The record of human beings’ care is dismal. It’s plain to see that there is an absence of care toward nature, including our own – a fact reflected in the ongoing debate regarding ‘human nature.’ Contrary to this, the understanding from which I live is that we are nature; and, as such, we are an activity of a larger interactional life process.
Some say we make war on nature. If so, why? If humans say they love nature, how come we are destroying it? Why do we – individually and collectively – act destructively? Why is it that we live as though the beauty of being human is up for debate?
These questions are easy enough to propose, but the situation is subtle in its dynamics. The situation doesn’t easily change. Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere. So, to begin simply: our care is thwarted by our psychological separation from the one, great life process. Our mental processes divide us off from the rest of life, as though the separation created by our cognitive habits is the ultimate dimension – that the division is absolute.
This division shows itself in the most ordinary workings of our thought. Consider, for example, how we become attached to ideas which manifest in our social life as opinions. In general, people hold to opinions so strongly as to be aggressive toward those who differ. Our daily news is filled with the evidence that this goes nowhere creative or healthy. It doesn’t matter if a person is from an individualist culture or a collectivist one, their attachment to individuality as their ‘core’ is misplaced. It creates a false core and then we wonder why we are always off-kilter. (I’ll refer to this attachment to a false sense of ourselves as ‘everyday narcissism.’)
Of course, in some respects we are individuals; but not in all. The problem is that we pay so little attention to the ways in which we are not individuals in the way that we think we are. To transform everyday narcissism, then, we need a new way to conduct the process of thinking itself, so that we can gain insight into the real situation and harmonize with life’s process. That’s my interest in these pages.
To many of us it is obvious that we can’t go on this way and expect to survive as a species. Ignorance of our place in nature has led to ways of living which are destructive of the very matrices upon which we depend. This is widely accepted now among thoughtful people, but I still don’t see a wide interest in closely examining the nature of our ignorance – our ignore-ance. I’d like to go into this with those interested, so I’ve taken to writing.
oOo
I grew up blessed on the one hand, because I grew up with a wilderness at my back doorstep; but I grew up disadvantaged on the other, in that the humans around me were violent, and even cruel. I was physically assaulted at home, in the streets, and in my primary school – not just by bullies, but by those in charge, those in authority. By the time I reached seventeen and faced leaving high school, I saw little joy in the prospect of life with the adults. In particular, the Vietnam War – an unjust war with its roots in false views – was raging, and the ignorant Australian government had instituted conscription of twenty-year-olds as law. I was thus oppressively aware, before the completion of my first twenty years on planet earth, of a need for a wider solution than the usual escapes offered to me. (The most common of which was notably the consciousness-dulling substance called alcohol, which I started consuming early).
However, at that transition point of late teens, I fortunately met a direct and simple message. One night at a public talk, I heard a man seated on the stage before me say, “A field of grass is green because each blade of grass is green” a comment which kindled hope in me.
This point, which at the time indicated a possible ‘whither’ for me, is not the whole story, of course – but it nevertheless sowed the seed of an intention to transform my own personal functioning as a human. I saw that I too – I, an ordinary individual – could participate in society, living in a way which by its nature was the answer. I sensed that this way, in principle, would turn around our habit of living from destructive emotions.
It was uplifting to think that there was a way in which I could contribute something useful to the chaotic world I was entering. I took this person to be saying: “Don’t leave the making of a peaceful world to others. And don’t go looking for yourself elsewhere. Take up the way of peace in society, you yourself in the here and now.” I could contribute to the whole, by ending the roots of destructiveness in myself. Who else could do that, really, but oneself?
Now, decades later, I understand that, because experiencing is core to all humans, then this, too, is a way of ‘generating’ human nature. Each of us can contact, understand, and transform our experiencing. If there is a human nature, it’s that we have ‘experiencing.’ It’s this which needs our care and insight. Each of us can creatively contribute to humanity’s experiencing. We needn’t wait for the others to step up.