Rediscovering Our Natural Selves

I am coming to believe that our bodies’ organs co-evolved our minds for a purpose other than their immediate and selfish self-protection. The second purpose of our minds, I think, is self-restraint. Why? Because self-restraint of creatures with exceptional capacity to influence their ecosystem is essential to the health of that ecosystem, and hence to the health of all creatures within it. Most creatures do not need self-restraint because, at their worst, they can do little to perturb the balance of life. But larger, fiercer, smarter creatures can wreak havoc, so their minds (in the collective interest of all-life-on-Earth) should inevitably have evolved self-restraint as a critical characteristic and determinant of decision-making.

Most of who ‘we’ are continues to be the autonomous processes of our bodies’ organs, and the subconscious realizations that we call ‘instinct’. Our conscious thoughts comprise a tiny proportion of our information activities. So what happened to us that we now equate ourselves with our conscious thoughts, and even believe we have an identity, a consciousness, that transcends our body entirely, and even defines reality? Some would have us believe it is our abstract consciousness, our ability to conceive, that ‘makes’ the world — that there is no reality without consciousness. (This belief reminds me of the equally arrogant belief of religious fanatics that the world was created six thousand years ago by a superhuman. It defies all credibility. But whatever gets you through the night, I guess.)

Most creatures exercise self-restraint, a manifestation of a humility that appreciates and realizes that the delicate balance of nature that has evolved over billions of years is the best model of sustainability, the best way to live. They ‘voluntarily’ reduce their birth numbers to keep them in balance with the rest of their ecosystem. This remarkable phenomenon seems to arise as a result of hormonal changes that respond to overcrowding and other stresses, changes that indicate a collective awareness. Only if that fails do nature’s other remedies kick in — increases in other predators, disease, and, as a last resort, aggression and violence leading to rising death rates.

I believe we had this same self-restraint, until, as an unexpected consequence of our sophisticated brains, we invented civilization, and its artifacts, including the suppression of our ‘natural’ self-restraint. “To be nobody else” is indeed, as cummings said, “the hardest battle”, and it requires that we rediscover our instinctive self-restraint, become truly natural creatures again, each one of us, alone, and free ourselves from the slavery and propaganda that our society, with the best of intentions, has imposed on us. We have lost that humility, that self-restraint. We have become disconnected from all-life-on-Earth so that we no longer sense that we are devastating the planet, that our way of living is unsustainable. Why?

My theory is that it began with either the ice ages, or with the rapid extinction of large mammals that followed our invention of spears and arrowheads. Suddenly, what had been a life of astonishing and continuous abundance became a world of great scarcity. That scarcity bred fear. That fear (in an autonomous process that Hall has shown occurs precisely the same way in mice) produces murderous violence, which in turn precipitates mental illness, trauma, shutdown, suicide, and vulnerability.

At about the time of this collective mental breakdown, we also invented, perhaps as a means of trying to manage social disorder, abstract human language, a tool that enabled the invention and dissemination of propaganda: Once we learned to communicate accurately, we quickly learned the advantage of lying.

The combination of emotional illness and psychological vulnerability, and propaganda exploiting this weakness produced, I would theorize, four phenomena that exemplify our modern society: groupthink (“becoming everybody else”). frenetic behaviour (inability to pay attention), disconnection, and dependence (on others higher in a hierarchy). A very sad, unhealthy, destructive and unnatural way to live.

If this is the case, what would we need to do to become our natural selves again? To stop being “everybody else”? To regain that humility and self-restraint?

It would be difficult, even more difficult than cummings suggested. We would have to deny all the conventional wisdom that we are taught from birth. We would have to live simpler, in order to re-become self-sufficient. We’d have to shut off the noise and propaganda that bombards our every waking moment. We’d have to refocus on the simple joys of life: eating, sleeping, loving, playing, and spend less time doing things that rely on others, people we don’t know. We’d have to talk less, and talk about what’s important. In place of the inane chatter we’d spend time reconnecting with our senses, our bodies, our instincts, and the natural world. We’d have to stop living the dread-ful life inside our heads and start living as part of all-life-on-Earth, in the astonishing, joyful, real world. We’d have to stop living in clock time and start living in Now Time.

We’d have to re-become simply who we are: A collection of organs amazingly complicit in realizing their collective success and happiness, inventing and reinventing and succeeding ourselves, connecting with love and without restraint, instinctively, under the spell of the sensuous.

Could we even do this? I think it’s possible. I think artists are, by nature, closer to this simple, open, vulnerable, natural, truthful way of living. We have a billion models — the wild creatures all around us, and the children, not yet disconnected and damaged and beaten into submission. They are showing us the way.

Painting above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival.