how to save the world

There are two large cutouts, facing each other, each bearing the identical likeness of a person known as Dave.

One is labelled “Dave the Creature”. In Natural Reality there are no creatures, just oneness, no thing separate at all, just what is apparently happening, living “full on” — “creaturing”. In this Natural Reality everything just is. There is no control, no god, no purpose or meaning or morality. There is no one to be terrified about this reality.

The second cutout is labelled “Dave the Self”. In Natural Reality there are no selves, either, nothing separate at all, just what is apparently happening. One of the things that is apparently happening is “selving” — in which illusory selves imagine themselves to be real and in control of the creatures they believe they reside ‘in’. These illusory selves are an unfortunate side-effect of the apparent emergence in some creatures of large brains capable of imagining separation. Although separation isn’t real, evolution often apparently favours illusions and simplifications that improve creatures’ fitness and survival, over perceiving what is actually true.

There is apparent conversing happening between these two cutouts, these two inventions, neither of which is real. But one of these cutouts, Dave the Self, believes it is real, and separate, and in control of Dave the Creature. The apparent cutouts, and the apparent conversing, are happening in the imagination of Dave the Self — ie in the imagination of something that isn’t real. But it thinks it is, so it is having this apparent conversation. Because it feels sad, and confused.

We can listen in, if you like:

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Dave the Creature: This is completely futile, you know. Neither of us is real. You are just a dream, or more accurately a horrible nightmare you can’t wake up from, a disease, an affliction. But it’s your dream, and you’ve invented me, given me this creature identity, so apparently you intend that I offer you some wisdom, or at least some solace. Should I put fingers on your forehead and ask “What can I do for you, my child?”

Dave the Self: I am tired. Tired of not feeling safe. Tired of suffering, and of causing suffering. I want to be dead, so you can truly be alive.

Dave the Creature: Hmmm. Such an apparently generous and un-self-ish desire! You know that in Natural Reality all that is is truly alive, and always has been truly alive. There is no ‘me’ to be truly alive, but there is aliveness, wholeness, beingness, all-there-is, unconditional love. There have been glimpses of it at various times during your selfing, and that’s why you’re now hoping you can die. So what is it that you don’t feel safe about? What are you so afraid of?

Dave the Self: Being trapped — blocked in or injured in this house, trapped in relationships, trapped in intolerable situations of endless and inescapable hardship, pain, dread, loss, anxiety, hopelessness. Suffering, and causing suffering to others. Being unable to control a threatening or unhappy situation. Failing. Social incompetence with strangers. Wasting time. Not knowing.

Dave the Creature: That’s a big list! Let’s take a look at it more closely. All of these fears, all these things you don’t feel safe about, right about — all these anxieties triggered by the power going off, or by seeing black ice, or when you feel a sudden sharp wrench in your back, or a hundred other things — these fears and anxieties are just imaginings. They aren’t real. The darkness and the black ice and the back spasms are real, of course, but they’re just happening, or aren’t. You want to be able to control what is happening, but since you aren’t real, you can’t control anything. You know that intellectually, of course, but that’s not helping, is it?

Not only is what is happening the only thing that can be happening, it’s happening outside of what you perceive as time. What you see as consequence is just the brain’s attempt to make sense of what is happening. But it doesn’t make sense. There is no consequence, no plan, no progress, no right or wrong, no meaning, no purpose, no ‘sense’ to anything that happens. There is pain happening, but there is only suffering when a self judges the pain, identifies with it. You can’t prevent pain from happening, and when there is medicating-of-pain happening, that’s simply what’s happening. You, Mr Self-Important, have nothing to do with it. You think if there was no you there would be no medicating-of-pain by Dave the Creature? There would be, or their wouldn’t, depending on the circumstances. No self is needed for it to happen. No self has any control over whether it happens or not.

You think that knowing will help you prevent or mitigate the things you fear. You can avoid travel, or driving, to try to avoid a black ice accident. You can study all the preventatives and treatments for acute pain and suffering, both physical and emotional, from drugs and practices and therapies to suicide. But knowing that will change nothing, beyond adding a bit of neurosis and a lot of unnecessary and futile dread. What is happening is what is happening. You have nothing to do with it. There is no time, no sequence, no consequence. Here’s how Mark Helprin put it in his novel:

Time was invented
because we cannot comprehend in one glance
the enormous and detailed canvas
that we have been given –
so we track it, in linear fashion,
piece by piece.

Time is a construct of the brain to make meaning of discontinuity, much as colour is a construct of the brain to make sense of electromagnetic radiation. It’s just patterning. It isn’t real. None of it makes sense because there’s no one to make sense of it and no thing to make sense of. There’s just what is happening — not now or yesterday or tomorrow — just what is happening.

I know that’s impossible for you to understand. It can’t be understood. But intuitively, you know it’s true, don’t you? When those out-of-time self-less glimpses have happened, you knew it then, and you know it now. You always have.

Of course, you cannot help yourself. Just because you know something intellectually or intuitively doesn’t mean you can change anything, including how you think and feel and behave. So all these fears, these things that make you feel unsafe, they’re not real, and they don’t serve any useful purpose. I know that’s not helpful, but you said you might want some solace, and that’s the best I can offer.

Dave the Self: That’s why I want to die. I know I’m useless, and the source of suffering. I just don’t want to take you with me.

Dave the Creature: No chance of that. Neither of us is real. You just imagine us both to be real. Your apparent death changes nothing. There won’t even be less suffering in Natural Reality if and when you did, because you don’t exist in Natural Reality. You’re just an abstraction with a lot of immiserating habits.

Dave the Self: But your body would die, if I killed it to end myself.

Dave the Creature: There is no body. There is no separate anything. There is only what is apparently happening.

Dave the Self: That makes no sense. Others would see a body dying, and those with selves, at least, would be upset about that.

Dave the Creature: There are no ‘others’.

Dave the Self: Perhaps, but they think they are. I’ve seen how they react to a body’s death. This would just cause more suffering.

Dave the Creature: So you’re going to go on suffering needlessly to supposedly reduce other selves’ suffering over your body’s apparent death.

Dave the Self: I guess so.

Dave the Creature: Well, that makes sense. At least to a self… I want to read something you wrote a while back, to see if that provides any perspective to what you’re struggling with. You wrote:

My whole life I have been bewildered, unable to really make sense of anything, just muddling my way through, and I have often  been quite fearful and socially anxious as a result. I have put great effort into many things but have nothing much to show for it. I’ve had some interesting insights, but nothing that’s of much practical use to anyone. I have been generous, but only when I could easily afford to be. I’ve been very lucky, “the world’s most blessed agnostic”. I have become more joyful and fun-loving, but more pessimistic, more curious, and more skeptical about everything, even whether we as separate ‘selves’ actually exist.

That’s quite remarkable! A self that’s come apart from its ego. Imagine what this world might be like if every self was able to recognize itself so clearly, and its life so humbly. It’s good that you doubt the existence of your self; if only you could also doubt the existence of this creature you cling to so desperately.

Dave the Self: It’s like I’m living in limbo, ‘knowing’ somehow what I cannot ‘realize’, and ‘realizing’ — making real — what I know is not real. How can anyone live like this?

Dave the Creature: No one can live like that. There is no one. If you don’t like the ‘dream’ metaphor, here’s another one to try, though metaphors are tricky because they are based on, and obliquely recapitulate, what is known, and this truth that you seek with such desperate futility cannot be known, cannot be expressed in language or story or any other medium that the self can understand.

Think about a time when your intuition, your instincts, told you something that your brain could not get its head around. Since I’m just a fabrication of you, I can provide one: On any number of occasions you have intuited that someone you cared about was unhappy with you. They didn’t say anything, and if there was something in their tone of voice or facial expression or body language it was far too subtle for the brain, or at least the mind, the ‘conscious’ part of it, to pick up on. In some cases you even acted on this intuition, and their response to your action confirmed your intuition, almost every time.

Where did this intuition come from?

Dave the Self: I have no idea.

Dave the Creature: That’s a good start. Now let me push it a bit further. Think about the times your creative writing has been most brilliant. When something amazingly clever and original just came out in words, almost effortlessly. You have tried to replicate this, but you can’t, because it’s not in your control, not within your reach. Where did this extraordinary creativity come from?

Dave the Self: Same answer, obviously. I have no idea. What’s your point?

Dave the Creature: One more step and maybe it will become clearer. Or maybe not. Remember the last few times you fell in love, suddenly, precipitously. Think about what it was like, palms sweating, the amazing look in your eyes, feeling ecstatic and invulnerable and utterly alive (at least until the anxiety came back), and wondering where this feeling that made everything else in your life temporarily unimportant came from.

Where did this feeling come from?

Dave the Self: I was not myself.

Dave the Creature: Whose self were you then?

Dave the Self: That does not make sense.

Dave the Creature: Exactly. None of it makes sense. There was just a sudden brief clarity when you, yourself, temporarily stepped aside, got out of the way, and these astonishing things — intuition, creativity, love — happened, without you. These things that made everything that you, yourself, did and do every day, every moment, irrelevant, non-sensical, pointless. What does that tell you? Look at this writing you’re doing right now, about these two goofy cutouts supposedly having a conversation. It’s all just putting in time, waiting for intuition, creativity, and love, and other things that have nothing to do with you, yourself, to arise. These self-less occurrences are expressions of life full on, and they don’t need you; you just get in their way with your silly sense-making that makes no sense.

Dave the Self: Boy, you really know how to make a guy feel better, don’t you. Before this conversation, I was just feeling sad, and confused.

Dave the Creature: You said you wanted to die. I’m giving you permission, and some reassurance that it’s OK, maybe better than OK.

Dave the Self: The only way I know to die is to kill this body. And I don’t want to do that.

Dave the Creature: You have no say in the matter. The play is already written, with its infinite number of scripts. In some of them, you kill your body. In some, something else kills your body, probably a stress-related disease that you’re ultimately responsible for, but maybe not, and then you die with it. In others, you die and your body, this apparent creature, apparently lives on, self-lessly, for an hour until an anvil falls on it and kills it, or until it is 85 years old, or forever. And all the scripts are in play, in the play. They all happen, apparently, really and unreally.

Dave the Self: That’s not helpful. You’re giving me a headache. You’re just making this up; you don’t really believe it.

Dave the Creature: No, because there’s no me. No creature. No you. No self. It’s all made up, by the apparent you. I’m sorry it’s not helpful. It can’t be helped. If I was real, and not just an invention of you, a projection, I could go back to creaturing. Fortunately, creaturing requires no cutouts. Neither does selfing, by the way. You can go on debating this with yourself and with other selves, if they’ll listen, forever, and it won’t get you anywhere. There is no thinking your way out of this.

Dave the Self: I know that. But somehow trying to think it through makes me feel better. It’s what I do, you know. So if all that’s left is making the prison of the self, the prison of my self, more comfortable, what ideas do you have about doing that?

Dave the Creature: You might try playing, though you’d have to learn how. If you get frustrated, if it’s a competition, a zero sum game, it’s not play. The amazing thing about play is that, if you do it right, everyone always wins, and has fun. You used to know about that. You’re on the right track trying to try to learn to dance, and to swim, but you’re way too anxious about it — and you can’t change that, either.

Exercise can also ease your anxiety and make you more comfortable. You take it way too seriously, too. Try to think of ways to make exercise easier, or more fun — maybe the swimming and dancing can help with that.

In your creative writing, think more about the future, and not necessarily the future of humans and specifically the future of privileged urban humans. Write about other worlds, worlds out of time. Imagine possibilities that have no obvious trajectory from here. Imagine, if you can, worlds without selves. I know, you cannot, but it could be fun trying. Write from the perspective of your beloved birds, for pete’s sake. And don’t anthropomorphize!

And write music. You’re totally incompetent at that, so you have nothing to lose from playing at it. You could be good at it, but if you are, it will be when you, your self, get out of the way. You might find it fun. Just begin. Try different stuff; you have the tools. Just make it up. Steal ideas if you must, but make it your own. Plagiarize creatively.

When the self-less stuff comes up — the intuitions, the awesome creativity, the falling in love with people and places and ideas and art — try to pay attention to where it is not coming from. This will be very hard for you, because you want to appropriate and conserve and replicate things you think are good, but you can get better at noticing what is happening. You might even learn, a little, about how to get your self out of the way. And the more you’re out of the way, the more comfortable you will be.

And notice, too, when the overwhelming stuff happens to you, when the anxiety and fear (and sometimes the anger and sadness, too) get the better of you. There may be no way to navigate the Feeling Path, but it could be comforting to know where on the path you are. Metta, Karuna and all that, versus falling into endless darkness. Being aware of the ‘self-full’ moments can be as informative as being aware of the ‘self-less’ ones.

Dave the Self: I wonder if I became really good at getting out of the way of the self-less stuff, if it might increase the chances that I could fall away, die, and you, or whatever is when there is no me, no self, could go on. I wonder if I could learn to nudge closer to the realization of self-less-ness, to liberation.

Dave the Creature: Not a chance. Making the prison more comfortable is enough.

Dave the Self: You’re pretty clever, and sometimes even unintentionally funny. I kind of like you.

Dave the Creature: I’m an invention of you. So you’re saying you like yourself. I’d never have guessed.

Dear, sweet Ren,

I hope you slept well last night  8-)

I thought about what you were saying last evening about the non-duality stuff, and about how hard it was to explain the whole thing about not really having free will, but seeming to, and after tossing it around in my head for a while I started drawing what the ‘self’ seemed to be and what ‘we’ are like without one. I decided to share my sketches with you; here’s the first one:

So here is the ‘natural’ apparent reality for a creature without a self — a wild creature, or a human child before the self emerges, or after it falls away. Say this creature faces a situation (0), like the apparent choice between eating two things. Its biology (1) may lead it (2) to instinctively prefer one of the things over the other. Its experiences or learnings from other creatures (3) may condition it (4) to prefer the other. There is some patterning in the brain (5) that may bring up some thoughts or feelings (6) about the two apparent ‘choices’, but ultimately the creature’s behaviour (7), apparently selecting one or the other (or both or neither), is a consequence of the creature’s nature (2 and 4) alone. The creature has no free will, no choice, no control over what happens. What happens is the eating of one thing rather than the other (or both, or neither).

Now here’s what apparently happens when a creature with a self is in the same situation:

This creature faces the same situation of apparently choosing between two foods (0). Like with the unafflicted creature, its biology (1) may lead it (2) to prefer one of the things over the other. Its experiences or learnings from other creatures (3) may condition it (4) to prefer the other.

But at some point, what emerged ‘in’ this creature, possibly as an unintended consequence of us evolving large brains with excess capacity, was the embodied self/mind, the mental construction of the idea that this creature is apart from all-there-is, and this self came up with the idea (reinforced by others similarly afflicted with selves) that it had control over this creature’s actions, beliefs and decisions. So now instead of thoughts and feelings just arising and passing in this large brain, the ‘self’ was appropriating these thoughts and feelings as belonging to it (and to the creature), and reacting to them. The self is just brain-patterning on a larger, reflexive scale (5).

So now the self attempts (fruitlessly) to intervene in what is happening (6). It reasons that it, not the creature’s innate and conditioned nature, is actually making the decision ‘for’ that creature. When the creature moves to eat one of the two foods (or both, or neither) (7), the apparent decision is not actually made by the self at all — it’s still made as a result of the creature’s nature (2 and 4).

But the self has to take ownership of the decision (it’s been taught by other self-afflicted creatures that it is and must be ‘responsible’), so it rationalizes (8) the decision that has been made in such a way it can continue to believe it ‘made’ the decision. It reimagines what actually happened to conform to its central, controlling view of itself. And then, it second-guesses that decision (9), and congratulates or blames itself for that decision. Depending on the nature of the apparent decision (eg whether to give money to a homeless person), this can give rise to all kinds of guilt, shame, anger and sadness (10). And uncertainty over what might happen to the creature that the self wasn’t up to perfectly anticipating, preventing, and controlling, gives rise to chronic anxiety and fear (8,9, and 10 are what Eckhart Tolle calls the egoic mind/pain body vicious cycle).

All for no reason. The self has no control over any of it. What the creature does has nothing to do with the abstract, oversimplified model of reality that the self has concocted and attempts relentlessly to use to guide ‘its’ decisions. While the large brain enhances the creature’s capacity to intuit cleverly and to learn from its own and others’ experiences (a wonderful survival tool, and hence an evolutionary success), the self/mind (a disease that came along with the large brain) has been an evolutionary disaster, producing unimaginable suffering and destruction. It will soon suffer the end-state of all terrible evolutionary mistakes — extinction.

So it’s a tragic story. What seemed like such evolutionary genius (the large brain), is, because of the parasite that came along with it (the self), destroying our whole planet’s rich ecosystem of life.

I can see how you find all this infuriating — you seemingly have this knowledge about the true nature of reality that almost no one else can fathom (it is a pretty powerful delusion, this self), so people think you’re crazy or preoccupied with something unimportant when you should be doing something ‘useful’ (like paying attention to them and their selves’ issues).

And on top of that you know that the affliction of the self is incurable (though occasionally it goes into spontaneous remission), and that no practice makes the falling away of the self any more likely to occur.

But I still love you (aside from the fact you use the word ‘inflicted’ when you should be using ‘afflicted’). You’re almost as smart as me, and you have the handicap of being male.

As for the ‘realization’ beyond the intellectual understanding that your self is not really in charge of anything, and doesn’t really exist, when I see you stop worrying, I’ll know you finally got it. 

Unrealistically yours in any case,

Gabi

image by Marsel van Ooosten via overgrowthesystem.com
“Listen to this,” Ren said, looking up from his laptop. “This cog scientist Donald Hoffman ‘has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction’.”

He smiled at Gabrielle, who was playing with Ren’s cat. The cat, named Vegan, was jumping between several dozen handmade padded shelves that extended up and down all the walls of the main room of Ren’s house. Apparently the whimsical display, which included a swinging bridge, a solar-powered elevator and a three-level tree-house, had been written up in the local paper, and friends often brought their cats over to play with Vegan and try out the contraptions. Some cats were apparently more impressed than others.

Ren continued: “That idea is entirely consistent with non-duality. The apparent reality of the separate ‘self’ arose as an adaptation of the survival instinct, and it’s a complete fiction, but, as Einstein said ‘a very persistent one’. C’m’ere a minute and watch this.”

Gabrielle stopped and watched the video.  “Seems reasonable,” she said. “But what use is that information? What we may perceive may not be ‘real’ reality, but it’s all we have. It’s not like we have a choice to give up perceiving the world through the ‘interface’ of the self, and see it as it really is.”

“Yes, you’re right, ‘we’ don’t have a choice, but that’s because there is no ‘we’. When the self falls away after it’s seen to no longer serve a useful evolutionary purpose, suddenly true reality, or what non-dualists call ‘natural’ reality, is seen. What was the apparently separate ‘we’ vanishes, and what is left is the awesome inseparable oneness that is all-there-is. Or so I’m told.” Ren smiled, turning up his palms.

“And what makes you say that the self no longer serves an evolutionary purpose?,” Gabrielle replied. She sat on Ren’s brightly-coloured hammock swing in the middle of the room and slowly began to move it back and forwards.

Ren picked up Vegan and perched her on his shoulder. “I’m going even further than that. I’m saying it never really did. It was an evolutionary mistake. The evolution of our large brains was what actually increased our survival fitness — the brain’s capacity to model reality, anticipate and identify possibilities and prepare for them. But then something went wrong: The self emerged as an unanticipated consequence of the brain’s capacity to model reality. It mistook the map for the territory, the model for the reality. The brain’s very useful model seemed to suggest that there was something called ‘separateness’, and the emergent self was the embodiment of this ‘enhancement’ of the model. The self/mind reasoned that if survival was advanced by mis-perceiving entities as being separate (as the model did), then those entities were (in its ‘reality’) in fact separate, and the self could and should fear and protect the separate entity from ‘others’. But that mis-perception is actually leading to a great extinction that includes our own demise. And in the process that mis-perception has made us self-inflicted, anxious, dysfunctional basket cases.”

Gabrielle laughed and raised her eyebrows. “Well if there’s only oneness, it’s a bit of a conceit to believe self-deluded humans can actually destroy it, don’t you think?”

Vegan launched herself from Ren’s shoulder to a perch on the swing above Gabrielle’s head, landing ungracefully but righting herself quickly as if that was her intention all along, and swatting a cat toy suspended from the ceiling each time the swing passed close enough.

Ren replied: “We don’t actually destroy it, we just inadvertently make it apparently unfit for us, and for all life on Earth, until extinction takes us out of the game. But the game goes on, and will continue perfectly without us. Apparently.” He started drawing on the white board behind his computer:

He pointed at his drawing and expounded: “Imagine that the newly self-inflicted ‘individual’ is like a young child given a new laptop and being told that this laptop monitors and controls critical events in her life and protects her from unknown dangers, so she needs to use it diligently. Unfortunately the interface isn’t very good — the keyboard doesn’t work very well and error messages keep randomly appearing for no clear reason. And there’s no instruction manual, just what others have told her to do or not do. And everyone else has also received a similar laptop and they seem to be doing OK with it, so she just keeps trying her whole life to make the best of it — to run the right apps at the right time and fix the bugs and update for new virus protection and so on.”

He sighed and looked at what he’d drawn. Then he continued: “What she doesn’t realize is that all her frenzied activity at the machine really makes no difference at all — the laptop actually works autonomously with nearly-perfect software to protect and support her, and it completely ignores everything she does through the keyboard. The ‘desktop’ displays what’s going on, and usually it seems to be responding to the user’s keystrokes and other inputs, but this is entirely to humour the user — the program itself is far too complex to entrust control to someone who doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing. Now imagine that the user suddenly realizes this— that she ‘herself’ need do nothing, after years of struggle with this awkward and poorly-functioning tool. How would she feel — astonished, annoyed at the wasted effort, puzzled? Liberated?”

“That’s a pretty fragile metaphor,” Gabrielle replied. “But I like the distinction between the brain and the self/mind. I never thought about it that way: the large, imaginative brain being the successful evolutionary advance, and the self/mind being a rather useless, high-maintenance appendage that happened to come with it — an interesting but problematic emergence made possible by the capacities of the large brain, but in the long run mainly just a source of great anxiety and commensurate stressed activity. The worm in the wonderful new apple. I like that part of it. Most people probably couldn’t conceive of the brain functioning without the mind controlling it, or of them even being separate ‘things’.”

“But I have a better metaphor for you about the interface thing,” she added. She took the markers and eraser from Ren’s white board, erased the right side of what he’d done, and filled in the blank area anew:

“You’re going to love this,” she said, smiling. “You’re the one who says organizations actually operate through workarounds by the people at the front lines doing what the customer wants and needs despite what the policy manual says and what the technology tries to enforce. Think of your body as an enterprise, or a complicity if you will. The front line workers in the enterprise are the senses, tuned into the customers’ needs, and the collective intelligence of the whole organization — what by consensus and knowledge-sharing (rather than by fiat) gets invented, iterated, agreed upon and done — is its brain. Now tell me if it isn’t obvious what its ‘mind’ is?”

Ren jumped up and clapped. “I love it!,” he exclaimed. “Just as enterprises would do just as well, if not better, without their over-rated, mostly-useless disconnected management, the human animal would do as well if not better without the self/mind. Not without the brain, but without the self, without the mind. You’re a genius!”

Gabrielle bowed. Vegan looked at them curiously.

Jumping off the swing and grabbing her coffee mug off one of the cat wall shelves, Gabrielle wandered into the kitchen, calling back to Ren: “And my metaphor is analog. Organic.”

.     .     .     .     .

“So now I have a question for you,” Gabrielle said, returning with a fresh cup of coffee. “To what extent do you think humans are actually ‘blank slates’? I’m not talking about morality or gender identity or anything like that when I say ‘blank slates’ — only idiots and economists still deny that humans and most other creatures are inherently cooperative and unselfish within their ‘tribe’. I’m talking about what we are, or would be, without the influence of our culture. I see culture as inherently propagandistic and coercive, another unfortunate artifact of evolution. What do you think a human being would be if she were completely free of any cultural influence?”

Ren had taken Gabrielle’s place on the swing, and Vegan was in his lap. “Hmmm,” he said. “Well, in the first place, cultures don’t actually exist. Just as ‘systems’ aren’t real — they’re just generalizations about the complex and unknowable, mental patterning by a species that loves to see cause and effect and correlation even when it means nothing and is completely useless — so too are cultures just a fiction, a meaning we assign to what we perceive as collective behaviour, when there is really none.”

“But,” he went on, “it might be interesting to speculate about what a human might be without enculturation — without any of the beliefs and behaviours that stick to you because they are reinforced so often by so many that you cease to question them. For a start, I’d guess that a tribe of un-encultured people would do things together intuitively rather than ritually, and not need or value an abstract language of any kind. They might not have ‘selves’ at all — no ‘individual’ beliefs or behaviours or habits or patterns of activity — because they wouldn’t be seen as needed.”

“So how would the ‘blank slate’ be filled in?,” she asked. “Take me through one of your weird ‘thought experiments’. Let me picture her growing up.” She sat beside Ren in the swing. Ren looked concerned — the swing wasn’t meant for two. But he shrugged and said:

“OK. Let’s imagine we kidnap a whole bunch of new-born babies and smuggle them away to some ‘uncivilized’ place — let’s say some remote place in the tropical rainforest. They’re still just oneness at that age. They have no sense of self. So we hire some shape-shifting empathic language-free adult-looking aliens, and have them act out the role of care-givers: Breast-feeding, lots of physical contact, affection, attention and appreciation for several years, the whole Gabor Maté thing. The rainforest gives them all they need, and they’re generally safe in the trees, though jaguars are occasionally a concern. So they grow up together, relatively anxiety-free, without formal language (they don’t need it), and without being affected by the neuroses of adults. What do they do? Like all young wild creatures, they play. That’s how they learn. In accordance with Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour, except when some rare issue of stress or scarcity comes up, when they would presumably cooperate to deal with it, they would spend their time doing things that are easy and fun.”

“And then they’d grow up, and then what would they do?,” Gabrielle asked. “Would they be more like chimps, or bonobos? Or Robert Sapolsky’s baboons?”

Ren went over to his fridge and pulled off a page from an anarchist magazine that he’d taped to it. He handed it to Gabrielle. “This is how Wolfi Landstreicher thinks they would turn out” he replied:

In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a dead world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We need to start exploring the extent to which we are capable of living these dreams in the present without isolating ourselves. This will give us a clearer understanding of the domination of civilization over our lives, an understanding which will allow us to fight domestication more intensely and so expand the extent to which we can live wildly.

“That’s how I think we would be without enculturation,” Ren said. “It’s how some of us seem to be even with it. Maybe Wolfi is one of them. Maybe E E Cummings was, too. Maybe there’s not much difference between being “nobody but yourself” and being self-less. Or undomesticated. Or uncivilized. I don’t know.”

They swung back and forth silently for a few moments, with Vegan sitting half in Ren’s lap and half in Gabrielle’s as they stroked her together. Vegan was purring. Finally Gabrielle stood and pulled Ren to his feet, taking his hand and leading him out of the room.

“Where are we going?,” he asked.

“We’re going to extinguish our selves, and the truth,” she replied.

He looked at her mischievously. “That sounds like fun.”

“Not what you’re thinking,” she said. She pulled him out to his art-and-tool shed. She pointed to some lengths and panels of wood, then to his toolbox, and then to the apple tree in his yard. “We’re going to build a tree house. A home for wayward bonobos.”

For the next three days they worked around the clock, with Vegan supervising. When they finished, they had built a two-story playhouse, extending between the apple tree and an oak tree nearby. It had a roof, a rope ladder between the two levels, a ramp leading down to Ren’s hot tub, a rainproof carpet, a screened area for sleeping, and a set of solar-powered night-lights. And of course, a swing.

The evening they finished, they sat in the lower story, watching the sunset and an approaching storm. They ate raw veggies and dip from Gabrielle’s garden (Vegan, perched above them, ate fish that Ren had recently caught for her), and drank Ren’s homemade wine. They played a cooperative board game, and spoke using sign language:

<<“Desires immediately realized”>> he signed to her, smiling and looking at the reflection of the lights on the leaves of the apple tree.

<<And look,>> she signed back, plucking an apple from the tree just above her head:

<<No worms.>>