiece), chanting, hymns, sermons that hypnotize. These instruments are essentially selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and so they produce a certain calmness. But they do not lay a glove on the foundation of emotional pain -- which is why there is such a thing as religious violence – in which Christianity has engaged enthusiastically.

But, meditation using the felt sense is a wake-up instrument, and it is universal, non-sectarian, secular. When you complete that regimen, you have dissolved the deepest foundations of emotional pain.

Michael H. Ducey, Ph.D.
New York
May 26, 2010