how to save the world

photo by the author

“Everything had changed, but nothing seemed different”
— Meg Hutchinson, True North

Lately I’ve been reading back over some of the old posts in this 15+ year-old blog. Some of what I wrote still mostly makes sense, but a lot of it has my eyes rolling back in my head. How could I have been so naive, so arrogant, so blind, so caught up in what everyone else believed and said?

Yet, I am learning that what we perceive, or more accurately conceive, as time, and its passing, is just an illusion, something our brains made up as a convenient way to categorize, store and recall what we think of as memories. A figment of our imaginations, though one widely shared and (as Einstein said) “very convincing”.

If there is no time, no past or future, and most of all no “now”, there can be no change, which has to happen ‘over’ time. As John Gray has written “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.”

If this is so, what is this apparent change that ‘I’ have gone through? If there is no time and no ‘me’, how shall I account for the fact that I once apparently believed that our civilization culture could and ‘should’ be reformed? That I thought things would be better if we worked to elect different governments or “reconnect with the Earth”? That I used to blame people for what I saw as their deliberate bad behaviour and stupidity, and ridiculed the idea of us not having free will?

During ‘moments’ when my self has fallen away, and there has been a glimpse, a true perception (not a conception) of what really is, it has been apparent that this magnificent life just is, and that there is no ‘reason’ or ‘how’ or ‘why’ or purpose or meaning for any of it, including the astonishing feat of co-evolution that has seemingly brought about an incredible complexity of atoms, cells, creatures and environments into the co-choreographed dance of life on Earth that, in our quieter moments, we so appreciate that we call it, all-of-it-as-one, Gaia. When there is a glimpse, this is still appreciated, still wondrous, but seen to be just an appearance, a game that nothing plays appearing as everything, outside of time and space. Time is seen as just a way of looking at the tiny subset of the infinite, endless possibilities that our senses are able to perceive, a way of ordering them to try to make sense of them, a putting of them in a seemingly-useful sequence, like cels in a movie that can then be played backward or forward to make sense of the memories — when those cels are just appearances and have no need for order or sense-making.

This is not a psychedelic or other self-awakening or personal enlightenment, or even an ‘experience’; it is not something you finally wake up from and ask whether it was real or not. It is not a ‘knowing’ — in fact it is the realization that nothing is or can be ‘known’ since there is no reason for it, no continuity, no existence within (our conceptions of) time and space. There is no explanation for it, and it needs none — it is totally obvious. It is just seen to be true, as everything we seem to know, including the knowledge of our selves, is seen through as illusion, false patterning like the animals we read into cloud formations, and like the characters and events in our dreams we try to make meaning of.

Human nature and institutions are not immutable, unchangeable, as the expression plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose suggests. But neither are they mutable. They just are, and (infuriatingly) also are not. They are our collective agreement of what is absolutely real, because ‘we’ can’t function without belief in absolutes, and belief in change. We’ve just all agreed, through mutual conditioning, to act as if our selves, and time and space, are real and separate and even controllable, even though very young children, who don’t get the joke, are incredulous and think we’re all acting, until we force them, with every word we utter and every action we take in their presence, to admit and then fervently agree that the naked emperor is indeed finely attired. Only on this strange footing can the business of the separate self and the adventure of ‘conscious’ human beings begin, ludicrously lacing together the unconnected fragments into a sad, veiled, and finite ‘life’. Our sense of separation is a horrible, fatal and incurable affliction. ‘I’ would rather be a bird, please.

Birds, I believe, are not encumbered with a sense of separateness, finiteness, mortality and self. That doesn’t mean there is no pain, no sadness, no fear; in fact I think these are felt much more by creatures without the veil of self, without the illusion that these are things to be suffered and (oh, progress!) overcome. And likewise, I believe, they feel more joy than our miserable selves are capable of. But for the birds these are not personal feelings; they are feelings that arise in what I can only, annoyingly, call ‘oneness’. These feelings do not belong to ‘them’ because there is no separate ‘them’. So there is no identification with these feelings, and the related thoughts, and hence they quickly dissipate, with no ‘one’ to attach them to.

I have thought a lot about what seems to be, in times of great stress, a sense of separateness, self-awareness and responsibility within wild creatures. How can there be what seems obviously ‘separation anxiety’ if there is no separateness? While the emotion is obviously real, that does not preclude it being instinctual — not automatic, but conditioned by the creature’s DNA and socialization. Wild animals show much more emotion when trapped than they do when they’re in (even acute) pain. Is that because entrapment is much more likely to be a death sentence in wild spaces than pain is, and the more virulent reaction is therefore evolutionarily selected for? Again, I am not saying they’re senseless — they likely feel much more fully and deeply than we can, living in our uncomfortable, artificial construct of reality instead of the ‘real’ world. I’m just suggesting that they are sensate creatures (alive and seeing and feeling the world principally through their senses and intuitions, seeing and feeling it as oneness, timeless, and endlessly wondrous) rather than ‘self-conscious’ creatures like our afflicted species (alive, and made endlessly anxious, only through the shallow representation of the separated world we conceive of and then attach our selves to).

‘I’ would rather be a bird, please.

The birds ‘know’, I think, that rien ne change, et rien ne reste immuable — that nothing changes, and nothing ever remains the same. We humans, sadly, will never understand.

I am watching a pair of violet-green swallows trying to get to their nest, which happens to be in the powder room vent of my house. Swallows have nested there every summer I’ve been here, though it means a sudden sharp flying turn up into the narrow vent in the deck ceiling. But they manage it with aplomb. It must be a new pair this summer, because they’re worried about me, sitting on the deck in the sun about 10m away; the past occupants learned I was safe and came to ignore me. So they take turns diving at me, squawking away in their tiny raspy voices. But when I just chirp back to them, they try a different tack: one dives at me to distract me while the other hurries, flying even faster to the opening to the nest. The distractor’s agility is amazing — s/he whirrs in front of me almost like a hummingbird, alternately almost coming to a stop and then whizzing off again. It’s a pleasant distraction. After a few trips, the swallow diving at me perches on the deck roof above me and squawks down. I natter back. After half an hour I’m deemed safe: both birds now race warily back and forth to the nest.

We can’t change who we are, and we have no free will or choice over what we do each moment, or what we believe. So this advice serves no purpose except, perhaps, to reassure those who already have a propensity for it. Mostly, this is just a reminder list for my poor, long- and needlessly-suffering self:

1. Trust your instincts. They are wiser, more ancient and less susceptible to manipulation than anything you think you know.
2. Eat well. Gradually move towards the diet our claw-less, fang-less bodies evolved to consume: a variety of whole, unprocessed, unadulterated plant-based foods.
3. Avoid vexatious distractions. To heal from the damage this terrible industrial world has inflicted on us, we need respite and escape from the upsets of the moment, but the healthiest distractions calm us rather than ‘righteously’ stirring us up. They let love, not anger or fear, incite us to action. For this, swallows are better than screens.
4. Move. Work up to 40 minutes of strenuous or 90 minutes of moderate exercise a day. If you can, work standing up. And get up, stretch and flex often.
5. Be with nurturers not narcissists. Don’t hide away, but spend your social time with people who can help you, mutually, joyously, discover and be who you are.
6. Learn something new every day. Something useful, that helps you be more independent, braver and more helpful to others. Not newspaper or social media crap.
7. Catch yourself, but don’t self-censor. Self-awareness is something of an oxymoron, since your ‘self’ isn’t real. What is possible is to notice and consider what’s going on in your head and heart, rather than just automatically following their dictates.
8. Challenge everything. Everything that you’re told, and everything you believe. Especially if there’s a “should” in it — all “shoulds” are lies.
9. Pay attention. Inwards, but mostly outwards. Don’t make meaning — just observe, listen, sense with your whole body — to the light, shade, softness, scent, tang, colour, tone, harmony. The stuff beneath meaning.
10. Be kind. To others, but to yourself first. We’re all doing our best, however incompetently, and blame is corrosive.

What we think of as our ‘life’ is actually just an infinite series of fragments. Each day when ‘we’ awaken, a useless bit of software that has evolved in our brains starts up and stitches together from ‘memory’ what it believes to be the record of a continuous ‘self’ — events, beliefs, and what it perceives to be its (that is, your) history, thoughts, feelings, attributes, skills, passions, preferences, and apparent purpose, drawing on its ‘knowledge’ as far back as ‘it’ can ‘remember’.

It’s a brilliant trick, the brain’s way of trying to make sense (using its largely unused capacity) of the firehose of data coming at it from all its senses, from the body of genes and organs it seemingly evolved to serve, and from ‘intuition’ — that ‘teller of truths’ (if you listen carefully enough) beyond knowing. The extraordinarily complex human brain no longer uses its mental cycles to appreciate (in the true sense of that word) and co-evolve with everything around it, everything it is a part of, what is. Instead, it amuses itself looking for patterns and ‘meaning’ outside itself.  It believes that such a process can help it cope, and thrive, and it believes that it has the free will and control to make use of the sense and meaning it conjures up.

So it would have ‘me’ believe that the little 6-year-old boy pictured above left is the same ‘person’ as the 66-year-old man, looking equally mystified, pictured above right. And it would have ‘me’ believe that, between the times the two photos were taken, some tiny homunculus residing invisibly in the apparent body of the little boy has steadfastly and continuously steered and directed this inhabited creature to strive, grow, mature, progress and finally ‘become’ the old man.

But there is no homunculus, no ‘thing there’. That little boy is not, and never was, ‘me’. Neither is the old man. There is no me, beyond the fantasies of the brain trying desperately to draw equivalence and connection between things that are just, apparently, happening. There is a body, an apparent ‘creature’, an apparatus of skin, water, bones and organs, or of cells, or of molecules, or of atoms, or, drilling down, of an infinite number of increasingly-tiny apparent constituents, all in continuous flux, that, the closer you look, don’t really have any cohesion at all, no boundaries, no substance, and most of all, no continuity. Everything is just another way of looking at nothing. And yes, I know that unintelligible statement is annoying. I wish there were a more coherent way of saying it, but I’m quite sure there is not.

That little boy, when the photo was taken, was just beginning to get snared in the mass deception of separateness. He was meandering in and out of it, finding the rigidity and desperateness-to-know of being a separate ‘person’ exhausting and terrifying, yet witnessing others, more ‘popular’ than he, embracing it. He was happiest when he was just part of everything, unconscious of and oblivious to ‘his’ existence apart. He was happy when it was his senses and instincts, the connected-with-everything parts of ‘him’ that seemingly preoccupied and motivated him, and unhappy when it was his thoughts and ideas and conceptions and beliefs and feelings, the ‘self-conscious’ parts of ‘him’, that preoccupied and motivated him. Yet strangely everyone encouraged him towards this latter, unhappy existence.

So, unhappily burdened with this fearful, ridiculous ‘self’, he grew up socially awkward, and mystified by lies, deceptions, fierce emotional reactions, and acts of selfishness and cruelty. Such behaviour seemed completely deranged. So he hid from it. Perhaps it was just a nightmare, this mad, awful behaviour, and he would one day awaken from it and everything would be perfect and eternal and connected, as it was, before.

But one’s embodied nature can only withstand the relentless barrage of enculturation by others, so sure of their separateness and its wisdom, for so long before one leaves behind one’s perceptions of the connection and perfection of everything, and adopts the ubiquitous mask of individuality, with its language, beliefs, ideas and emotions borne of assurance of the separateness of everyone and everything.

For 60 (apparent) years ‘I’ have played this game, pretended to be what I ‘know’ I am not. Sixty years ago I somehow knew there was something terribly wrong, sad and sick with everything I was told was true. But as politicians and despots and other professional liars keep showing, if you’re told something, no matter how ludicrous, again and again for decades by everyone you know, with everyone telling you it’s true with absolute certainty, you start to believe it. You begin to act as if you believe it. This is the nature of enculturation. You come to believe that humans are individuals with free will and choice and self-control, and that humans are the crown of creation, endowed with the wise and magical ‘consciousness’ of their separateness and ‘intelligence’ unique on the planet and possibly in the universe.

You come to believe in your capacity to shape your life, and that it has a trajectory and a purpose and a meaning, that it and everything has a beginning and end, a ‘progressing’ ever forward in time, only to smash into the bitter rocks of death just as wisdom is dawning.

You come to believe there is a you, that there was a 6-year-old you that was and is the same person as the you that exists, separate from everything and everyone else, today, and will exist until… well, there the agreement ends and the truly magical thinking, constrained by the horrific prison of the self, begins.

How did we humans get to this insane place?

For millennia, since the emergence of the self, we have come to believe some truly preposterous things: That the earth was created in 6 days by a humanoid deity. That human health can be “improved” by lobotomies, bloodletting, phrenology, “hysteria” treatments for women, faith healing, burning at the stake, shock treatments, etc. That some humans (by race, gender or other distinction) are naturally, or scientifically, or by the grace of some god, superior to others, and entitled to abuse and even “own” their inferiors. That the sun and everything else revolves around the little blue planet we creatures seemingly happen to live on.

Few people still share the beliefs above, but there are many others, just as absurd, that most people continue to believe fervently: That the planet and universe somehow ‘began’ with a big bang, ‘before’ which there was nothing and no time and will perhaps end with a singularity (our newest creation myth). That there is some outer limit to what is, and some fundamental essence of which all-that-is, is composed. That we can and do (or soon will) ‘know’ absolutely what is real, what is right, and what is true. That our species can and will overcome every challenge it faces, and is destined for immortality and to reach out and fill the empty, ‘undeveloped’ universe. That we can grow and steward our population and our use of resources and our creation of wastes, forever, simply by being ever-smarter and/or ever-more-cooperative about how we do it. That the way we live (in our now-global culture, and in our various local micro-cultures) is, though it may need a bit or a lot of tweaking, the only possible sane way to live. That soaring rates of illness in industrialized nations are despite human progress and the modern diet, rather than because of them. That there is such a thing as progress. That ‘prehistoric’ humans lived short, brutal lives of immense struggle and suffering, and that life for our species has never been better.

At an ever-accelerating rate, we are starting to appreciate that none of these beliefs is true — that we have been lying to ourselves and to each other since our species first developed the capacity to lie and the language and other tools to do it convincingly. There is nothing malicious in any of this. Just like our geocentric, anthropocentric, overtly misogynist, blood-letting forebears, we lie because we don’t want to know the truth, or because we don’t want our loved ones to be hurt by the truth, or because we cannot bear the truth, or because the truth is just too complex to understand and we cannot bear not knowing. We can’t help ourselves. We have to believe we know, and that we will soon know better.

Cast aside all the beliefs above and it is easy to despair. When we realize that essentially everything we have believed all our lives was true is a lie, our immediate reaction is to find “some other story, a new story” that we can believe in instead. But that merely takes us further down the rabbit hole, into wacky unprovable “string” theories, faith in magical thinking, scientism, creeping nihilism (“nope, that isn’t going to work either”), pursuit of charismatic ‘leaders’ with easy answers, or mind-shattering cognitive dissonance.

And that’s where we are, in this modern world, desperately casting about for a new story and clinging fiercely but ambivalently to the discredited ones that underlie our entire civilization. We are caught in an existential limbo that is spreading throughout that entire civilization, and setting it aflame, as one seeming truth after another is pulled from under us. This has been going on for ten thousand years, though that’s just an instant in the evolution of our planet. It is now happening at a furious pace.

That’s where the six-year-old boy and the 66-year-old man came into the picture. The six-year-old boy ‘knew’ this was all madness, a made-up game in an anguished, dreadful rush to make sense of what ultimately made no sense at all. He ‘knew’ that the answer didn’t lie in the old stories or in a new story, in the discredited, preposterous beliefs or in a new set of precariously cobbled-together replacements. He could still ‘remember’ that place outside of space and time, that place that is without separation, without struggle, without suffering. That place that has no need for action, for beliefs, for knowing, for planning, for striving, for theories, for ideas, for progress, for meaning or purpose, for despair, or any emotion other than simple wonder.

Somehow, the 66-year-old man who does not exist and is not the same as the six-year-old boy, ‘knows’ this too. It had been forgotten, but recently, thanks to the blessing of time and resources and some little-exercised capacities, that place without separation is remembered.

This is not a matter of faith. It is not something ‘I’ believe, or that I just want to believe. It is not a ‘state’ and there is no ‘path’ to it. It is not ‘enlightenment’ or ‘awakening’ or ‘awareness’ or (thank heavens) a ‘higher consciousness’. It is not a ‘process’ of ‘letting go’.

It is the realization that there is nothing to let go of. But it is not ‘my’ realization.

I am not a believer that there will be, soon, the humanists’ dream — a sudden global raising of ‘consciousness’ just in time for us to work, furiously and together, to reform and save our staggering civilization just before it shatters. You know — the Hollywood ending. Isn’t going to happen.

But it is not impossible that, sooner or later, the self that afflicts us all will become untenable. That ‘it’ — the illusory separate self — will ‘realize’ it serves no useful function and will just fall away. It will not go easily. ‘We’ will not go easily. ‘We’ cannot believe that the world would be possible, better, perfect, without ‘us’. It will happen when the bodies we presume to inhabit die, in any case. But it might happen ‘before’. My guess is that it won’t happen, on any scale, before the end of the gradual, rolling but ultimately total collapse of our global industrial civilization by the end of this century. The self digs in harder when it feels threatened.

But I think it will happen as new human societies dawn in the millennia after civilization’s fall. It will happen at first because there will be no need for the self to emerge in the first place, in a peaceful future world of abundance and relatively free of stress. And then, victim of the virus of reconnection to everything-else, selves will fall away, unneeded and ignored — the useless bit of software will be mothballed in the brain, and the liberated human creatures will not encourage its re-emergence in their children and communities.

It will be realized that everything ‘we’ in our civilization culture believed so fervently was as ridiculous as our earlier belief in “the vapours” and the rewards of animal sacrifice.

All that will be left is fragments, pieces of everything appearing, wondrously, to no one, yet appreciated, awe-inspiring, beyond anything that ‘we’ could ever have imagined.

‘We’ won’t be missed.

image: from Martijn Meijerink on skitterphoto.com, cc0
A growing number of researchers and theorists studying human nature, and the nature of the universe, from a wide range of disciplines, now seem to agree that most non-human creatures do not have, and have no need for, a sense of being separate ‘selves’ in control of and responsible for the bodies they seemingly inhabit.

Their argument is that, other than in moments of extreme stress, most creatures don’t see themselves, or anything else, as separate from the whole — they just are everything, and exist with no sense of time. That doesn’t mean they are in any way insensate — they live life full on and feel wonder and pain probably more than we do (with our tricks for buffering ourselves from reality). Their behaviour is the result of their embodied and enculturated ‘knowledge’, and requires no separate decision-making ‘self’.

In moments of extreme stress, the argument goes, these creatures’ evolved fight/flight/freeze instincts kick in, and briefly they act as if they were separate, until the danger has passed and they furiously ‘shake off’ the nightmare of the experience and return to just being everything. In this natural reality, they have no sense of time, no fears about the future, no fear of death, no anxieties. They don’t need them. Their bodies take care of themselves, so what possible use is there for the sense of a separate self?

Human babies apparently are born this way. Their sense of separateness emerges after birth (and is of course thereafter reinforced by every encounter with other humans who conceive of themselves as separate). So if it’s possible for us adults to access at all what it’s like to just be everything, it may be through a kind of intuitive remembering, or a glimpse in those rare moments when for a variety of reasons our separate self suddenly falls away, rather than through any spiritual journey or path.

Scientists are now discovering that human actions actually precede our brains’ ‘conscious decisions’ to perform that action — the separate self only rationalizes after the fact, and takes responsibility for having decided, what our evolved-to-thrive bodies have already started to do. Our human brains’ sophisticated models of reality, which allow us to think about the (actually non-existent) past and future, and to anticipate dangers to our (non-existent) separate selves and ‘learn’ from ‘their’ experiences as separate selves, were a logical evolutionary development, an extension of our instincts. But if so they are so slow and so utterly imprecise and simplistic that they are actually useless to us, and our listening to and believing their version of reality is likely at the root of much human mental and physical illness and suffering. We’d be better off without them.

Biologists and physicists, in addition to questioning the existence of time as other than a construct of the human mind, are starting to question the mind’s propensity for ‘knowing’-through-analyzing — breaking everything down into separate, discrete ‘parts’ as a means and precondition for making sense of it. Richard Lewontin for example argues in The Triple Helix that genes, organs, and environments are not separate from each other — there are no scientifically sensible ‘borders’ where one ends and the next begins. Everything makes more sense when seen holistically. Carry that to its natural conclusion, and what would make most sense is to accept that everything is one — particles and waves whose ‘separateness’ from everything else is just an invention of the mind.

To carry that argument further, it’s now accepted by many physicists that almost all of even the smallest-known element of ‘matter’ is — nothingness. Everything is mostly nothing. If so, and if as some scientific theorists now say there is no fundamental particle of matter or energy — ie it’s ‘turtles all the way down’ — then logically (1/∞) there is nothing. Everything is just an appearance. That is precisely what radical nonduality posits.

It could of course be argued that even if that is correct, it’s useless knowledge, a model without value — science as currently constituted can’t do anything with the realization that there is no time, no space, and no one. It’s equally useless as the foundation of a philosophy or religion. But if our bodies (absent the affliction of ‘selves’) know what to do, how to live, better than any empirical or scientific or philosophical or religious theory or model can improve upon, there is (again, absent selves) no need for anything to be useful.

Consider how we behave when emergencies arise — in an accident scene, or being on the verge of losing our grip at the top of a mountain. Those who have had those experiences say that while their thinking brains basically give up functioning in these situations, they are somehow able to achieve miraculous, “super-human” feats — when their selves are out of the way.

Of course, this is just a theory. It is hard to imagine that, if we could retain our sense of child-like (wild-like) wonder for our whole lives, we would thrive much better than we do with our calculating, imagining, patterning, probability-computing minds telling us what our separate selves ‘should’ do (or should have done) in any particular situation.

But let’s imagine for a moment this theory is true. How would ‘we’ behave if ‘we’ just lived our lives in wonder, free of the constraints and anxieties of separate selves? This is almost impossible to imagine (“this is what ‘we’ would be like if there was no ‘us’”), but here’s my guess:

We’re flying down to earth some millennia in the future. For a while we wonder whether there are any humans at all, since there are no cities, no monuments, no visible evidence of human presence of any kind. Until we notice, in some of the tropical rainforests (which due to climate change are not in the same places they are today), and along some of the warmer coasts, some rustling in the trees and darting movements along the forest floor.

There we see them, small tribes of naked apes — tall, strong, healthy-looking creatures. So we activate our cloaking devices and move in for a closer look.

To our surprise, they don’t look or act at all like the vestigial 20th century indigenous communities untouched by civilization culture that we have studied. True, they do have extensive ornamentation over their bodies and in their hair, which is likely a way of expressing their culture. But there is neither a tribal commonality to the designs on their bodies, nor a cohesion of style that would suggest the body canvas is a medium of self-expression. The art is more diverse and apparently improvisational, seemingly more about having fun and being creative than meaning something.

We’re listening for language, but all we’re hearing is a lot of birdsong, plus the calls of creatures we don’t recognize at all — newly evolved species perhaps? And then we realize that some of these sounds are coming from the humans — very complex but surprisingly short “check-ins” with tribe mates, we are guessing. We wonder if these post-civ humans are like birds in each having two distinct types of “voices” — ‘calls’ of warning and notification, and ‘songs’ of joy. Suddenly, that thesis gets some confirmation, as one human female sends out a long, rich line of song in some unknown language, and immediately others in the tribe join in in response, in a complex and improvisational harmony.

Soon, we realize that only a small part of these humans’ conversations are verbal — head movements, hand and arm and whole-body gestures, even subtle eye-movements are clearly conveying most of what these humans are ‘saying’ to each other. Their bird-like ‘calls’ seem to be used only when they are out of sight range of each other.

We had expected these post-civ cultures to be scavengers, using the surfeit of production of everything during civilization times as a means of continuing to use these useful and sometimes life-saving tools. But there is no evidence of anything that could really be called “technology” in this tribe.

So now we’re watching the faces of these humans, trying to decipher what they’re thinking and feeling. And the sense we get, the more we study them, is that while thoughts and feelings are arising in them, they are not much preoccupied with them; they flit across their faces but then are let go. What they perceive directly however — sights and sounds and other sensuous experiences — seems to impress them more deeply, and for much longer. Their faces easily and often take on expressions of wonder, almost child-like delight in the simplest noticing.

As we watch them, we realize that they have a powerful intuitive sense — they react instinctively and effectively faster than intellectual processing would allow. The look on their faces is attentive and peaceful, free from signs of stress and anxiety, but not what might be called ‘blissful’. Much of the time they are quite animated, strolling, dancing, doing flips and gymnastic or martial-art-like movements, exploring the areas around them, constantly in motion. But even then they are carefully sensing what is happening around them, and seem to sense things before they become immediately apparent.

We see them harvest foods — though browsing might be a better term, as if there are ‘gardens’ here we cannot discern them. The tribe members seem to know exactly what to eat and what not to eat, even the small children. Finding food seems to be no problem in the abundant forests where they live, so we try to figure out what they do with the rest of their time, aside from singing and body art. They seem exceptionally social and generous, touching and patting each other frequently, but to our surprise sex seems to be, while readily available, not especially frequent.

They spend a lot of time apparently doing what we would call ‘nothing’ — just sitting and watching and listening and sensing the world around them. This often leads to singing, solo or joined by others, but this singing is so gentle and quiet it seems more like purring than song. They sing often, it seems, but ‘talk’ only as much as they must. Their language, if it can even be called that, seems to be totally reactive to the immediate situation, and perceptual, not conceptual.

There seems to be no hierarchy among the tribe-members, perhaps because their lives are so easy and stress-free that they have no need for specialization or organization of activities. They seem highly spontaneous — they break into song or dance, and others join them, or don’t, with no perceivable pattern. If there is ritual here, we can’t see it. Their anarchism seems almost un-human, un-mammal-like, even — almost all indigenous human, primate and cetacean cultures we’ve studied seem more organized than this one.

This tribe seems to have no property, no possessions, personal or collective, not even shelters. This may be because they have no need of them, but it seems more consistent with their behaviour that they don’t even conceive of the idea of owning or possessing anything. It’s as if anything that happens is of no consequence to them — it is just what happens, the only thing that could happen.

More interesting still is that they don’t seem to have identities. Their members have different voice qualities, clearly enough that they could identify other individuals by these qualities, but they don’t seem inclined to do so. In fact their vocalizations seem more often directed to creatures of other species, and even to inanimate objects, than they are to other tribe-members. And one of their strangest behaviours is vocalization that is apparently directed to their bodies, or something within their bodies — using tones that seem instructional or reassuring or even self-hypnotic rather than self-reflective.

They seem astonishingly connected with the (other) wild species in their forest and coastlands, as if they could understand their ‘languages’ and ‘read’ their bodies and hence, their very way of being.

Many of the brainier 20th century mammal and bird species have been found to have what is called “theory of mind” — they are capable of seeing themselves and other creatures as separate entities and attributing characteristics to these creatures, and behaving accordingly. Strangely, this thriving, seemingly intelligent and healthy human tribe doesn’t show evidence of this capacity to differentiate at all. They just don’t seem to perceive of others as separate from themselves, and hence seem incapable of conflict with or deception of their tribe-mates, or other animals.

We also witnessed one wandering tribe member who was suddenly confronted by a jaguar. There was seemingly no thought of running or fighting, though from our perspective in the circumstances both actions would have been futile. Instead, the human seemingly just sat quietly and then fainted, and was quickly and peacefully devoured.

To avoid jarring the tribe-members too much by suddenly appearing to them, we instead transported and de-cloaked one couple from our group. But as we watch, we see that the tribe-members treat our people as if they were lost children — after showing us how to find food, and seeing that we were unwilling or unable to learn the lesson, they ignore us, as if we aren’t even there.

They seemingly have nothing to learn from us, nor us from them — we apparently live in utterly different, ‘unrealizable’ and unreconcilable realities. So we depart.

We cannot, of course, know whether this is how a tribe of people without the sense of being separate selves would behave, or whether they would thrive, or what it would be like to be them.

And I want to be clear that I don’t think the way of being I’m describing is anything like the way in which any known modern indigenous peoples live — I think we have much to learn from indigenous cultures but I don’t think they are any closer to a collective nonduality than we are. Nor do I think they are free from what I have called the ‘affliction’ of separate selves.

Would the planet be better off if humans were more like this imaginary future ‘self-less’ tribe, instead of like us? Would ‘we’ be happier, or rather, would we be at peace without always striving to be happier and being disappointed and anxious about everything that was not as our separate selves, and those we strive to please, hoped or expected?

And if we had a chance to give up our lives and live as they do, would we take the chance?

(PS: I’m thinking of writing a sci-fi/cli-fi novel about such a tribe of people. Thoughts on how to do this are welcome — I suspect it could be as hard to write as Riddley Walker.)

Painting by Cristobal Ortega Maila CC0 from pxhere.com

Michael Pollan, famous for his books on cooking, food and nutrition (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”), is about (May 15th) to release his latest book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us. Michael gave a long and wide-ranging interview about the book to the less-annoying-than-usual Tim Ferriss, and Tim’s podcast and interview notes are the basis for this article.

The book describes the parallel changes in both the medical and social communities in attitudes toward psychedelics, a word that literally means “mind-loosening”. He urges the medical and regulatory community to be open-minded and humane in allowing research on and subsequent use of psychedelics as a managed therapy for a host of mental illnesses (including depression, anxiety, phobias, obsessions, addictions and PTSD). These diseases, he says, have in common that they occur when “the default mode network” (a series of connections in various parts of the brain that usually launch our thinking and reacting processes) becomes overly rigid, and caught in repetitive loops. Drugs found in plants such as psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, and synthetics such as LSD have been shown to quieten this network and its pathways and lead to powerful, long-term healing of these diseases, even with only a few doses.

There are of course dangers: people with already-disrupted default mode networks (those with psychoses, schizophrenia etc) can react badly to these drugs, and bad trips for anyone can be very unpleasant and have serious consequences. For this reason, Michael advocates avoiding the carelessness with which these drugs were used in the 60s, and wants us to develop secular community-based support groups with people experienced at guiding people safely through trips (“flight instructions”) and helping people to integrate and interpret them afterwards, before rushing into full legalization.

Michael describes his own personal trips as well as findings from many others he spoke with, as leading to the dissolution of the ego, ie “non-dual” realization and the “merging with something larger than you”.

When asked about Michael Pollan’s earlier description of this dissolution, Tony Parsons (at a meeting of his I attended last year in Wales) seemed to dismiss it as “probably just another experience”. Tony asserts that any “experiences” are experiences of an individual (self/ego) and hence nothing like the true falling away of the self and the seeing of natural reality. I’m inclined to believe him, though Michael’s description certainly matches at least the “glimpses” that have led many (including me) to believe that the self is an illusion (and “a useless bit of software” that arose as a consequences of the emergence of large brains).

What is remarkable to me is the degree to which Michael’s description of the discoveries and ideas that came from these experiences or events parallel the messages and insights into the nature of reality of many people in a wide array of disciplines — so-called “spiritual teachers” (Eckhart Tolle, Adyashanti, Rupert Spira etc), philosophers (John Gray in Straw Dogs: “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.”), scientists (Stewart & Cohen, Richard Lewontin), and artists (Jim Carrey, Terence Stamp, etc).

Tony has commented that the likely reason there are so few articulating this message is that (a) the loss of the self is not really an experience or event (it’s a realization that the self never existed), (b) it just isn’t in most people’s nature to question or to speak publicly about inexplicable “life-changing” events that leave no trace, and (c) it’s really impossible to put into words, since language is an invention specifically to facilitate communication between acknowledged separate “selves”.

Michael says this is reflected in the gushy, inane, often incoherent descriptions of many people who have “experienced” this (though it isn’t an experience). It’s impossible to describe. It’s not “higher consciousness” (in fact there is generally a quieting rather than a focusing or concentration of the mind). It’s not “consciousness” or “awareness” or “presence” at all — it’s absence, loss. Liberation, from the affliction of the self.

If Michael is right, and presuming we don’t extinguish human life on this planet before it happens, it might theoretically be possible to treat and even cure what I have called Civilization Disease” (including all of the aforementioned mental illnesses, and likely many related chronic physical illnesses and the general anxiety most of us have come to accept as “life”). If that were to happen, we might see a sudden large-scale walking away from our ruinous global industrial civilization, which depends utterly on our culture’s stranglehold over our “separate selves”. If enough of us “lost our selves”, how might the trajectory of the human species then shift? Would we learn, once again, how to live in community as one with everything around us?

If Tony is right, this won’t be possible; psychedelic drugs might enable us to glimpse, and to long for, oneness, but they won’t enable us, in any functional or enduring way, to “lose our selves” and just be, as we were before our selves arose in early childhood.

My guess is that Tony is probably right — the self has too strong and too established a grip on the creatures it inhabits to be shaken by medicines that briefly short-circuit the brain that gave rise to it. Sometimes I even question whether post-civilization societies, living without the stresses and barrage of information and distraction and propaganda that characterize the era of human civilizations, will escape the affliction of separateness and self-hood. We might be just inherently, as a species, too smart for our own good.

Still, the idea of separation and self-hood as a mental illness that might be treated by medicines that “loosen the mind” — liberating us from most mental and chronic physical illnesses in the process — is intriguing.

But I’m deeply skeptical. We are complex creatures, we humans, and every body is different. We may have a deeply transformative experience under the influence of these medicines, and some may find they heal some of the ailments that have defied all other attempts at treatment, at least for a while, maybe longer, and that’s wonderful. But what then? Things are the way they are for a reason, and I wonder if we are already too damaged, and if our propensity to do things that don’t seem healthy for us can ever be “cured”. We may briefly escape the damage that the self inflicts on us. But that will not destroy the self.

There is nothing to destroy, after all.