chart of fears, from this earlier post

Nick Smith recently pointed me to a short article by Turil Cronburg, which in part read:

The way I’ve found real safety, even while being held captive in jail and in homeless shelters (run almost like a jail) and mental institutions (again pretty much like a jail) has been a combination of realizing that safety is really all about freedom, and finding clarity of my own purpose in life. And by freedom I mean freedom to be oneself. To react to life’s complications in a way that is honest and true to what one’s deepest self is – one’s highest ideals of what one wants to contribute to the world, one’s purpose in life.

If I am trapped physically by a violent individual or group – the shelter system, “legal” system, or “health care” system or any other forceful agent – I might not be especially free in a physical sense, which certainly sucks, and is something a healthy society will avoid at all costs, but on a deeper, more meaningful sense I am very much free to make at least some choices about what I do and say such that they help me make progress on my life’s goals…  Real safety comes from finding the most effective way of expressing your true self – what you want and what you have to offer – in every situation you come across in your path.

This is what ee cummings was saying when he wrote about how hard it is to be “nobody-but-yourself” in a world where everyone (the media, advertisers, peers, others trying to influence and/or control us, and even that small self-critical voice inside us) is trying to make us “everybody-else”.

The day after I read, Turil’s post, Mireille Jansma pointed me to this TedX talk by psychologist Brené Brown, in which Brené says something quite similar:

Whenever we’re on the verge of bliss, we picture something horrible happening… I blame this in part on the media… This is a symptom of an issue that is both universal and profoundly dangerous, and that is: We are losing our tolerance for vulnerability, which we see as synonymous with weakness, and which is at the core of our fear and anxiety and shame and other difficult emotions, but which also is at the core of joy, love, belonging, creativity, and faith.

When we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding, disappointment, disconnection, perfectionism, [political, religious, and ideological] extremism, and most of all self-numbing, [mechanisms by which] we try to protect ourselves. What is driving this intolerance for vulnerability?… [I think it's] scarcity. We live in a culture that tells us that there is never enough [time, money, security etc. and] that we cannot ever be good enough. [We are inundated with hugely exaggerated messages of ubiquitous danger.]…

We numb vulnerability. We are the most addicted, the most medicated, obese and in debt cohort in human history. And we stay busy, so that the [feared] truth of our life can’t catch up. What are the consequences of numbing ourselves to vulnerability? You cannot selectively numb emotion. When we numb the dark emotions — vulnerability, fear, shame of not being good enough — we by default numb joy.

After this intriguing diagnosis, alas, Brené falls victim to the tendency of most ‘experts’ (and self-help book writers) to prescribe a cure for the malaise they’ve just identified.

How do we embrace vulnerability? Practice gratitude… Honor what’s ordinary about our lives… Play… [Appreciate] nature… We want more guarantees. We we want to believe that we we’re not going to get hurt and that bad things aren’t going to happen and they are. But if we don’t allow ourselves to [fully] experience joy and love we will definitely miss out on filling our reservoir with what we need when those hard things happen.

“Practice gratitude” is a nice phrase, and maybe whatever it means it works for her, but it’s not at all clear how this is supposed to help us “embrace vulnerability”. The advice, in any case, violates the corollary to Pollard’s Law: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, first be sure you understand why it is the way it is. To tell us essentially the way to overcome our fears is “don’t be afraid” is not useful, or actionable, and the struggle in vain to try to follow this advice is likely to lead to even more feelings of “we can never be good enough”, and more retreat to numbness.

I am a fearful person, and I have become as a result of trying to cope with these fears and anxieties somewhat emotionally flattened, if not numbed. But I have come to accept myself: We cannot be other than who we really are. I aspire to liberate myself from civilization culture, and hence become less fearful and more present, more “nobody-but-myself”. But I acknowledge that this will take lifelong practice and may well be a fruitless pursuit.

As a result, a far more interesting approach, I think, would be to ask ourselves these questions, and come up with our own answers, coping practices, and self-acceptances:

1. Who is “nobody-but-myself”? If I lived in a cultureal that didn’t try to make me “everybody-else”, what would I be like? What’s holding me back?
2. What am I afraid of, and why? How do I cope with these fears (avoid, vent, condition/desensitize, learn, accept, detach/let go)? Why aren’t these coping mechanisms fully effective for me?

The ultimate question stemming from these is What can I do with this self-knowledge? And the answer may be: nothing. It may be enough just to understand ourselves a little better, to know why we are the way we are.

This is another in my series of articles exploring the basic existential questions of who we are and what motivates us to do what we do. For those puzzled about what that has to do with “saving the world”, my answer is that if we hope to be able to organize with others to make the world a better place, and deal with the huge crises we are now beginning to face, we are going to have to be cognizant of the truth of human nature, and specifically these existential questions. There is no point hoping millions or billions of people are going to change their beliefs and behaviours if such change is just not in our nature. And, as regular readers of this blog know, I am inclined to believe it is not in our nature, though I’m open to evidence to the contrary.

My friend Dale Asberry has been writing about “human cognitive failures” and put me on to this article in the extraordinary Less Wrong wiki, about whether what we want and what we like are different, and if so how and why. At the same time, my contacts who are members of Quora, a collective brainstorming site on deep philosophical questions, have been pinging me about the threads related to the existence (or non-existence) of free will.

As I wrote last year, my position on who we are and the existence of free will is as follows:

1. The cells and organs of our bodies evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes. The ‘existence’ of our minds and identities as ‘individuals’ is therefore a self-deception. Our minds are nothing more than processes carried out for the benefit of our cells and organs — they are their information processing system, not ‘ours’.
2. Like most species, we are social creatures that have evolved codes of behaviour that enable us, as part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth, to collaborate, share and keep our numbers in balance with the local ecosystem — these are all evolutionary selected behaviours, since they enable us to adapt and fit well into these ecosystems. These learned codes of behaviour are called cultures.
3. In times of stress, due to overcrowding, natural disasters, climate change or the exhaustion of local resources, cultures can intervene to act in adaptive ways that would be unneeded in normal times, including war, migration, adoption of new diets, new tools and new ways of living that are better suited in evolutionary terms to the changed environment. At some point some of our species chose to leave the trees of the tropical rainforest where we lived a leisurely life as vegetarian gatherers for a million years, and struggle to survive in other environments. We evolved weapons to kill other animals, enabling us to live as carnivores, and discovered ‘catastrophic’ agriculture, enabling us to live where there was insufficient food growing naturally. These new tools, however, required settlement and a very different kind of culture — civilization culture — to sustain.
4. Civilization culture requires sacrificing a great many freedoms for the survival of the collective membership, and requires vastly more work, personal sacrifice, hardship, suffering, and vulnerability to catastrophe than other cultures. To keep people from obeying their cells’ and organs’ natural tendencies by just walking away from this culture, it is of necessity inherently coercive, using hierarchy, violence, threat of imprisonment, propaganda and other means to ensure obedience and conformity of the group.
5. Whereas our cells and organs had nearly full control of our (their) minds before civilization culture evolved, the new culture was able, through language and coercion, to influence and seize control of a significant part of our minds. There has been a continuing and escalating war for control of our minds ever since. Our culture persuades us that we have ‘free will’ to ignore what our cells and organs impel us to do and instead do what it (our culture) wants us to do — that we have an ego, an identity, and a responsibility to conduct ourselves according to the rules of civilized society, or we must face the social consequences.

So ‘we’ are, essentially, helpless witnesses in an endless struggle between our cells/organs/bodies and our culture for control of ‘our’ minds, and our beliefs and behaviours reflect who has ‘won’ each battle in that struggle. By contrast, our close cousins the bonobos (yes, I know they aren’t perfect either) are at peace — there is no inherent conflict between what their bodies and culture want, no scarcity, no imposed responsibility, almost no aggression, no monogamy or jealousy, no hoarding. And their only real stress is caused by our brutal, cancerous culture, which is extinguishing theirs.

Where does ‘liking’ versus ‘wanting’ fit into this model of who we are? Things we like (such as being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others), according to the Less Wrong article, are different from things we want (such as sex, addictive foods and other substances, attention, appreciation, and acquisition of shiny objects — all things that in our modern culture are usually scarce). When we do or get things we like, we are happy. When we do or get things we want, we are often not happy — just (for a time) satisfied. Wants are cravings; likes are joys. Needs are another matter entirely — none of the “wants” listed above are really needs, the way that nutritious food, water, warmth, and social contact are — things we cannot live without. Wants could be seen as the midpoint of a continuum between likes and needs. Some things may be both wants and likes — beauty, for example, may be something we crave (especially if our world offers little of it) but is also something we derive genuine happiness from.

An example to explain the difference: For many years I hosted and organized monthly neighbourhood poker games. The game was small stakes with strict limits, couples and total novices were welcome, and we played “dealer’s choice”, developing over the years a list of some 100 variants, some of them really silly. Really serious poker players who had to win to consider the event a success, generally dropped out after one or two months. Much of the game was about learning, sharing, showing, and inventing new games. It was fun, and generally people were happy, win or lose. But everyone sometimes got unhappy if they lost too many times in a row, or lost a large pot by a very close margin. At these points, when tension rose, liking to play became wanting to win. Joy became addiction to the ‘high’ of taking risks and winning big. The nights I liked best were the ones where I came out ahead, but not too far ahead, and not as a result of any one person’s loss. Yet I know there is a gambler in me, someone who wants to win more than he likes to play. When I get stressed, I distract myself with video games (including poker against computer opponents) and I want to win (and get upset when I don’t, even though there is no ‘real’ money involved).

Scientists now say that the chemical reactions in the body when we ‘want’ something (dopamine-based) are different from those when we ‘like’ something (endomorphin and enkephalin based). Why would this be so?

My hypothesis is that this different chemistry evolved to suit different requirements: Our wants take precedence in times of stress or scarcity, while our likes take precedence in times of peace and abundance. When we can “afford” it, we do what we like; the rest of the time, we do what we want. This does make sense in the context of wants being more urgent and closer to needs.

Creatures in the wild, according to some biologists, spend most of their lives in “Now Time” — present, blissful, unaware of the passage or even existence of “Clock Time”. During this time they are happy (that’s in the best interest of the perpetuation of the species) and their lives are seemingly eternal. Their body chemistry in this state is driven by endomorphins (not to be confused with endorphins) and enkephalins, which create a feeling of bliss.

In times of stress or scarcity, however, wild creatures snap into “Clock Time” (the instantaneous time-sensitive state that most humans spend their entire lives in), and hormones are produced to equip the body for fight-or-flight. They are driven then to satisfy immediate needs and wants (safety, food, victory over a predator or enemy etc.), and their body chemistry in this state is driven by dopamine — which immediately flushes the body when a craving for one of these needs or wants is satisfied. Not the same thing as happiness at all. When the crisis has passed, the creature returns quickly to Now Time, and the endomorphins and enkephalins again take charge of the body, seeking happiness.

Except for the few humans who are able to set aside the constant and chronic stressors of modern civilization culture (through meditation or other relaxation/awareness/presence practices), we humans spend all our lives charged up and seeking the satisfaction of our endless needs and wants, the dopamine “rush”. And our industrial civilization culture, which now depends on a constant growth of consumption, encourages this by creating additional “needs” and anxiety about scarcity and inadequacy. We’re never really happy, only temporarily satisfied.

My guess is that the emotional and erotic response stimuli shown in the Chemistry of Love chart above, are primarily “want” chemicals, while the aesthetic, sensual and intellectual response stimuli in the chart are primarily “like” chemicals. Science remains almost entirely clueless on this, however, so this is only a wild guess.

This is part of the reason, I think, that we humans have become so utterly disconnected from Gaia, from the land and place where we live, from all-life-on-Earth. That biophilia connection is a “like” connection, which only few humans, rarely, really feel, so deeply are we buried in the chemistry of unfulfilled needs and wants. Yet our instincts, I think, still “know” and long for this connection, and every once in a while, in those still, peaceful moments of deep relaxation and awareness, we become present, shift into Now Time, and start to resonate with the ancient and delightful chemistry of what we really like, beyond wants and needs.

That is why I believe that the essential preparation for the coming economic, energy and ecological crises, culminating in the collapse of our exhausted civilization, is re-acquiring those essential capacities that will lift us out of the culturally-created illusion that our world is one of endless conflict and scarcity, full of unmet needs and desperate wants, and move us into the real-ization that a better, simpler life is possible, one almost entirely without wants or needs, one where we are free to enjoy what we really like — being in love, being in nature, listening to music, play, learning and helping others, all things that are and have always been free.

Only then can we realize that our civilization culture cannot be reformed to provide what we want and need (in fact its purpose is to create more and greater wants and needs). And by its very design, it will never make us happy.

This is another post in my ongoing personal exploration of ‘who we (human beings) are’, how we got that way, and how, at the individual level, we might learn to better heal, better adapt, and better prepare ourselves for what’s to come.

I‘m a pretty fearful guy. I spend a lot of time trying to work up the courage and/or energy to do important things, and not much actually voluntarily doing anything important (I’m comfortably retired from paid work, so I am fortunate to not have to do anything).

At the risk of appearing to rationalize my unproductivity, I have a theory for why I am this way: Our culture wants us fearful and (emotionally) flattened. Here’s my thinking:

Back when there were only a few million of our species, we had no real need for culture. When I observe wild creatures, I see them living “in the now”. They will do what is needed to help the flock/herd/group in the moment, and most wild creatures are a lot more generous and altruistic than we might think. What they are not is anxious or fearful about the future, or in thrall to their collective culture. That’s in part because they ‘know’ they have no control over the future, so there is no evolutionary point in them imagining it or worrying about it. Their fears are immediate, and require a quick fight/flight response, after which the anger and/or sorrow they felt when the fear was realized, is discharged, and they return to living joyfully in Now Time. That’s not to say they don’t feel grief at the loss or suffering of a loved one — just that they are not fruitlessly consumed or debilitated by these feelings.

Wild creatures have cultures (read Bernd Heinrich’s works on corvids if you want to learn more about avian cultures), but these cultures are simple emergent properties of the reality of their lives; culture is not necessary to their evolutionary success and does not impose itself on individuals in the group. Wild creatures do what they do because their instinctive, intellectual, sensory and emotional ‘knowledge’ guides them. They may scrap with others in their group, and may not always get what they want, and they are able in the moment to collaborate brilliantly to achieve a shared goal, but ultimately they make their own culturally-unencumbered decisions.

When human populations started to outstrip the carrying capacity of our ecosystems (the reason why we did so is a subject for another essay) it became necessary for our species to ‘settle’, and to create new political, economic and social systems just to survive in unnaturally large numbers and concentrations. Democracy and personal freedoms don’t scale well, especially in situations of horrific and unnatural overcrowding, so as these human systems grew larger they had to become ever-more coercive — we had to be forced to conform, to obey others and cultural “rules”, to “settle” for less than what our wild selves had always been accustomed to, and will always yearn for.

As our human numbers accelerated and soared past a billion, the levels of human violence and oppression have ratcheted up commensurately. So have the numbers physically imprisoned — in jails, ghettos, camps, and (in Gaza for example) even whole nations.

But physical violence and physical constraints have not been enough to keep us in line. To submit more and more of the ever-increasing plague of human numbers to the necessary levels of restraint and suppression of our natural behaviours, psychological violence has been required as well. What I see, all over the world, are two now-endemic forms of psychological violence invoked to keep seven billion people in our culture’s thrall:

1. the social construction and constant triggering of a new set of crippling fears via learned helplessness, and
2. the emotional flattening of the human spirit through social prohibitions and inurement.

To inure is “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection” or acculturation. If you are subjected to something long enough and often enough (e.g. spending time in slaughterhouses or jails or emergency wards or factory farms or “old age” homes or street gangs or torture prisons or refugee camps or ghettos or the armed forces or police forces, or living with an abuser, or watching violent “entertainment”) you become habituated to it. You become unable to feel the strong negative emotions and visceral revulsion that you would if this were a rare or brief event. You cannot. You emotionally detach, disengage, dissociate. No one can sustain that intensity of emotion indefinitely. The emotion gets suppressed, turned inward, and eventually the chemical reaction that occurs no longer has the same effect. You become emotionally flattened, numbed.

From the perspective of a massive human culture that is trying to get all seven billion of its members to work hard without anger, grief, outrage, or complaint, such emotional flattening provides a huge evolutionary advantage. If you can be inured to not care, or to not care to know, you can be made to do anything. Or, in the face of continued cultural atrocities, to do nothing.

But there is an even more powerful tool that can be brought to bear to wield control over billions of people — fear. Fear is a natural phenomenon — most creatures have evolved instinctive fears of injury, and of being trapped, and of imminent harm happening to their loved ones, and these instincts have helped them survive.

Humans, however, thanks to our exceptional imaginations and memory and our invention of “Clock” Time, are capable of whole sets of additional fears about things that are either outside our control or are about the future. It doesn’t matter whether we are able to do anything useful with these fears. If they are invoked, we will fear nonetheless — and groups that are able to invoke widespread fear among others can capitalize brilliantly on it. Here are some of the things we humans fear (the taxonomy is mine, and is not intended to be complete or scientific); the ones on the right are those fears our culture has added to our instinctive repertoire, and thence exploited mercilessly and relentlessly to keep us in line:

Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.

Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime.

Our culture employs propaganda not only to divert responsibility for our anger and grief to ourselves, but also to keep us fearful. The propaganda machine creates a worldview of danger and scarcity, consuming us with fear of attack, of failure, of loss (especially loss of love), of uncertainty, of not fitting in and “not having enough”. And, of course, of death.

Because of our brain’s vulnerability to these future, unpredictable, easily-exaggerated and unactionable fears, our culture can exploit us by playing on our anxieties — re-triggerable dreads that precede fear and subside when those fears are not realized. Anxieties are conceivable fears. Any fear that can be conceived — terrorists, foreigners, rejection, threats of all kinds — can be blown up and exploited and used to control us and our behaviour, and even to immobilize us.

This cultural immobilization runs deeper than most of us ever realize. People on their death-beds, asked what they most regret in their lives, overwhelmingly cite things they regret not doing rather than things they did, and most of those ‘inactions’ are the result of cultural constraints or personal self-constraints, self-censorship of action, rather than the result of never having the opportunity to do those things. Daniel Gilbert‘s research shows that (thanks to our cultural programming) we have a tendency to overestimate the impact of current and future events and decisions on our future happiness, and this makes us timid and risk-averse in making those decisions, and overly preoccupied with the future instead of our current happiness. And many people’s reaction to Derrick Jensen’s relentless urging of us to act on our instincts in defence of our suffering and dying planet, is resentment at being pushed to do what is culturally-prohibited, rather than anger at the culture that is, with our own complicity, holding us back.

There are two cycles, which I think are unique to our species (or at least to large-brained species), that can be provoked with appropriate propaganda, as shown in the diagram below.

Because our brains create stories (mental representations of what is, was, may be or will be, and of who we are and why we are that way), we can and do constantly ‘re-enact’ situations which caused us pain and suffering — what I call the grief/inurement cycle. We feel the pain, we create a story to explain it, that story is so vivid and memorable that recalling it re-invokes the pain, and so on. We can become incapacitated by such suffering, until enough cycles have passed that we begin to forget these stories and heal. This aids a coercive culture in two ways: through the initial debilitation that prevents us from acting against the perpetrator of the outrage that produced the pain, and through the inurement that comes when we become so desensitized to the outrages, and the pain and suffering, that we begin to accept them as normal, the only way to live.

And then there’s the feedback cycle from anger and sorrow to chronic anxiety, as our brains imagine situations in which the atrocity that caused our pain could recur again and again, to the point this anxiety begins to immobilize us, and makes us pliable to cultural forces that promise to relieve us of or protect us from the things we have learned to fear. As Robert Sapolsky‘s research has shown, this anxiety/fear/pain/anger/grief feedback cycle is an emergent property and unintended consequence of our brain’s exceptional ability to imagine and recall, and the anxiety, especially in situations where events are outside our control, is unhealthy and useless — except to the culture that wants to use it to control us. This cycle also produces “learned helplessness” — the invalid but propaganda-reinforced sense that there is nothing we can do, except hope and trust that our ‘leaders’ can ‘save’ us.

Those who presume to be able to tell us how to deal with and ‘overcome’ our fears suggest six broad approaches to doing so. None of them is simple, or else we would all be using it. But the harder approaches (at least, harder for me: your experience may be different) seem to me to offer more effective ways of interrupting the vicious cycle of suffering, grief and inurement, or the vicious cycle of chronic anxiety and learned helplessness. Here’s a table that shows these six broad approaches to dealing with fear, and my personal assessment of their potential efficacy (again, your experience may be different):

The first, and obvious, approach is to try to avoid situations that give rise to fear or anxiety in the first place, but I’m learning that this is futile. The more you try to protect yourself, the more vulnerable you become to events and situations you could not avoid, and in the process you can incapacitate yourself to the point you become afraid to do anything.

Another common approach is to try to discharge, through physical means or through conversation therapies or other behavioural techniques, the emotion that the fear gives rise to. Many people believe wild animals do this when they “shake off” their emotion after averting danger. The theory is that this “discharging” cuts off both the grief/inurement cycle and the anxiety/fear/pain/anger/sorrow cycle by preventing the pain from being constantly revisited and reimagined and dwelled upon. But I would argue that we are incapable of having that much control over our memories and imaginations, and that while discharging might provide temporary relief, in the long term it is more likely to lead to addiction to the act of discharging (especially dangerous if that discharging is expressed as violence or unrestrained anger against others), than to any relief from either pain or recurring anxiety.

A newer method of dealing with fears is conditioning. For those with fear of flying, for example, the idea is to have the fearful person experience many safe flying experiences gradually, so that the mental connection between the experience and the feeling of pain is broken, and eventually the anticipation of the experience arouses no anxiety. I know some people for whom this has worked (and others for whom it has not). The danger is that you can end up being desensitized to real risks based on limited experiences. What happens if you are conditioning yourself to overcome fear of flying and your plane has an emergency landing? Trauma, I would think.

A fourth approach is learning and preparation. The more you know about what you can actually do if a fearful situation arises, in theory the less anxious you are likely to be about its potential occurrence. You are, in effect, combating the learned helplessness by giving yourself something (knowledge and experience) that gives you more control over a potential future experience. The danger here is that you may think you have more control than you really have, and that self-deception may lead to underreaction or complacency when the risk is real.

Now we come to the two methods I’ve been working on most recently. I think they’re connected. The idea of “letting go” of our stories about what might happen (our anxieties) to the extent they are beyond our control is extremely difficult, and I appreciate the skepticism of those who assert we can think ourselves out of our pain and anger and sorrow and fear. But our anxieties and fears and stories about things we cannot really know and cannot control is a ‘learned’ behaviour, so it should be something that, with practice and self-awareness and self-knowledge and self-management, can be unlearned.

And the sixth approach, of simply Living in the Now, and rejecting the stories our minds (and our culture) tell us about ourselves and others, and about what is and was and will be (or may be) in the future, before they even become part of our belief system and worldview, seems to me likewise a means of living more naturally, of being more present. I have had moments when I feel fully present, when I am simultaneously very aware (and self-aware) and very relaxed (and hence more competent and resilient in the moment), and in such moments I feel legitimately fearless. I want that feeling to last forever, and sense that this is the way most wild creatures, unencumbered by diabolically imaginative and past- and future-oriented brains, live their whole lives (except when danger is imminent), joyfully, naturally, and arguably more sensibly than we.

So my sense is that this practising of presence, this learning to live in Now Time and to let go what I cannot predict or control, is what I must pursue with increasing energy and commitment. I see it as being part of rediscovering who I really am, this feral, nobody-but-myself, me. And I think this is essential to cultural liberation and hence to the emotional flatness and fearfulness that is so much a part of the “everybody-else” me I have been acting as for so many years.

Maybe this is what we must all learn to do if we want to be able to do the essential work of preparing ourselves, our loved ones and our communities for the terrible crises ahead, when our industrial-growth civilization culture collapses and loosens its well-intentioned hold on the rest of us. Maybe that preparation is nothing more than this learning, this becoming ready to live without dependence on and coercion by culture. So that when it happens, we will know, as liberated, wild creatures, exactly what to do, in the moment.

Our perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps what I am seeing as the dark constraint of and the emotional imprisonment by our culture, is just my own projection, my own neat and convenient story for my own inaction, now. I don’t know. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

image from free-desktop-backgrounds.net

Today, after months of hearings and deliberation, a BC judge ruled that the Canadian federal law making “polygamous union” a criminal offence in Canada was needed and defensible notwithstanding the fact that it does violate freedom of religion and other provisions in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In a 300+ page judgement he ruled that the charter right to freedom from the threat of harm, particularly to women and children, outweighed religious charter rights. He also asserted that the law violates the charter’s right to fundamental justice when it is applied to minors, and as such the law cannot legally and should not be used to prosecute minors.

This means that actions taken under this law against leaders of an allegedly misogynist and child-abusing fundamentalist Mormon cult group in the village of Bountiful BC, which were thrown out on constitutional grounds, can be reinstated. It is unclear whether the decision will be appealed (to the Canadian Supreme Court), which would delay prosecution.

The West Coast Legal and Educational Action Fund (LEAF) argued that the law needed to be rewritten and narrowed to cover only situations involving “minors, exploitation, coercion, abuse of authority, a gross imbalance of power or undue influence”, an argument the judge rejected, claiming that the information presented to him made it clear that polygamy is inherently harmful and that “there is no such thing as ‘good polygamy’”. The Civil Liberties Association argued, also unsuccessfully, that the law should simply be ruled unconstitutional and not used, since by criminalizing polygamy it merely drives it underground, increasing rather than reducing the vulnerability of affected women and children. All of the opponents of the argued that there are many existing laws against child and spousal abuse, unlawful confinement, exploitation and similar crimes, and that recourse to an ancient anti-polygamy law is unnecessary to bring perpetrators of such crimes to justice.

Where does this leave those of us who are poly — who have more than one loving, adult, respectful, egalitarian, consensual relationship in our lives? The Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association argued that if the polygamy law were upheld, it would jeopardize the rights of poly people and throw us, and our families, into a legal limbo where we could be harassed, threatened, charged and jailed for living a healthy, natural lifestyle.

The judge said a number of things to try to reassure us that the law is not intended and won’t be used to prosecute those in consensual, adult relationships:

“For polyamorists, the ability to live in a family with the people they love is essential… Each party must know of and consent to both the possibility and the reality of other relationships within the group. This need for openness and consent at all times necessitates considerable self-awareness, communication, conflict resolution and emotional processing on the part of all members…

“While polyamory has been a largely secular phenomenon to date, the evidence indicates that some polyamorists do favour religious ceremonies. Criminalization of these ceremonies significantly impairs the ability of polyamorists to experiment and innovate in this regard. As such, s. 293, as interpreted by the Attorneys General, directly infringes the religious liberty of polyamorists.”

The judge fell short, however, of saying that s. 293 (the polygamy criminalization law in question) should be amended to clearly exempt polyamory ceremonial unions. As a result, according to John Ince, lawyer for the CPAA,  the judgement “rules that the lifestyle of polyamorists as practiced in Canada is not illegal and we’re pleased with that.” Ince added that marriage is “not really an issue in the polyamorous community”, and concluded that “[multiple] common law relationships are clearly not prohibited. Polyamorists who are dealing with immigration or family custody issues for instance now need no longer worry about being considered to be criminals”.

CPAA spokesperson Zoe Duff cautioned however: “The decision still criminalizes a segment of the polyamorous community if they have a marriage ceremony… Polyamorous Canadians are responsible citizens who work toward sustaining healthy, loving, egalitarian relationships and it is wrong for Canada’s laws to continue to criminalize any of us. The number of people in any given relationship is not the issue. The health of the relationship and family is the issue.”

What does all this mean? The judge’s ruling is an interpretation on the constitutionality of the existing 120-year-old law. He ruled that the law violates religious rights and freedoms under the constitution but that notwithstanding this, the law is justified because the charter-protected right to freedom from harm or threat of harm (to the victims of coercive polygamous relationships) outweighs religious rights and freedoms.

A large part of the judgment is spent clarifying the judge’s conclusion that despite changes in both formal and informal relationships since the law was written 120 years ago, and despite changes in the definition of terms such as “marriage”, the law pertains only to multiple relationships sanctioned and recognized by marriage or comparable “conjugal union” ceremony. Specifically, he describes the ceremony that sanctions and recognizes a second marital relationship of any individual (subsequent to or simultaneous with the first) as a “capital M Marriage”, and asserts that this particular law applies to and allows prosecution of all (adult) marriage partners of the person or people in that/those “Marriage(s)”.

This is a particularly tricky bit of reasoning. It means that if you have multiple relationships sanctioned by a marriage ceremony, even if they are all with adults and all parties have consented to them, you are guilty of polygamy, and subject (for that reason alone) to harsh criminal punishments (up to 5 years in prison) under this Canadian law. But if you have multiple relationships not sanctioned by marriage ceremony, even if they are coercive or abusive, you are not subject to this law (though you may be subject to other Canadian laws). [Just as an aside, to show how arcane this law is, the very next section of the law prescribes up to 2 years in prison for "solemnizing or pretending to solemnize a marriage without lawful authority".]

I’m not sure that such a legal definitional nicety would pass scrutiny in an appeal. It seems to me discriminatory to apply a law to groups that hold religious ceremonies sacred, and not to those that don’t (and as you know I’m not a big fan of organized religion or ritual). Convenient in the case at hand, but pretty shaky as a precedent-setter.

What’s worse, though, is that I don’t think the subtlety of this distinction (which the judge takes many pages to draw) will be appreciated by law enforcement agencies that will, if this ruling is not appealed, see “polygamy is illegal” as justification for endless harassment and prosecution of poly people. It will be tempting for law enforcement agencies to make the following argument, for example:

1. Under Canadian laws, if you cohabit with another person for a certain period of time, or if you have a child with another person, and/or if you “register your union” with an appropriate provincial authority (generally for purposes of claiming rights to jointly-registered property), you are deemed, for most legal and tax purposes, to be “equivalent to married”, and have most of the rights and responsibilities of a marriage party. So, if you do any of these things with more than one partner, law enforcement officials would have some justification for saying you are “equivalent to married” to more than one partner.
2. Equivalent to married to more than one partner = polygamous = arrested and carted off to jail, possibly because your neighbour or one of your kid’s school-mates doesn’t like you. I wouldn’t want to have to try to explain to some misanthropic pepper-spraying beat cop the subtleties of the distinction: “No, really, officer, the law only applies to religious people who are officially married! We’re just poly! Read the whole twelve-page section of the ruling that explains that here.”

Just in case anyone misinterprets what I’m saying: I think people and leaders of cults that brainwash, exploit and abuse children and the weak, and who intimidate, threaten, harass and imprison ‘members’ who try to break free, should be put away for much longer than five years. We don’t need a law that restricts rights to and criminalizes assembly and association to do that. What we need is better whistle-blowing legislation and protection, better services for those living in fear to get help and find safety, and a much more responsible and less laissez-faire and less privacy-obsessed attitude towards what goes on behind closed doors and walls by all of us.

There’s something very wrong with our laws when, in order to shine a light on and bring justice to remedy outrageous and ritualized abuses ruthlessly perpetrated on the weak, while the bully perpetrators rely on “privacy rights” and “personal property rights”, we have to rely on a flimsy and inadequate 120-year-old statute that makes it illegal to have more than one “conjugal union” at a time.

There are, it would seem, nearly as many approaches and therapies for dealing with triggers — events and actions that provoke negative emotions in us — as there are potential believers in them. Although I try to be open-minded about this, at this point in my life I tend to believe that there are a relatively tiny number of people with the skill, time and understanding of human nature to be able to help those afflicted (and I think that’s just about all of us, though I admit that triggers are more debilitating for some than others), over time, to recognize and ‘manage’ their triggers better. I have almost no use for the vast number of ‘self-help’ books that purport to help people deal with these on their own.

My sense is that most triggers tend to provoke three broad classes of negative emotional responses (there may well be triggers for positive emotions, but as long as they’re authentic and not delusional I’m content to see them as a good thing):

• anger, jealousy/envy, hatred, self-hatred
• fear, anxiety, dread, helplessness, feeling ‘trapped’
• sadness, grief, shame, guilt, sorrow. hopelessness, anguish

This intuitive grouping corresponds well to Parrot’s emotion ‘tree’ (though I sense that the ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ groupings are more closely connected than we might think). The triggers for any of these negative emotions depend on our own experience and worldview. For example, many of us get angry at being mistreated, fearful when we sense danger, and sad when we hear tragic news. What underlies all of these emotions, I think, is suffering — real or potential, past, present or future, personal or on behalf of those we care about. Suffering is a consequence of pain (though some would say not inevitably so). And there is a lot of pain in our overcrowded, overstressed, exhausted world.

In an article last spring I attempted to lay out a strategy for avoidance of and coping with triggers. I have tried very hard to apply it. To my credit, I think I have become much better at recognizing when I have been triggered, and the direct cause (event or action) and indirect causes (traumatic events in my past, feelings of incompetency etc.) All of these ’causes’ are, of course, stories (about myself, others, the past or the future) and all of them, as people like Tolle and Richard Moss will tell you, are inventions. That doesn’t mean the trauma wasn’t real or the feeling isn’t valid — it just means that what is causing suffering now when a triggering event occurs is our own intellectual and emotional processing — the stories we create to explain what happened and why, what will happen and why, or what we believe is true and why, and the negative emotions that these stories immediately provoke.

So, for example, when someone suddenly cuts in front of me in traffic after shouting ‘asshole’ in my window and giving me the finger, a flurry of negative emotions are provoked by the stories I immediately invent about this event:

• this guy has publicly disrespected me for no valid reason (anger)
• the guy is dangerous, and will now try to physically hurt me as a result of his anger (fear)
• I was not paying attention, and must have created a traffic hazard, perhaps by wandering over the line (shame)

When this happens, I am pretty good at recognizing both the stories I am telling about it and the emotions these stories provoke. I’m even getting better at helping others, when they are triggered (even when it’s by my actions) to recognize the stories they are telling about it and the emotions these stories are provoking in them.

What I am not good at is preventing myself from getting triggered at all. As I move to prevent and avoid situations (and people) who I think are likely to trigger me, I find that as the situations that can trigger me get (on average) tamer, my sensitivity to them is actually increasing (perhaps due to lack of practice). So (what I perceive as) a mild personal rebuke now triggers me more than it used to.

And, worse, when I get triggered, the process I prepared for myself, and try to practice, to cope with the trigger, is not working at all. This process is:

1. Recognize what I’m feeling (the pain and the emotions), and recognize the stories I’m telling myself that provoked these emotions. Don’t judge the validity of either the stories or the emotions in the moment. Just accept that this is who I am.
2. Understand, take time to let feelings/thoughts settle, and put things in perspective.
   • For fear: What is it I really fear? Is the threat real? What does responding fearfully to these situations get me? Five years from now looking back, will my current fearful response seem justified? What steps can I reasonably take to mitigate the threat or its impact?
   • For anger and sadness: Be generous, appreciative and forgiving of others. Imagine alternative stories that make the behaviour that angered/saddened me more understandable.
3. Be present. Breathe. Be aware of my body, how I am ‘embodying’ what I am thinking and feeling.
4. Express my feelings. Let them out. Discharge.
5. Let go of the feelings. If it’s a ‘fear’ trigger, let go too of the need for (and illusion of) control and certainty. Take the existential step of realizing that there is only this moment, now, and that I am not my mind, not my thoughts, not my feelings.

In reality, after doing step 1 I tend to jump directly to 4. I can’t help myself. And the problem with that is, by discharging what I feel too quickly and emotionally, I can trigger others, creating a vicious cycle of triggering. It can take me a long time to get around to 2, and if I were to be honest with myself, I probably don’t really do 3 or 5 at all.

The theory behind the ‘discharging’ step is the argument that all wild creatures do this after a stressful ‘fight or flight’ incident. They explode with anger. Then, immediately, they ‘shake it off’ physically — you can see this in animals that have just fought or just escaped danger. And then, supposedly, it’s done, forgotten.

Except it doesn’t seem to work that way for humans. Perhaps our brains get in the way, or perhaps our bodies are just not yet well-adapted to the types of triggers and stresses we face in modern civilization. In his book You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney cites studies that suggest that catharsis — venting our anger — does not discharge it at all, it keeps it in our system, and makes us more aggressive and more prone to seek ways to vent our anger when the next situation arises. Perhaps this is because of our egoic minds (it is doubtful most other creatures waste their time inventing stories about others’ motivations) — another facet of being ‘too smart for our own good.’ McRaney explains:

Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion which led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if it made you feel good, you’ll seek it out again in the future… Smashing plates or kicking doors after a fight with a roommate, spouse or lover doesn’t redirect your fury, it perpetuates your rancor. If you spank your children while infuriated, remember you are reinforcing something inside yourself. Common sense says venting is an important way to ease tension, but common sense is wrong. Venting – catharsis – is pouring fuel into a fire… [Instead, cool off]: delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.

McRaney sites other studies that suggests catharsis (crying) often doesn’t help people recover from emotions of sadness, either — especially if it’s ‘protest crying’ — a plea for help rather than an expression of sadness.

But how are you supposed to start by ‘cooling off’ when your emotional reaction — the anger, fear or sadness you feel — is so powerful, so overwhelming that it just comes out, spontaneously?

There are a lot of sometimes-conflicting views on how to ‘manage’ the emotions that these triggers evoke:

• So-called “anger management” programs focus on dealing with people who express their anger in physically or psychologically violent or threatening ways, and I think we can all agree that violent venting, directed against others, is abhorrent behaviour.
• Some people argue that we need to be angry before we are ready to act to change something that needs changing but where advocating change poses a great personal risk — that our anger can effectively be ‘channelled’ into positive intention and activism.
• In some cases (e.g. some childhood trauma victims), where external expression of anger or fear was or is taboo, people may internalize this feeling, and it may end up being expressed as sadness, shame, or grief. In these cases, some therapists would say it is better to be angry, to re-externalize this emotion. Might ‘anger catharsis’ work better for these sufferers than ‘sadness catharsis’ (crying)?
• Grief counsellors often advise working through sadness at your own pace, aiming to reach acceptance, to the point the sufferer can to some extent ‘let go’ of their grief.
• Most would agree, I think, that learning something new is always a good strategy, whether it’s just a distraction from the negative emotion, or acquiring self-knowledge or more knowledge about the situation or people that triggered the emotion, in order to better understand the psychological dynamics at work.

But none of this really answers the question: What can you do if you can’t ‘help yourself’ from immediately (non-violently) discharging your feelings of anger, fear or sadness, when there is (apparently) no cathartic benefit to doing so — in fact, your discharge may make you feel worse, may trigger others, may provoke additional or more extended negative emotions in you, and may increase your tendency to seek similar (unhelpful) catharsis in future recurrences?

In the diagram above I propose two ‘self-healing interventions’ we can try to invoke in the moment when we feel ourselves being triggered. The first entails changing the story we tell ourselves, either by finding a more benign one (in the case of anger or sadness triggers), or by having a ‘reality check’ on whether the threat is real and what mitigating steps we can take immediately to reduce it (in the case of fear triggers). The second entails, as McRaney suggests, delaying response (just giving it time), using relaxation techniques, or distracting yourself with a peaceful activity. I suspect this second intervention works best for anger triggers and is less effective for fear or sadness triggers.

Neither of these interventions is cathartic. But neither can (in my experience anyway) be invoked quickly enough to prevent the immediate response to the triggered pain — the created stories that explain what happened, and the negative emotions those stories evoke, in a vicious cycle. It’s fine to heal the damage through interventions after it’s happened, but isn’t there any way to prevent the pain responses (stories and negative emotions) from arising in the first place, with all the commensurate damage they can do?

Or is it just natural (and human nature) to react cathartically first and try to heal later? Our our primal “fight-or-flight” selves that badly maladapted to our modern culture and its triggers?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

A quick re-cap of the hypothesis I laid out in parts one and two of Who ‘We’ Are:

1. The cells and organs of our bodies evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes. Our cells collectively evolved organs and organisms by trying trillions of trillions of random variations, rolls of the genetic dice over four billion years. The evolutions that best adapted to and fit into the ever-changing global environment survived. It can be shown statistically (as Stephen J Gould did in Full House) that such evolutions will tend to produce greater diversity and complexity of life forms, and the human species is a reasonably but not exceptionally complex adaptation compared to the rest of life on Earth.
2. The ‘existence’ of our minds and identities as ‘individuals’ is therefore self-delusion, self-deception, as Stewart and Cohen explain in Figments of Reality and as John Gray reiterates in Straw Dogs. Our minds are nothing more than processes carried out for the benefit of our cells and organs — they are their information processing system, not ‘ours’. The four aspects of our ‘selves’: intellectual, emotional, sensory and intuitive, are simply the four sets of chemical processes that our cells and organs use, and weigh and balance, in making decisions in their collective best interest, as shown in the upper right chart above. To use Stewart and Cohen’s term, we are a complicity, a complex collaborative ‘folding together’ of the collective interests of our component parts. Each individual creature is plural, not singular. This is true for all complex creatures, not just our species.
3. Like most species, we are social creatures. Such creatures evolve codes of behaviour that enable them, as part of the larger organism of all-life-on-Earth, to collaborate, share and keep their numbers in balance with the local ecosystem — these are all evolutionary selected behaviours, since they enable us to adapt and fit well into these ecosystems. These codes of behaviour are called cultures. Cultures are learned rather than genetically innate codes, so they can evolve much faster than our bodies can.
4. In times of stress, due to overcrowding, natural disasters, climate change or the exhaustion of local resources, cultures can intervene to act in adaptive ways that would be unneeded in normal times. These ways can include war and other aggressive and violent behaviour (as scientists have observed in mouse populations under stress). They can also include migration and adoption of new diets, new tools and new ways of living that are better suited in evolutionary terms to the changed environment. At some point, for reasons we don’t know, some of our species chose to leave the trees of the tropical rainforest where we lived a leisurely life as vegetarian gatherers for a million years, and struggle to survive in other environments. We evolved weapons to kill other animals , enabling us to live as carnivores, and discovered (by studying plant growth in floodplains and fire-burned areas) what Richard Manning in Against the Grain calls ‘catastrophic’ agriculture (as opposed to sustainable permaculture), enabling us to live where there was insufficient food growing naturally. These new tools, however, required settlement and a very different kind of culture — civilization culture — to sustain.
5. Civilization culture requires sacrificing a great many freedoms for the survival of the collective membership, and requires vastly more work, personal sacrifice, hardship, suffering, and vulnerability to catastrophe than other cultures. To keep people from obeying their cells’ and organs’ natural tendencies by just walking away from this culture, it is of necessity inherently coercive, using hierarchy, violence, threat of imprisonment, propaganda and other means to ensure ‘law and order’ — obedience and conformity of the group, without which the new civilized settlements would naturally disintegrate. Two key adaptations to enable this were the evolution of abstract language, suitable for the giving of instructions down the hierarchy and the reporting of information back up, and the concept of clock time. None of this is ‘evil’ — its is all just necessary evolutionary adaptation to a changing environment.
6. Whereas our cells and organs had nearly full control of our (their) minds before civilization culture evolved, the new culture was able, through language and coercion, to influence and seize control of a significant part of our minds. There has been a continuing and escalating war for control of our minds ever since. Our culture persuades us that we have ‘free will’ to ignore what our cells and organs impel us to do and instead do what it (our culture) wants us to do — that we have an ego, an identity, and a responsibility to conduct ourselves according to the rules of civilized society, or we must face the social consequences. As Eckhart Tolle explains in his books, the consequence of this great deception is a vicious cycle of egoic mind (fictional stories that our culture has told us are true and ‘factual’) and pain-body (the negative emotions such as anger, fear, guilt, shame and grief that these stories invoke in us). As shown in the illustration above left, the egoic mind and pain-body can be easily triggered by our culture to control or debilitate us, and the resultant psychological illness (which often also manifests as physical illness in the form of chronic stress-related diseases) cripples our ability to be present and at peace in the world. Again, this triggering is not malicious (except when instigated by psychopaths). Our reaction to it is mostly autonomic and beyond our control: We cannot be other than who ‘we’ are.

As I concluded in part two, now that our civilization culture has (as an unintended consequence of its evolution) desolated the Earth, and has begun to collapse, we are left to wonder what will be left of ‘us’, and some of us who believe that culture cannot be ‘saved’ have started to try to liberate ourselves from civilization culture, and our dependence on it, now. I wrote:

This does not mean moving to neo-survival mode, but rather moving away from civilization culture’s broken, desperate, coercive survival mode. Moving from a society whose worldview is one of scarcity, competition, obedience and sacrifice, to one whose worldview is one of abundance, cooperation, independence and generosity. Moving forward to a natural society. One that trusts the wisdom of each individual’s cells, organs, instincts, senses, emotions, intellect, biophilia, to know just what to do, and to act on that holistic wisdom. One that through its connection to all-life-on-Earth intuitively and collectively and wordlessly manages its numbers and behaviour (as most complex natural species do) to contribute to, not destroy, the complexity and diversity of life on our planet. In our cells, in our organs, in our DNA, this is who we are, and who we always have been, except for a few desperate millennia, when we forgot.

In my postscript I mentioned that we can use music and other sensuous stimuli, and love, and perhaps ‘mind-full’ activities such as meditation, gardening etc., to at least temporarily cut through the egoic mind and pain-body that has made us all mentally ill and begin again to function as natural creatures, aware and relaxed, present and at peace, as in the diagram in the upper right. There are many other things we can do as well to liberate ourselves from our crumbling civilization culture:

• Relearn the skills and capacities of community self-sufficiency that will allow us to become less dependent on our fragile, globalized, reeling civilization culture.
• Reconnect with and trust the wisdom of our senses, our instincts, our emotions, our bodies and all-life-on-Earth through personal practices (which will require patience — the disconnections that civilization culture has wreaked on our minds are the result of a lifelong war of propaganda and incapacitation on us and our communities, ostensibly ‘for our own good’).
• Think critically — challenge everything we’re told, turn off the obfuscating media, and recreate local ‘salons’ where people can talk about things that are important again (as opposed to things that are merely urgent, and things that are entertaining and hence distracting) in ways that are re-empowering and community-building

A new thought: The two diagrams above both imply that it is our ‘beliefs’ (what we know or think we know) that drive our behaviours, our actions. I’m now in the process of reading David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, and in this book he argues that it is the opposite: our actions and behaviours inform and determine our beliefs.

What actually happens in our minds, he writes, is that we act first, and then rationalize and self-justify our actions. Our minds don’t ‘decide’ at all. The decision is made for us by our cells and organs, or by our culture, whichever has the upper hand in the moment (or perhaps a mix of both, which can make our behaviour confusing and inconsistent). Whichever has the upper hand is determined by how susceptible we are to (or skeptical we are of) the messages of our culture, and how we understand those messages; by how powerful and clear and trusted the messages our senses and intuition send us are; by how much information we have and how unambiguous that information is; and most of all by which has most influence over the chemicals that are rushing through our bodies in the moment: our cells and organs or the pain-body our culture is triggering in us. ‘We’ have nothing to do with it.

When there is a cognitive dissonance between our behaviour and our beliefs, we attempt to resolve it by adjusting our beliefs, rather than changing our behaviour. Why should this be so? My hypothesis is:

• Our beliefs, conceptions and worldview are simplified models of reality created in our minds. Before the influence of our culture became so pervasive, these were, like upper legislatures were once supposed to be, places where actions could be second-thought, analyzed, assessed for effectiveness. These assessments, ‘stories’ about what happened and why, may be used to prompt overriding or mitigating actions, and to ‘re-mind’ the emotions if that situation occurs again. An excellent adaptation of the brain’s information processing capacities by our cells and organs.
• But now that most of these ‘stories’ are propagated by our culture, not formed from personal body-assessed experience, the egoic mind and pain-body interfere with our natural decision-making process. Our culture can play with us as if we are puppets by triggering the appropriate negative emotions, invoking the appropriate fictional ‘stories’ of what happened and why, and making us behave the way it wants us to. Now we have to reconcile what we have done with what we believe, by altering inconsistencies between our actions and beliefs the only way we can — by changing our beliefs to justify and rationalize our behaviour — so we can ‘live with’ ourselves. Our culture is, of course, delighted with this reinforcement of its message.

So our beliefs and worldview are not a moral or behavioural compass that is used in guiding how we live our lives. On the contrary, our beliefs and worldview are our rationalizations for what we have done and are doing, and why.

This does not require that the arrows in the models depicted above need to be reversed. Who ‘we’ are is not our beliefs or our worldviews. What the models need, to reflect that our behaviours and actions drive our beliefs, is an additional ‘feedback’ arrow from the Decisions and Actions box back to the Intellect box. On the right side, this might be called ‘learning and modelling of reality’. On the left side, it is these things too, but also ‘rationalization and justification’, because when we’re afflicted with egoic mind and pain-body, without rationalization and justification for actions that otherwise make no sense, we cannot live with our ‘selves’.

Why is it important (at least to me) to have some kind of explanation for who ‘we’ are, some model that makes sense of how and what we think and feel and believe and do? I believe self-knowledge is one of the most important and difficult to achieve of the essential capacities we need to acquire to be ready to cope with the challenges we face in the years ahead. I believe our civilization’s collapse has already begun, that it is irreversible and will bring with it an enormous amount of suffering (not that our world isn’t already filled with suffering). How can we hope to be able to deal with the cascading crises of economic, energy and ecological crises likely to roll over us in the Long Emergency decades of this century, if we don’t know ourselves, and our motivations, and if we’re not sufficiently self-aware and present and at peace with ourselves to competently self-manage, deal with crisis, and create healthy, sustainable communities in the aftermath of civilization’s collapse?

I hope this is a useful, or at least interesting, model of ‘self’ for you to think about as you work on building your personal capacities for resilience and your own projects to find better ways to live, now and for the generations to come.

I should have realized that my recent post on Who ‘We’ Are would get me embroiled in a discussion on ‘free will’. So here’s Part Two of this existential rant, to hopefully explore and clear up some of the comments and questions the first article provoked.

In Straw Dogs John Gray writes that “free will is a trick of perspective,” based on the self-delusion that there is “an inner person directing our behaviour.”:

We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.

These ‘fragments’ that are conceived by our minds are what Stewart and Cohen call “figments (simplified, invented models) — of reality“. Our ‘minds’, they argue, are nothing more than processes that produce these figments (originally for the benefit of our cells’ and organs’ survival, but now, with the increasing power of our culture due to language, also appropriated by our culture).

This is what I was getting at in the previous article when I said that one’s ‘mind’ is a battleground, without any ‘natives’ to defend the territory, where a ceaseless battle rages between the cells and organs of our bodies which evolved our brains as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their purposes, and our culture which uses every available form of propaganda and coercion to try to seize control of our minds for their purposes. As our culture accelerates over the edge of a cliff, these ‘purposes’ are increasingly divergent.

That we have a ‘choice’ between doing what our cells and organs would have us do, and doing what our culture would have us do, hardly constitutes ‘free will’, as humanists would have us believe. It is hard to imagine anything further from ‘freedom’ than to have to make a Sophie’s choice between two irreconcilable alternatives, the choice of either of which will inevitably hurt us, either through damage to our physical and/or mental health, or the angry opprobrium of the well-brainwashed majority in our culture.

In Tolle’s model (above, left), the constant traumas inflicted upon us by our dying, ruthless culture produce a vicious cycle: Our brains invent stories to try to ‘make sense’ of our suffering, and these stories in turn provoke negative emotions (anger, fear, grief etc.), our experience of which reinforces the ‘validity’ of these fictional stories. Many stressful events in our culture (e.g. attacks on us or our loved-ones or our beliefs, bad news about the planet, and a million others) trigger these negative emotions and the stories that we’ve invented to try to make sense of them. Our culture puts its ‘spin’ on each event’s story to pressure us to do its bidding, or to make us believe there is nothing we can do. As a result we are intellectually and emotionally incapacitated, often to the point of chronic mental and physical illness.

So the battle between our biology and our culture for control of our minds (and hence control over our beliefs and actions) is further aggravated by these incapacitating triggers, which take our minds (our intellectual and emotional ‘selves’) hostage. Many of us dissociate, and, in order to try to avoid the triggers, endeavour to live inside our heads, disconnect the four aspects of our ‘selves’ (intellectual, emotional, sensual and intuitive) from each other and from the ‘real’ world, and hide away in a ‘safe’ world of our own making. Except it’s not really our own making: We are really living inside our culturally ‘dis-eased’ mind. This ‘we’ that is doing so is, of course, another fiction — our ego, a cultural construct that exploits a brain that is too smart (and too vulnerable to stress) for its own good. As Gray explains, this ego is just a self-delusion that an inner person is directing our behaviour.

It’s very difficult to shake the delusion that our ego is ‘real’ however, because our culture constantly tells us it is real — and as long as we all believe our egos are ‘real’ we will go on reinforcing that delusion in our every contact with others. The culture tells us that we must take responsibility (as our culture defines responsibility, which in today’s overwrought world is tantamount to self-induced imprisonment and slavery), that we must do what those in power tell us (on threat of punishment), and that we must conform and be like everybody else (or be shunned and ostracized). It also tells most of us that we are sinful, vulnerable and only worth what our culture deems us to be worth.

Inevitably and endlessly our culture fills us with feelings of guilt, fear, shame and self-loathing, and false stories that support these feelings.  When the egoic mind and the ‘pain-body’ (the chronic negative emotions the egoic mind’s stories provoke) churn fast enough, we slide into depression (a form of disengaging from our emotions and thoughts when they become too much to bear), or lash out against others (in personal violence or collective wars), or retreat into paralysis or denial (consumed by fear, or nostalgia, or irrational magical thinking). Our culture knows how to pull the triggers and exploit the ego only too well.

Much has been written about how to ‘realize’ that the egoic mind and pain-body are not real; they are just, as Stewart and Cohen say, ‘figments of reality’ — false models, self-constructed and culturally-reinforced fictions. Even more has been written about how to free ourselves from them.

If we can do so, if we can get rid of the fictional egoic ‘gunk’ that our culture has, throughout our lives, layered on us, our ‘selves’ begin to look more like the ‘present’ self on the right side of the illustration above. With the deception of the ego gone, we are free of the controlling and debilitating effects of culturally-induced triggers. Our senses, instincts, intellects and emotions are reconnected with each other and with the ‘real’ world, and we become healthy and fully functional — that amazing combination of relaxation and awareness that allows us to be fearlessly open to what our instincts, senses, emotions and intellect perceive (not what they conceive, nor what others conceive and urge us to take as ‘true’), and at the same time calm, comfortable and competent to assess what they mean, without bias, judgement or expectation.

In this ‘frame of mind’ we can be both fully present and at peace in the world (the way I believe most wild animals live, most of the time), and able to bring a mindful approach (rather than a reactive one) to each event we face, such as the 7-step process I have tried to use: Sense, self-control, understand, question, imagine, offer, collaborate. The knowledge (instinctive, emotional, sensory and intellectual) we have and can draw on can then be integrated and appropriate actions taken, in the moment.

But if we are just a collection of cells and organs who have evolved a ‘mind’ to create useful (to them) figments (models) of reality, a mind that is, to some extent or other, invaded and controlled by our culture, who, then, is taking these ‘present’ actions?

I would argue that it is our cells and organs, ‘speaking’ to us through our cleared minds. Our senses and instincts are primeval, and the knowledge they convey to us requires no mental model, no ‘figment of reality’. Our minds, when they are as free of cultural baggage as possible, use our instincts’ and senses’ knowledge to decide on actions that are in our cells’ and organs’ interest. These need not be selfish actions — our bodies are ‘smart’ enough (consider e.g. the urge to procreate, to socialize, and to nurture) to act in concert with others in the greater good of all-life-on-Earth, which they (we) instinctively appreciate — our biophilia is innate, an evolutionary prime directive in our genes, at least when this biophilia is not overridden by the nature-fearing stories of our culture.

Our cells and organs prompt us in integrating this knowledge by producing chemicals that evoke strong emotions (in the natural world these are mostly positive, except in fight-or-flight situations) to goad us into appropriate behaviours.

Our culture is of no help at all in this process. In ‘less-civilized’, healthy societies the culture of the people rarely interferes to compel its members to act against their cells’ and organs’ interests. Individuals in such societies are trusted to make their own decisions, without coercion; the purpose of the culture is to provide objective knowledge through stories, not to advise.

So what’s wrong with our ‘civilized’ culture, that it has so overstepped its bounds of helpfulness, and now tries to control ‘us’ to the point we are mostly ill, disconnected, imprisoned, and dysfunctional?

My guess is that our culture became, as a consequence of our own inventiveness, perverted, deranged, cancerous. When our species faced crises that threatened our existence, our response was to invent the arrowhead, and then agriculture, and then settlement — ‘civilization’. Without these inventions we might not have survived the ice ages — earlier rounds of severe climate change.

But these new inventions required a great deal more interdependence and associations much larger than tribes — the bigger the better. We naturally did not take to the constraints such interdependence and scale required — hierarchy, conformity, obedience, settlement, dependence on fragile human systems, and suffering with plagues, famines and violence, all consequences of living in unnaturally large numbers in close quarters. Our culture, which as ‘software’ can evolve must faster than our cells’ and organs’ ‘hardware’, adapted quickly to the need to enforce compliance and uniformity. Language was its most powerful tool. As civilization ratcheted up to 100 million people, and then a billion, and now seven billion, the culture has needed to restrict personal ‘choices’ and freedoms more and more. It had to get inside our heads and control us, from birth, put us in thrall to civilization culture to keep us in line, keep fuelling the culture. And that’s where we are today — like lab rats starved of food, beginning to eat our own young.

The libertarian-anarchist streak in many of us is producing a now-futile yearning to be free from civilization’s control. But our civilization is collapsing, and as it does survival will depend on our ability to reconnect, to be present and at peace — to be nobody-but-ourselves, feral, social in a collaborative and diverse way, not in civilization culture’s coercive and homogeneous way.

I sense that this is what those who have moved past the Second Denial are now trying to do. We are trying to simultaneously unplug from civilization culture’s thrall (freeing ourselves from the egoic mind and pain-body) and reconnect to the larger ‘organ’/society of all-life-on-Earth, whose voice has been all but drowned out by civilization’s noise.

This does not mean moving to neo-survival mode, but rather moving away from civilization culture’s broken, desperate, coercive survival mode. Moving from a society whose worldview is one of scarcity, competition, obedience and sacrifice, to one whose worldview is one of abundance, cooperation, independence and generosity. Moving forward to a natural society. One that trusts the wisdom of each individual’s cells, organs, instincts, senses, emotions, intellect, biophilia, to know just what to do, and to act on that holistic wisdom. One that through its connection to all-life-on-Earth intuitively and collectively and wordlessly manages its numbers and behaviour (as most complex natural species do) to contribute to, not destroy, the complexity and diversity of life on our planet. In our cells, in our organs, in our DNA, this is who we are, and who we always have been, except for a few desperate millennia, when we forgot.

.     .     .     .     .

Postscript: When I wrote the earlier post arguing that we have no identity, that there is no inner person directing our behaviour, a couple of respondents asked me: What about music? If there is no ‘me’, who/what is it that responds so viscerally and rapturously to great music — even if that music has no words?

My tentative answer to this is that music cuts through the ‘gunk’ of our egoic mind and pain-body, kind of like how a dishwashing detergent cuts through grease. It doesn’t get rid of it, it just makes it seem to disappear for a while, gets it out of the way. Music goes right to our emotions, and I think it may short-circuit the vicious cycle that connects our egoic mind (those ghastly fictitious stories) and our pain-body (the negative emotions that these stories evoke). The direct connection temporarily cuts off the stories and stops the vicious cycle. The result can be an amazing feeling of relief, calmness, awareness. When my depression is at its worst, I know when I begin to respond to music that it’s lifting. This is when I cry, and it’s wonderful.

There are other ‘sensations’ that likewise seem to cut through and cut off the egoic-mind/pain-body connection. While I’m sure they are different for everyone, for me they are:

• lights and/or sounds in the darkness — the moon, streetlights, rain, the night calls of birds and animals, fragrant breezes, storms etc.
• falling in love
• poetry — especially brief, powerful, lyrical turns of phrase that directly call up an emotion or paint a picture
• playing with animals
• being in hot water — hot tubs, baths, even showers, seem to liberate my mind from intellectual constraints and stimulate my imagination
• sometimes, movement — being in a gently moving vehicle that I’m not driving

There is something about all these experiences that accentuates the sensual, relaxes and stimulates at the same time. The senses and instincts take over and then appeal directly to the emotions or the intellect. For a short while, I am ‘cured’ of the suffering and dysfunction in the upper left diagram, and able to function in the healthy way depicted in the upper right diagram; freed briefly from the suffocating ‘dis-ease’ of our culture.

If there is a consensus in the responses I have received to my recent posts about being unhappy and ‘un-present‘, I think it would be:

• I should be grateful (and ‘get over myself’)
• I should stop thinking so much and just be
• I should act (do what my instincts tell me ‘needs’ to be done) and those actions will resolve my unhappiness and lack of presence (along these lines, this fascinating article asserts our actions drive our beliefs — what we do determines who we are — rather than the other way around)

We are, I believe, products of both (a) our biology (‘we’ are a collection, a complicity, of cells and organs in a watery sack, cells and organs that together evolved our minds, our ‘consciousness’, as a feature-detection, protection and mobility management device for their — our organs’ — benefit) and (b) our culture (we are ‘each’ a part of an evolving society, a larger organism, self-organized for our collective survival). Both ‘we’s’ are extraordinarily complex, beyond more than rudimentary knowing, so we flounder around, pushed in often different directions by our biological selves and our cultural selves, profoundly un-self-aware and profoundly ‘alone’.

We have, arguably, no identity — there is no ‘us’ other than our constituent organs (whose consciousness and knowledge are largely unfathomable to our ‘minds’) and the self-delusion of ourselves as ‘individuals’ which has been created and ‘taught’ to us by our culture (through its propaganda tool, language) for their collective purpose. Our cells and organs, our microcosmic selves-as-collection, are in a relentless war with our culture, our macrocosmic selves-as-part, and the battleground is our minds. We might see ourselves as being at the mercy of two colonizing forces, one that created our minds for its purposes and the other trying endlessly to co-opt our minds for its purposes. Except that there is no ‘ourselves’ to be colonized. The suffering and weary terrain of our minds has no natives. There is no ‘us’ to take sides in this battle. We are, as I keep saying, just the space through which stuff (chemicals, information, ideas) passes.

I don’t mean this post to be about the existence, or not, of free will. I am trying to get at something more profound, about the non-existence of identity. When we fall in love, when we crave, or nurture, or erupt, or laugh, or cry, or cower, or mourn, we are doing our biology’s carefully-selected bidding — our cells and organs count on ‘us’ doing these things, for their health and survival, so they flush our minds so full of powerful chemicals that we can do nothing else. When we join others, in war, in celebration, in protest, in recreation, in obedience, in activism, in outrage, in conversation, in solidarity, in community, and especially in acceptance of our social situation, social norms and worldviews, we are doing our culture’s carefully-programmed bidding — our civilization counts on us doing these things, for its health and survival.

When the imperatives of our biology (“go hit on that beautiful creature over there”) and those of our culture (“unfaithfulness to one’s partner — and you can only have one partner –  is a sin with ghastly consequences”) are in conflict, we feel obliged (and empowered) to make a ‘choice’ which to obey. But it is hardly a choice — ‘we’ are in truth merely spectators of the conflict, and they will determine the winner.

When my cells and organs have decided it is in their interest for me to make a bond with someone, they stimulate my imagination to create a fiction in my mind of who that person ‘is’, what they are feeling, and what my relationship with them is or could or should be, that cannot possibly be real, since no one can ‘know’ what it is to be another person. The two of us act out a script, more or less mindlessly, that has been written by our respective bodies, in testosterone and oxytocin and other colourful inks, with characters and plot sufficiently delicious to make us enjoy the performance, and hopefully to enchant us to repeat it, at least until it gets boring and a change of cast is called for.

Likewise our culture uses us, brainwashing us from birth into believing that we have rights within and responsibilities to that culture, and that the way it dictates we live our lives is the only way to live, until we lose awareness that we have given up our freedom (in order to continue at a scale of 7 billion, our culture must now dictate and micromanage our every behaviour) and our health (our bodies are not evolved to cope with civilization’s endless and intense anxiety, so stress-catalyzed chronic physical and mental illnesses are epidemic). And in the process, we have mindlessly desolated our planet and precipitated a sixth great extinction of life on it.

Why has our culture done this to us? As I have written before, I think it is because we became too smart for our own good. Much of what civilization has wrought is an unintended consequence of the evolution of the human brain to the point that our inventions and technologies outpaced our ability to come to grips with their consequences, and to the point that we fell under the thrall of the imagined world inside our heads and others’ ability to manipulate that world, until we became, as ee cummings put it, “everybody-else” — the tide in the war between our biology and our culture shifted inexorably in favour of the latter. Once we became ‘smart’ enough to realize at an existential level that we were completely, utterly alone, we were even more willing recruits to the side of our culture, which comforts us with the illusion that we are not.

So now, retired, with a comfortable pension, free of debts and obligations, living by myself on top of a hill on a staggeringly beautiful island, I am free, at last, to spend the time to contemplate what all this means. To strip off the mask and belief systems and worldview and other gunk that my culture covered me over with for more than fifty years and told me was ‘me’ and stand naked, feral, unencumbered. To stand outside my biological self, still preoccupied with creature comforts and its self-induced chemical addictions. To stand outside my cultural self, so long preoccupied with the carefully-crafted fictions about my ‘self’ and the past and the future and how to behave.

And to realize that, outside of these two warring tyrant ‘selves’, there is no ‘me’. No volition. no ego, no identity, no purpose. Just space.

When I first experienced this ‘spacey’ feeling I feared it was disconnection, which is often, for me, a precursor to depression. But I’m starting to realize that it’s not disconnection from all-life-on-Earth, but from civilization culture, and it’s not disengagement, it’s re-engagement, liberation. It’s just very new to me, and not a little scary. I don’t know what to do with my ‘self’. I am meditating, taking yoga, and spending as much time as possible language-free (no talking or listening or reading or writing). I am listening to, and writing, songs without words. I am spending time in nature trying to just be, to accept what is, to let go, to really see and sense and feel. Raw.

When I am with people, now, even people I love, I am impatient. I don’t want to behave in a ‘civilized’ way anymore. I don’t want to talk at all. I don’t want to care about how others have been trapped by civilization culture, and the terrible minutiae and infinite suffering of their lives — I don’t believe in ‘saving’ people, and recognize (at last) that it is up to them to liberate themselves. I just want to ‘be’ with people who just ‘are’ themselves. Uncivilized. Primal. Wild. In the hope that, in their presence, we can learn together how to be nobody-but-ourselves.

I sit here, naked, on the deck, on the hill, staring up at the moon. Rachmaninoff playing in the background, and the sound of owls in the dark in the nearby trees. Breathing. Letting go. Dissipating, falling apart, crying, howling, becoming part of all-life-on-Earth, which calls me, always, quietly, home.

In my ongoing search for ways to become more Present, I’ve been researching a variety of practices. I recognize that this will not be an easy journey, and whatever practices I pursue could take years, so I’m looking to narrow the list to several paths that (a) will show some early success, so I know I’m on a promising path at least and (b) are activities I enjoy rather than finding onerous.

To me, Presence is what happens when I’m keenly aware of all four aspects of my identity — intellectual, emotional, sensual and instinctual — and when they are in balance, integrated, whole, under control. When I’m present I feel at once aware and relaxed. When I’m truly present, I am “just the space through which stuff passes, touching the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through”, and I approach each moment and situation using this process:

The intellectual and emotional “me”, the product of my culture, is, alas, most of the time disconnected from the instinctual and sensual “me”, the product of my biology. I suppose this is the classical mind/body disconnect. These two “selves” manifest within me and to the world differently, and drive me in different directions:

So my “Presence” challenge is to bring these two “selves” together and get the four aspects of my identity working in concert. Here are some of the practices I am thinking about trying, to do this:

1. No-language week (or two): Spending a week or two at home, without reading or writing anything, without listening to or saying any words. I can do this by stocking up on foods and using only recipes I’ve committed to heart (or eating raw); and by turning off the phone and the laptop, and turning the iPhone on only to play playlists of preselected instrumental music. I rarely get surprise visitors, and the neighbours are far enough away I can’t overhear conversations. And I can still go for runs and walks in the forest, where I rarely encounter others. It would be interesting to try doing this with someone else, but I suspect it will be a solitary adventure. I’ve read about people who have done this, outside of any religious context, and it appears to have brought them a heightened awareness of their senses, emotions and instincts. After a while, they stopped “talking to themselves” and began to think differently, more expansively, in ways not constrained or defined by language.
2. Yoga / meditation: I have tried both, but have persevered with neither. Time to give them another chance. Possibly Vinyasa yoga this time, since it might complement mindfulness meditation due to the attention of both on the breath.
3. Therapy: I took a course in co-counselling this year, and acknowledge that, like everyone else, I need to heal myself from the damage that the civilized world has inflicted on me. But as a phenomenologist philosophically I am inclined to seek more existential (and perhaps less orthodox) approaches to therapy than the currently popular ones.
4. Self-acceptance: As a complement to the above, I think it would be beneficial for me to spend time just acknowledging (and learning more about) who I am, including an awareness of what my capacities and incapacities are, my motivations, and what actions (if you can follow the chart at the top of this post) I am and am not likely to take — what is and is not in my ‘nature’. And just accepting that, without self-judgement or attempts to change it. I have learned a lot about myself in the last decade; the wisdom to realize that seeking ‘self-improvement’ is sheer folly is taking longer.

The purpose of pursuing these four practices is not to change or better myself, but to know and be myself, so that the actions that I am naturally inclined and capable of taking will be more mindful, more competent, and more effective. What those actions will be remains to be seen.

[Thanks to the many readers who have suggested some approaches to the above, and other practices. I read and appreciate all suggestions, ideas and comments, particularly when my blog posts get, as they tend to do from time to time, a bit self-preoccupied. I feel as if I am getting ready for something, some major transition, but I have no idea what it will be.]

chart showing the body’s chemical and neurological activity when it feels love (as best we know), explained in my earlier posts on the chemistry of love

I am unhappy. I feel somewhat ashamed admitting this. Most of the people in the world would give anything to have what I have — good health, physical and financial comfort and security, love, a beautiful home environment, and a stimulating intellectual life. I have always been incredibly fortunate, the world’s most blessed agnostic.

Yet I am unhappy. The times when I have been happy recently have been times when my profound pessimism about the state of the world, my chronic sense of grief and anger about what humankind has done to this planet and the resultant massive suffering of all Earth’s creatures, are overwhelmed by the chemisty of new emotional and erotic love, the rush of ocytocin and phenylethylamine and dopamine and norepinephrine and testosterone. Once that rush is over, and all that’s left is the quiet comfort of endorphins of enduring love, that apparent happiness subsides, I crave new love, and I once again become unhappy.

Except that now that I am aware of this crazy addiction to the self-produced chemicals of new love, it is losing its hold over me. I want the chemical rush without the addiction, without the madness of pursuing and involving ever-more new people in my emotional life. I want the joy of new love without the loss of self-control, without the complications and the responsibility and the demands on my time and energies that come with the attachments of love.

Yes, I do get some happiness from aesthetic and sensual and intellectual love — when I listen to good music, when I play with animals (or play, in general), when I am exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking, and when something, late at night, usually connected with water, or wind, or light, or the sounds of wild creatures, stirs my heart. But these times are hard to come by, and they are transient. I don’t know what chemical or neurological responses these experiences set off in me that fills me with aesthetic delight, sensual pleasure and intellectual appreciation, but they lack the power of the cocktail of new emotional and erotic love.

I want more fun in my life. And I want my life to be, at last, easy. I have retired from paid work and I don’t want to work hard at anything any more. After 18 months free of wage-slave work, I am still exhausted. I still prefer to do nothing. But when I do nothing I feel empty, disconnected, not alive at all.

And I am quietly consumed with fear — of loss, of extreme discomfort, of getting hurt, of getting trapped, of getting depressed, of hurting people, of letting people down, letting the world down, letting myself down.

I have undertaken and been involved with several projects over the past 18 months, but I don’t feel my involvement has produced anything of real value, and I have largely disengaged from them. I haven’t found any new projects that are sufficiently imperative to me, or sufficiently fun, or sufficiently easy, that I’m motivated to take them up. There are lots of projects that need doing that I think I could contribute to, but I have no passion for them, or else I am afraid — of failure, of arrest, of losing interest in them before I’ve done what needs to be done. And there are many things I think I would be wise to learn, and to practice, in order to be more useful, or more balanced, or more resilient, but I have no patience for studying and practicing them.

I think I know myself well, better than I ever have, yet I feel that there is something wrong and I don’t know what it is. And I don’t know what to do about it. I am such a slow learner, and so self-unaware in the moment.

My sense is that my unhappiness is rooted in the cultural indoctrination that has so profoundly clouded the way I see everything, so wrenched me out of my natural self and into this place inside my head, coloured by everybody-else’s way of thinking, that I can no longer see things as they really are (wondrous, beautiful, spontaneous, connected, ever-present, boundaryless, joyful, abundant, eternal and vibrant) and instead am burdened with perceiving everything the way the disconnected human mind and civilized human culture see things (fearsome, urgent, hostile, full of evil and unfairness and error that must be vigorously and endlessly corrected and self-corrected and improved, controllable with sufficient effort, dangerous, full of struggle and scarcity, endlessly stressful, inherently tragic, and of course anthropocentric).

My instincts tell me that to be truly and sustainably happy I will have to learn to get outside my self-polluted and culturally-polluted head and re-learn to be a natural creature, to be at once nobody-but-myself and a connected part of all-life-on-Earth.

In this, my instincts, which I trust, are at odds with my mind and body, which are tired and unwilling to keep trying to break through this cultural conditioning, to rid myself of the lifetime of gunk that other people and my own contaminated sense-making process have covered me with, the stuff that keeps me everybody-else instead of nobody-but-myself.

But I’m girding myself up to try again, to practice until I learn to slow down and silence the noise in my head and just be, present, self-aware, Earth-aware (drawing on the larger, real context for making sense of life and what happens). More comfortable in wild places. And more play-full (in forms of play that are less earnest and less escapist and less cathartic, and more joyful).

I think this will entail me becoming a bit more self-indulgent, self-centred, less self-sacrificing and less busy, not in the sense of being less generous but rather in the sense of liberating myself from the influences of our terrible culture so that I can connect more with people as they truly are. So instead of getting caught up in their anxieties and cultural indoctrination I will be able to be connect with them as fellow feral creatures, and help them in their liberation instead of with the malaises that have resulted from their captivity.

I am not sure this makes sense, and I am not sure it will make me more sustainably happy. I’m not even sure I’m ready to try it and to persevere. But it seems to offer more promise than an unhappy cycle of love addiction and love-sickness.