3(g) Adolescence and the Human Condition

During humanity’s childhood our capacity to absorb and repair any hurt to our soul (caused by compromise to our instinctive expectations) was boundless. The balance of love and hurt was completely tipped towards love. We had so much to give that any hurt amongst us, such as a child in our group being orphaned and as a consequence missing out on some of his or her instinctive expectation of ‘bonding’ (love) and becoming upset, could easily be repaired. Our capacity to keep ‘turning the other cheek’, to absorb and repair upset was very high. This Page 165 of
Print Editionintegrativeness/selflessness also made it possible to repair the ‘mistakes’ made in our first tentative experiments in self-management, the games we played in childhood simply because we could.

Finally, however, the number of ‘mistakes’ resulting from these games became too great for either our conscience to contain or our integrativeness to repair. Upset began to set in. The game suddenly became serious. This corruption breakout point signalled the end of humanity’s childhood and the onset of adolescence and launched our desperate search for understanding because now only real answers could stop the upset increasing and spreading. The need to find understanding was suddenly imperative because it was the only thing that could stop the conflict between our conscience and our mind. We desperately needed to explain these acts our conscience saw as ‘mistakes’.

Incidentally, it was this emergence of the need to explain ourselves that led to the development of language. Anthropological evidence supports this insight. Study of fossil skulls for the imprint left on the skull wall of Broca’s area (the word-organising centre of the brain) suggests, according to Richard Leakey in his book Origins (1977), that, ‘Homo had aThe advent of
language greater need than the australopithecines for a rudimentary language’. Apart from contact calls our Childman ancestors had little need for sophisticated noise signals and no need to express concepts because their behaviour was instinctively co-ordinated and there was nothing to explain. This instinctive empathy we once had is now much repressed in us.

Nevertheless, we were once so in tune with each other and our world that, to quote Sir Laurens van der Post about the relatively innocent Bushmen of the Kalahari (from The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958), ‘He and they all participatedHow we lost our
sensitivity so deeply of one another’s being that the experience could almost be called mystical. For instance, he seemed to know what it actually felt like to be an elephant, a lizard, a baobab tree.’ It has to bePage 166 of
Print Edition remembered that despite their relative innocence compared with the rest of us, the Bushmen are still members of modern highly embattled Sophisticatedman, Homo sapiens sapiens, so if this is the sensitivity we are capable of when living naturally (in the environment our soul is familiar with) today, how much more sensitive must Childman, who had not even engaged in the battle, have been! Her sensitivity would have been so great it would appear to us as supernatural. In two million years of battling and repressing our soul we have become extremely superficial and insensitive. We are almost completely numb beings. That this degree of repression has been necessary is a measure of just how much pain and hurt we have had to bear (since repressing hurt was our way of coping with it) and how tough and heroic we have been in the face of such pain.

There is a whole world of beauty from which, over two million years of repression, we have become almost totally alienated, from which we have lost almost — but not all — access. Our great artists — be they painters, sculptors, singers, musicians, dancers or poets — are essentially people in whom the alienation that now exists within all humanity is incomplete. Two million years of repression has achieved an almost but not quite complete block-out of our soul’s awareness of the magic world of beauty on earth. Occasionally a human occurs whose protective block-out has a crack or tear in it. Through this small window these people can touch some of the beauty that exists on earth. Look closely at Claude Monet’s paintings of water lillies. His amazing empathy/sensitivity is instinctive. Certainly he cultivated his talent but what this really means is that he cultivated ways to further let his soul reveal its immense sensitivity. In an interview with the Australian painter Martin Sharp about his art, radio talkshow interviewer Caroline Jones said ‘are you saying that art makes visible things from another dimension’ and Sharp replied, ‘Yes, at times I seem to expand and do things gracefully instead of chaotically’. There was also mention of ‘artPage 167 of
Print Edition supplying a rare glimpse of God’.¹ (By the way, this does not mean the innocence/soundness of prophets such as Christ is similarly due to a freak tear in their/our instinctive block-out. Unlike these exceptionally sound people many great artists had terrible childhoods. Their sensitivity arises from having a rent in what is now the basic fabric of instinctive alienation in humans, a peephole to beauty, that lack of nurturing wasn’t able entirely to block-out/repress, although it did influence the way the talent expressed itself. People with such freak rents we call geniuses. Christ was not renown for anyone particular freakish talent — he was not a genius rather he was just overall sound/innocent. Exceptional soundness has been so rare and our ability to cultivate it so denied that the best we could normally hope for in terms of talent was the appearance of these freak geniuses. This is a sad commentary on our plight.)

However, to return to Adolescentman’s need to understand existence. We know that genetic refinement could separate information from matter (and thus adjust the species to present requirements) but not information from influence. This was only possible with brain refinement. The ability to process information separately from its influence made it possible to learn about change itself and thus to anticipate change; using our brain it was possible for us to adapt ourselves to the future, not just to present. However, to correctly anticipate the future, to become responsible/secure managers of existence, we had first to understand existence.

As said before, it was by chance that our ape ancestor, Infantman, needed to be integrative or co-operative. She was instinctively indoctrinated or trained in integrativeness or love because she needed it to survive but this did not give her an understanding of integration. This distinction — and conflict — between our instinctive integrative orientation, our conscience, on the one hand and our conscious experimenting self, our mind, on the other is important. It was a dichotomy which forced Page 168 of
Print Edition adolescent humanity into serious self-management experiments in order to learn how to manage securely. No longer were self-management experiments a game of childhood.

The major conflict arose when the mind began trying to manage from a basis of limited understanding of existence and in the process made mistakes, such as late Childman’s innocent decision to take all the bananas for herself. The instincts criticised these mistakes and tried to stop the experiments. We were in the impossible position where our conscience was trying to stop us doing the one thing we knew we had to — it was trying to stop us learning how to adjust yet we had to master this ability in order to meet the future successfully!

We were a self-adjusting system as yet unable to successfully self-adjust and dependent on our love-indoctrination, our instinctive shepherding, for guidance. Sooner or later we had to grow up and leave the safety of our infancy and childhood home to shoulder the responsibility of beingWhen we left Africa a self-adusting system, to achieve our potential. We set out on the adventure to find our own identity and thus learn to cope on our own. The first bands of early Homos (intelligent but insecure Adolescentman) left our ancestral home in Africa about one and a quarter million years ago.

The following stages of Adolescentman have already been introduced and explained in Step 5. The first Adolescentman who had to resign himself to the fate of having to self-adjust without answers/understandings was Soberedman, whom anthropologists know of as Homo habilis. Homo erectus followed, he was Adventurousman, the adolescent who left Africa. Then came Angryman, who was Homo sapiens (sometimes referred to as H. sapiens [archaic]) and finally ourselves, modern, battle-wearied/exhausted or refined in alienation Sophisticatedman, Homo sapiens sapiens (sometimes referred to as H. sapiens [modern] ).

Adolescent humanity was in anExplains sin or evil ambivalent situation. Were it not forPage 169 of
Print Edition the restraining presence of our correctly orientating conscience we would have had no safe shelter or basis from which to conduct the search for understanding. For instance, it was the continued presence of the innocent — of our conscience, of idealism — within us and amongst us (contributed especially by each new innocent generation) which saved us from ourselves, kept us from excessive mistakes and the consequent alienation/corruption of our integratively orientated soul. In this way our conscience facilitated our search. Conversely, we had also to defy our conscience to some degree in order to master self-adjustment. We were in the extremely difficult predicament of having both to defy our conscience and obey it! This was the paradox within which we lived and struggled during adolescence. This is what modern society has called our Human Condition. Within this paradox is the origin of criticism — of ‘sin’ or ‘guilt’ — and also the origin of defiance of criticism, which is our human anger or aggression and resentment of criticism. We were in competition with the false implication that we were bad or evil. For instance, the presence of innocence only represented the unfair criticism we were trying to live with, so we resented innocence, we tried to evade its criticism, and we destroyed the innocent.

— We destroyed innocent animals (the advent of hunting and thus meat eating about one and three-quarterExplains hunting &
meat-eating million years ago).

— In perverted sex we destroyed the innocence of women.

— Innocent people were replaced by less innocent people. Less intelligent, more innocent people could not cope in the new reality of compromise and struggle and were replaced by more intelligent, more realistic people. It was only fifty thousand years ago that development of I.Q. or speed of mental information processing came to a halt and a balance was struck between answer-finding but corrupting cleverness and non-answer-finding but sound lack of cleverness.

Page 170 of
Print Edition — We destroyed the innocent original self or soul within ourselves by mentally ‘forgetting’ it — by means of repression, block-out or evasion. The result wasExplains alienation
and subconscious we became separated or split from our true situation and self which is the origin of our alienation/psychosis/neurosis and also the origin of our subconscious (repressed) self.

The ideal solution to the paradoxical predicament of having both to defy our conscience and obey it was to have been balanced about it. If we obeyed our conscience completely we were safe for the present but would not learn to understand existence; if we were excessively free of its influence we would make too many mistakes and diverge too far from integrativeness (would become too upset, which is angry/egotistical/alienated and superficial, all of which are selfish, socially disintegrative traits). If our society became disintegrated/destroyed we would never find the understanding that would end our upset. We needed to be sufficiently free to experiment but obedient enough to our conscience to avoid becoming ‘corrupted’ and socially disintegrated. The trouble was such an ideal balance could not be known precisely so it could be found only through oscillating between both extremes — through pursuing freedom until we become obviously excessively mistake-laden or ‘corrupt’, then changing to the pursuit of obedience to conscience until this, in turn, became too repressive of the need to understand, and so on, back and forth.

In politics, one side of the balance is represented by socialism and the left wing, where obedience to absolutes is stressed, the other by capitalism or the right wing which stresses freedom from absolutes. It is only the dialectic or oscillation between these excesses which reveals the middle ground. AtPolitics the same time, these oscillations have given rise to alternating bouts of excessive freedom and excessive oppression and thus conflict and argument and polarisation. We progressed by argument which, in the extreme, was war.

Page 171 of
Print Edition It follows that to end war or bring peace to earth the argument had to be resolved and the polarities reconciled. An understanding of change which accorded with the instinctively known absolutes had to be reached, which now is at last achieved. Above all we have had to find the true reason why we have been competitive and aggressive in order to explainWar is over,
peace has arrived our upset and establish our dignity. Finding this reason marks the arrival of peace to earth. The realist and idealist, the right wing and left wing, the young and the old and, above all, the ambivalence within ourselves, all can now be reconciled. The so-called struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is resolved. Our divisiveness is now explained. Humanity has won its fight. The human condition is resolved and humanity is at last Free.

_________

¹Australian Radio National, October 6, 1987.