Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature (eBook)

Chapter Two

Spiritual Obligations vs. Legal ones

You can take human beings out of Nature,

but you can’t take Nature out of human beings.

When human beings belonged to the natural world, we lived like the animals, on the land, and far more exposed than now to the dangers one encounters in Nature. Each species—including humans—lived, not by plans, but in the present moment. All individual choices and actions were directed by instincts honed and handed down through millennia. Every individual’s instincts represented the sum-total of that species’ instinctual—its evolutionary—wisdom, to date.

Instincts don’t impose rules of behavior. They work in a far more elemental way, by causing individuals to “feel like” doing what best serves the life of the species, given the situation at hand. This body of evolutionary information is so voluminous that it supplies the necessary answer to every situation that any human or animal may encounter in the natural world. Schemes and plans, such as those we humans depend upon, today, play no role in the natural way of life.

For each individual’s response to every situation, feelings sparked by instincts were the drivers behind the action taken. That’s because feelings represent the sum-total of evolutionary wisdom gained from all the successes and failures of countless individuals over eons of time. The overarching result of the intimate connection animate beings have with feelings is the amazing order we see in the natural world. Natural life works, because of this organic order whose origins trace back to the first stirrings of life, on earth. This order has made it possible for countless lifeforms to coexist and thrive in sufficient harmony for life on this planet to flourish.

Life is much different for civilized humans. Civilized lives are not ordered by Nature, but by each individual’s compliance with rules instituted by artificial systems of order. The only time we modern people are even remotely free to do what we feel like doing is when we are on vacation. Hence, two worlds exist: We now live in the world of human civilization, where we can do what we feel like doing only when on vacation. We once lived in the natural world, where, in essence, animals are on vacation all the time, because they always do what they feel like doing. That doesn’t mean wild animals are unruly, because as we have seen—Nature has order, an order that humans, too, participated in, long ago. The difference between animals and modern humans is that animals march to a different drummer. They do what they feel like doing, never knowing that their innate wisdom is governing their every behavior.

The loss of our freedom was our own doing. We humans stepped outside the natural paradigm—the natural order—when we became civilized, a few thousand years ago. Ever since, we’ve been governed by institutions and the laws they impose, to create order in civil cultures. Our survival is now so dependent on complying with legal obligations that we’ve lost virtually all sense of what we might do, and what our relationships would be like, if we were free to be true to our feelings.

Inside the modern civilized paradigm, we have to work to make a living, by doing things in which we have no emotional investment. We are emotionally invested in money, because we need it to survive, but not in the things we have to do to make it. If we ever let go of our emotional investment in money, and the institutions that organize our lives around it, our natural emotions will suddenly be free to come to the fore, again. Remove the artificial rules, and the natural paradigm reasserts itself. Our feelings will again infuse us with that innate affinity for specific behaviors that are intrinsic to the natural order for homo sapiens.

This is possible for all of us, right now, because, underneath our civilized exterior, we humans have the same emotional make-up as pre-civilized people did. We are what we have always been—animals. Like all animals, we possess the innate emotional intelligence to be orderly. But, unlike other animals, we abandoned our emotional investment in the natural order, hence, we are not living according to our natural human way of life. All the other animals kept their investment in natural order. If they had allowed themselves to be trapped into artificial lives, as we have, the order we find so amazing, in the natural world, would not exist, today.

As it stands, now, our very survival is so dependent on our obedience to legal obligations that it’s hard for us to believe that humans were once born into the life of a natural world ordered by the “spiritual obligations” that arise from the soul, which, in all animate beings, is the repository of evolutionary wisdom. In the natural world, every individual is born with the desire to contribute to order.

Homo Sapiens is a social species—social, because no individual human can physically survive the natural world, alone. Our instinct for close interconnectedness is akin to what researchers have documented among chimpanzees and baboons. In the era during which our species evolved and thrived on earth, we survived as our social primate cousins did—by bonding together in extended family groups of, probably, 30 to 40 individuals.

Over millions of years of living that way, we humans evolved into emotional and spiritual beings with a deep-set need for the sense of wellbeing that can only come from close, trusting, interdependence. Intimacy and spiritual freedom were not mutually exclusive in the closely bonded families that existed, then, because the social fabric amongst those people was based on give-and-take, and on an absence of pretense that made the frank expression of any feeling—even of anger—the norm.

What a far cry from life, today. Such close, yet spiritually free relationships bound us together, as one, in mutual reliance and shared spiritual obligation. In families of this kind, Homo Sapiens thrived, and developed into a species capable of empathy and love, yet, equally capable of killing to protect, or even of sacrificing their own individual lives, to save their brethren.

Remarkably, these unbreakable bonds combined freedom and belonging. Each action taken was preceded by a desire that rose from within. Each desire was heartfelt, because it came from one’s own soul. Among these people, no danger or uncertainty could still the spirit of a human being. Only loneliness could.

Among both animals and humans, our spiritual obligations to each other spring from powerful desires—in some cases desires more powerful than an individual’s will to live. An example of this is seen when desperate hunger drives lions to put themselves in jeopardy, by threatening a troop of baboons. The male baboons fulfill their spiritual obligations by rushing to confront the lions, despite the chance that some might lose their lives.

The lives of those baboons have meaning, in large part, because of their spiritual obligations, which are so powerful that, to fulfill them, they are instinctively willing to place their lives at risk, to protect the group of individuals they love. This instinct exists in other social primate males, particularly homo sapiens. If we men don’t have something in our lives that’s worth dying for, then we have nothing to live for. It’s as simple as that.

The natural human way of life I have described was rejected, when civilization replaced it, several thousand years ago. That was the trigger that caused humans to emotionally disconnect from one another, and from life’s meaning. The way of life we live, nowadays, bears little resemblance to the natural human way of life which once was the incubator, then, the spiritual home that nurtured our species. Uncountable anxieties and contradictions have now replaced the self-evident sense of security and spiritual freedom that our ancestors took for granted. Yet, only milliseconds of evolutionary time have passed, thus our bodies and, most importantly, our emotions, remain unchanged, despite the dramatic changes in the way we live.

Our world is completely different, now—almost entirely manmade, and separated from Nature and the elements. We are surrounded by technology, artificial substances and objects, and subjected to anxieties and other emotional stresses that would be incomprehensible to our ancestors. Nevertheless, we retain all our instincts, despite the fact that our survival requires us to repress most of them. We even perceive the natural world as foreign, because our relationships are defined, not by how we feel, but by the legal obligations that define order in our civilized world. We’re so steeped in legal obligations that we don’t even recognize spiritual obligations exist, much less that they-alone maintain the order that we find in Nature—the order that our souls would embrace, if only we were spiritually free.

Our emotional lives are so repressed that, as civilized beings, we entirely overlook the significance of our feelings. Feelings have no place in our way of life, which is dictated by our belief that life is a rational process. To us, feelings are not the source of order. They are, instead, the source of disorder, because feelings are the culprit whenever we fail to follow the rules! Thus, we learn, early on, that feelings must not be allowed to influence our decisions, at all. We think all decisions should be based...