Page 159 of
Print Edition 10. Developing Answers

 

 

Stage A
The Search

 

 

 

To refute the implication that we were bad, we needed to explain why we were not. We had to learn why we were the way we were. We had to find our identity. Searching for our identity or meaning or context or worth was the concern of humanity’s adolescence.Page 160 of
Print Edition

We had to explain why we made mistakes. We had to find the good reason for our apparent badness and, in so doing, end our insecurity and the upset it caused us. In religious terms we needed to discover the origin of sin.

To find this key understanding that would liberate us, we first had to learn the mechanisms of our world. In particular we had to know that nerves are insightful and genes are not. Finding these mechanisms was the role of science.

While looking for this knowledge, science had to evade integrative ideals because they unjustly criticised our divisive upset state. We had to be free from the integrative ideals to search for understanding of those ideals. This also meant science had to avoid subjective introspection (soul guidance) and depend on objective research. We had to be free from the condemning integrative ideals that our conscience insisted on.

However, while science had to be evasive and objective, we also needed unevasive subjectivity to complete the journey. Unevasive thought was needed to assemble the full truth from science’s hard-won but evasively presented insights. The full truth that explains us couldn’t be reached via evasion. For example while denying the existence of integrative meaning we were in no position to recognise that our soul was our genetic orientation to integration. We couldn’t begin to look into the human condition while being evasive. After all, our evasion or insecurity is the human condition. Alienation couldn’t investigate alienation. In the end sound, secure, unevasive soul guidance was needed to reveal the truth about ourselves.

Only those free of upset could look into the human condition. Innocence would deliver the key to our freedom from upset. Exceptional innocence — not exceptional cleverness — would lead us home to integration or peace. ‘Think tanks’ of exceptionally clever people like Nobel Prize winners and academics were not going to solve the world’s problems. Their contribution was finding the mechanismsPage 161 of
Print Edition while evading any unjustly condemning partial truths. They were the custodians of the evasion that eventually monopolised the world. Clever, esoteric intellectualism was a cul-de-sac in Development. The answers would come from back down the path of our development towards non-clever, innocent soundness. It wasn’t ‘brain-storming’ but ‘soul-storming’ that would free us.

 

The wolf will live with the lamb,

the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

and a little child will lead them.

. . .

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

The Bible, Isaiah 11:6,9.

 

Whatever happens, I shall be there in the end, for I, child that I am, am mother of your future self.

Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976.

 

One of the most moving aspects of life is how long the deepest memories stay with us. It is as if individual memory is enclosed in a greater which even in the night of our forgetfulness stands like an angel with folded wings ready, at the moment of acknowledged need, to guide us back to the lost spoor of our meanings.

Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958.

 

There is the biblical story of David slaying Goliath, and in what is probably Australia’s most famous poem, Banjo Paterson’s The Man From Snowy River (1895), a boy brought in the wild horses after the men had failed, and in Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837) it is a child who breaks the spell of deception and discloses the truth.

 

Evasive, mechanistic, objective science and unevasive, holistic, subjective introspection had separate roles to play in liberating humanity from criticism, insecurity and guilt.

 

Page 162 of
Print Edition Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1950.

 

Perhaps this life of ours, which begins as a quest of the child for the man, and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child, needs a clear image of some child-man, like the Bushman, wherein the two are firmly and lovingly joined in order that our confused hearts may stay at the centre of their brief round of departure and return.

Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958.

 

Sir Laurens van der Post’s unevasive books about the Bushmen have been the inspiration for my own writing. The Bushman’s comparative innocence sheltered my soul, giving it companionship and confirmation. Without the Bushmen my soul would have been too alone to stand up to our denial of our souls’ world and all the truths that reside there. That is why this book is dedicated to Sir Laurens van der Post.

As the quotes in this book reveal, all I have been able to add to the perception/soundness of Jesus Christ and Sir Laurens van der Post is the biological reason for the repression of our soul. Through all the evasion in recorded history a thread of strong, unevasive thought has been held onto and developed. The exceptionally unresigned and unevasive thinkers or prophets of modern times that I have become aware of are Sir Laurens van der Post, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur Koestler, Eugène Marais, William Blake, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

 

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it. For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John.

The Bible, Matt. 11:12.

 

I stress again that science, and in fact humanity as a whole, is the real liberator of humanity from the human condition.Page 163 of
Print Edition In many ways prophets only got in the way while we were searching for understanding because they confronted us with truths that depressed us and which we therefore had to evade. Exceptional innocence played an important but minuscule concluding role in our search for knowledge. In gridiron football the team as a whole (with one exception) does all the hard work gaining yardage down the field. Finally when the side gets within kicking distance of the goal posts a specialist kicker, who until then has played no part, is brought onto the field. While he — in his unsoiled attire — kicks the winning goal, the win clearly belongs to the exhausted players who did all the hard work.

The concepts presented in these pages are a synthesis (and reconciliation) of biology, physics, chemistry, philosophy, psychology and indeed all the scientific disciplines, and they were ‘disciplines’. To be prepared to put aside the big questions of life’s meaning and our inconsistency with it and go in search of an understanding of the details and mechanisms of the workings of our world required great restraint, perseverance and patience.

These answers were built on the wealth of detail won at great personal sacrifice by the warriors of all the scientific traditions. But science was only the institution humanity created to investigate the mechanisms of our world. Science itself depended on the supportive structure of civilisation for its continued existence. In truth every human who has ever lived has contributed to this breakthrough. It stands on the shoulders of all the weary battlers who fought the only way they could; every businessman, selfless or greedy; every nurse, compassionate or uncompromising; indeed every victim of paradox from the birth of the concept ‘I’.

Since the emergence of our fully conscious mind over 2 million years ago, humanity has dreamed of, hoped and prayed for and, above all, worked unceasingly against immense odds towards this breakthrough.