Page 155 of
Print Edition3(f) Childhood

By five million years ago, as humanity left its infancy period, we had acquired perfectly refined integrative instincts. During infancy our indoctrination in love had become fully instinctively reinforced. Any thought and consequent act was completely integratively orientated or shepherded. Whenever the mind thought integratively the instincts in effect said ‘that’s right’ and whenever it thought divisively they said ‘that’s wrong’.

It is important to remember though, that it was not because Infantman understood that the meaning underlying change was integration that she attempted to be as integrative as possible; it was because integration was needed as a means of survival. In other words, integrativeness was a genetically imposed orientation not an understanding or insight at this stage. We learnt how to be integrative but not why we should be integrative.

Humanity’s infancy was a difficult period for development. It was not easy to develop and maintain love-indoctrination. It was like trying to swim upstream against a fast current to reach the safety of an island. Any disruption or lack of attention to the task of loving infants would produce divisive adults who could not practice the co-operation necessary to maintain the group. In trying to reach the safety of the island of co-operative behaviour Infantman often failed and was swept back downstream to the pre-love-indoctrination situation where such divisive, disintegrative behaviour as sexual opportunism reigned. But cooperation/integration was finally achieved, marking the end of this stage in development and removing the pressure for development.

With the pressure off, our ape ancestor began to multiply or flourish as she moved out of infancy into childhood. (Such increase occurs naturally following theThe reason for
‘spasmodic
evolution’ completion or fulfilment of any opportunity for genetic development because survival stability or relative non-changePage 156 of
Print Edition returns to the species. Implicit here is the explanation for so-called ‘punctuated equilibrium’ or ‘spasmodic evolution’ that has confounded evasive science — if you are not going anywhere, as the idea of evolution maintains, you can’t have an impasse or break through an impasse, which in truth was what was happening).

This population explosion marked the first major success for brain development and the transition of humanity from infancy to childhood. As a consequence of the population increase numerous fossils have been found of Childman (the australopithecines on the archaeological scale). Childman lived in what we instinctively ‘remember’ as paradise. We describe it in the Bible as ‘The Garden of Eden’ and inParadise and The
Garden of Eden Australian Aboriginal mythology it is aptly called the ‘dream-time’. This was the time we finally became as God or development wanted us, integrative, in the ‘image of God’. (Of course while development had at last achieved the complete integration of a large multicellular animal species, there was still the task ahead of producing a system capable of understanding change. A mind had still to be fully developed. We were in the ‘image of God’ but not yet understanding of God or ‘knowing’.)

Humanity’s three-million-year childhood, which began five million years ago, was spent idyllically. Until the appearance of naughtiness and some cruelty towards the end, our behaviour towards each other during our childhood was utterly integrative, giving and loving or unconditionally selfless. We lived in the shelter (on the apron strings) of our ‘mother’ love-indoctrination, ‘who’ looked after us, ‘who’ told us how to behave. This was the idyllic integrated world to which we can now at last return.

Childman was successful but she was under no particular pressure to develop in any new direction. The question then is, what led to the development of the mind through childhood into adolescence? We know that love-indoctrination itself did not promote a better mind it only liberated mental cleverness orPage 157 of
Print Edition reasoning. However, this would have been of some survival assistance and therefore the development of some mind or association cortex would have occurred during infancy, such as to the degree of association exhibited today by the chimpanzee stacking up boxes to reach bananas.

The self-confidence that came with more intelligence would have led to some mind development during humanity’s childhood through mate selection, because admiration for cleverness as an aspect of self-confidence in ourselves and in others would have been expressed in the choice of a mate. While there was no pressure to change or develop more intellect there was also nothing stopping the development of intellect. Childman simply wandered towards adolescence. It was like a flock of sheep wandering into a lush pastured field with the gate (into adolescence) open on the other side. While there was no need to go across and no reason not to, there was also nowhere else to go, so the sheep spread out in the field and eventually found their way to the gate. While development of the mind was not forced during childhood, nor was it restrained, so gradually it occurred.

Infancy was a period of inward orientation (it was about being loved which liberated and nurtured or established the conscious thinking self) while childhood was a period of outward orientation (it was about practising with the now liberated conscious thinking self and discovering its power). Infancy was about ‘I am’ and childhood was about ‘I can’. Infancy was the development of self-awareness and childhood was the development of self-demonstration — of self-confidence — of what self (the conscious thinking self) could do. In childhood we began to apply our ability to make things happen. This was a time of reinforcement of the mental self, of drawing it out, and it was an exciting time. (Incidentally this description of our psychological stages of development shows how watching television can be so bad for today’s children. Children have an intrinsic need to make and do things themselves, not watch other people making and doing things. They need an active reinforcing environment not aPage 158 of
Print Edition passive one like television. We take creativity — the power of the mind to manipulate events — so much for granted now because we have been living with it for so long that we can forget how amazing our ability to make, create and do things is. Childhood is the time we should naturally discover this amazing talent. If children discover the power of free will sufficiently well they will enter adolescence inspired to find understanding of this power. What children need to be properly prepared for adolescence and adulthood is reinforcement. ‘Toughening’ them or trying to make them egotistical/winners has no place in the life of a child. They will be naturally strong and winners later in their life if they are loved in infancy and reinforced in childhood.)

Although in its adolescence humanity would have to find understanding, in childhood our self-management mistakes had not yet got sufficiently out of hand to require this. Humanity’s childhood was an idyllic time in which we were gloriously free of the responsibility and the consequences that came with free will, this wondrous ability to do whatever we liked with ourselves and our world. We only dabbled in self-management. We still depended on our ‘mother’, love-indoctrination instincts, for safe passage through life, but we were beginning to investigate the limits of our power to anticipate. We were hanging onto our mother’s apron strings very firmly with one hand while using the other to conduct brief exercise ‘games’ in self-management, not because we had to, but because we could. We were ‘playing’ (with self-management) as we evasively have described it.

Humanity’s early childhood can best be described as our ‘prime of innocence’ period. It was when we revelled in our emerging intellectual freedom in the perfectly secure shelter of our maternal training, unaware of the dangers of such freedom. It was the demonstrative stage ‘look what I can do — I can jump puddles — aren’t I fantastic’. It was the emergence of pride in self, in our mental or self-management capability. It was the emergence of mental confidence and independence of instinct. However, there still remained the vast difference between being capable or confident of management and being capable ofPage 159 of
Print Edition secure management. Early Childman would have been as naive (of the consequences and thus responsibility of mental freedom) and as demonstrative or happy in this freedom as a child is today. In humanity’s demonstrative stage of early childhood we proclaimed our mental independence.

By midway through childhood, some three and a half million years ago, the emerging self-management capability and independence from instinct would have started to get Childman into trouble. Innocent mistakes began to bring our self-management capability, our mind, intoNaughtiness in
children conflict with our perfectly integratively orientated instincts, our conscience. These earliest self-management misadventures which when displayed by children we call naughtiness characterised humanity’s late childhood. As the word ‘naughty’ implies, they were not serious mistakes since at this stage our conscience could still repair and thus contain them.

The first mistake or misunderstanding was the obvious one of being selfish — of seeing ourself as being ‘I’ before seeing ourself as part of ‘we’ — of taking all the bananas instead of sharing them. It was the first time since pre-love-indoctrination times that selfishness had appeared. (It occurred again later, in humanity’s adolescence, but these later acts of selfishness were for completely different reasons. We were angry and preoccupied demonstrating our worth and became divisive and self-centred and selfish because of our conscience’s unfair criticism of our efforts to self-manage.) The consequences for Childman were devastating. Everyone else (other group members and her own conscience) was angered by her outright selfishness. Generally a child only made this grand mistake in understanding once before becoming cleverer or smarter and realising the benefits of a more subtle form of selfishness, reciprocal or conditional selfishness. This time the others were also given some bananas, to stop them becoming angry and/or in anticipation of sharing their bananas later. We may have pacified the other members of the group but our conscience was not deceived andPage 160 of
Print Edition became increasingly hurt by these misadventures in self-management.

From here on Childman became more and more devious in her childishly superficial rationalising of her ‘if I can get it all for myself then why shouldn’t I?’ attitude. (The reason such selfishness was ‘superficial rationalising’ or limited reasoning will be explained shortly.) Actually there were two forms of selfish opportunism possible in a group or association or system: greed and laziness; taking more than a share and contributing less than a share. While Childman had no reason to be opportunistic, initially she saw no reason not to be, either. In learning to understand God or integrativeness humanity had a long way to go.

The development of understanding had to go through all the stages of a system developing integration. A parasitic species characteristically starts by selfishly living off its host then, through natural selection, discovers this is ultimately a self-destructive attitude and so develops a relationship, called mutualism, which is a relationship of reciprocity. A parasitic relationship, like a selfish one, is an immature association. Because parasitic species learn by natural selection, they cannot develop altruistic capability which would promote completely integrative relationships, so development of associations of organisms or systems of this type stop at mutualism.

Biologist Ralph Buchsbaum (in his book, Animals without Backbones, 1948, in which he makes reference to parasitism in flatworms) says:

‘Commensalism [where members of different species live in close association without much mutual influence] usually evolves, not in the direction of mutualism, but towards parasitism. A commensal that at first takes only shelter, then scraps of food, finally begins to feed on the tissues of the host body, and the host suffers a certain amount of harm. Should the parasite become so well adjusted that it causes little damage, and, in fact, finally proves to be some service to the host, the parasitism becomes a mutualism. Thus, the threePage 161 of
Print Edition kinds of relationship are only different stages in the process of living together. Mutualism and parasitism can probably arise directly from commensalism, but they may evolve from each other. Since mutualism requires the greater number of adjustments, it is relatively rare as compared with parasitism.’

It is easier to be selfish/parasitic but ultimately we learn that only co-operation/mutualism works in the long-term. This is a microcosm of all existence — of the development of integration. Even we humans, with all our built-in evasions, have been capable of revealing the truth in remote situations such as the life of parasites. The point to be made is that the stages in development of ecological systems and of the mind’s understanding were, firstly, selfishness, which became reciprocity, which became pure integration (in systems capable of learning unconditional selflessness) which was the emergence of a larger, more stable system. Unconditional selflessness is the reason a human body works so well. Every cell in our body has submerged its individuality to the needs and functioning of the larger system which is our body.

Early Prime Of Innocence Childman was Australopithecus afarensis. Middle Demonstrative Childman was A. africanus and Late Naughty Provocative Bullying Childman was A. robustus. (Anthropologists recognise an early and late form of A. afarensis as well as an early and late form of A. robustus, the latter, slightly heavier form sometimes being referred to as A. boisei.)

The reason late Childman is described above as ‘provocative and bullying’ as well as ‘naughty’ is that by the end of childhood we were beginning to taunt/challenge the dangers of self-management to come out and show themselves. We have all seen children, boys especially, pulling off fly’s wings, burning ants and pushing each other over in the playground. They become extremely naughty, even cruel. The reason was that their minds were saying ‘why shouldn’t I do whatever I want to do?’ They were taunting their power, trying to discover its limits. TheyPage 162 of
Print Edition were throwing out a challenge (pathetic as it sometimes was) to the world to reveal to them the significance of this power. The reason boys especially tried to provoke this self-adjustment power to reveal its limitation (which was the need to have understanding), the reason they tried to draw out the danger or threat of ignorance that self-management contains, was that males have always had the job of group protectors. It was males who were going to be charged with the task of going out to challenge this group-threatening lack of answers/understanding — this threat of ignorance. Unaware, at this stage, of the magnitude of the dangers involved in this threat, boys have looked forward to and even provoked the impending battle.

What has just been said about the capacity of older children to be cruel can be better understood if we appreciate that cruelty to others is really only the other side of the selfishness coin. Greed and cruelty are the two extreme forms of divisiveness possible in our world. While our soul or instinctive self knew not to be selfish and not to be inconsiderate of or, in the extreme, cruel towards others, the first mysteries the emerging conscious mind would encounter was ‘why not be selfish?’ and ‘why not be cruel?’. When we are older we take it for granted that cruelty is wrong. We forget that cruelty to others, like selfishness, had first to be ‘tried out’ by the mind before it can be rejected. They are the first two mistakes the mind makes in learning to understand.

Incidentally, the major physical difference between early Childman, A. afarensis, and late Childman, A. robustus and A. boisei, is that the latter had more pronounced cranial and facial bone structures. Anthropologists know that these modifications were for the support of much stronger facial muscles used to work the heavy jaw and huge grinding teeth of the later australopithecines. We know all the australopithecines were vegetarian but why did the later australopithecines need bigger grinding teeth? What change in diet occurred? And why? The answer lies in an appreciation of the different psychological state of the later australopithecines. They were more extrovert, increasingly naughty and roughly behaved. As well, like olderPage 163 of
Print Edition children today, they would rather have been out playing than eating. To fuel this energetic robust lifestyle and let them ‘eat and run’ they would have needed a readily available food source that they could eat quickly. Being vegetarian, they would have needed a lot of it because vegetables are not as efficient an energy source as meat, for instance, which was not to appear on humanity’s dining table for some time yet. (While australopithecines would have been capable of being cruel to animals they were not yet upset with animals and thus practising killing them regularly which was what finally led to meat eating.) We can imagine certain edible varieties of roots, tubers and stalks best filling this need for a ready fuel supply, which explains the need for massive grinding teeth and accompanying facial structure.

It is now possible to summarise the story of the emergence of brain refinement, the development tool which, together with integration and the other development tool, genetic refinement, completed the trinity of ‘characters’ involved in development. It was the advent of this last tool, the vast information-associating nerve network of the brain, that made it possible for humanity to learn to understand ‘God’ or Development.

The basis of nerve-based refinement was the ability of nerves to remember experiences. From this came the possibility of relating memories, of processing information in the nerves. When these related memories or insights became capable of effecting action through effector muscles, an organism was capable of altering its behaviour in anticipation of likely events. This marked a major turning point in development. Organisms were now capable of reacting individually to a possible future instead of reacting as a species to an existing present. Initially such anticipatory behaviour (nerve-based information refinement) was promoted by the species because it provided variety for the process of genetic refinement. This meant that only anticipations of the future which were valuable in the present were selected. Insights were shepherded and reinforced by the genes. These earliest orientations for insight-based changes in behaviour are what we term instincts. Instincts eventuallyPage 164 of
Print Edition developed to block further development of the mind’s (the nerve centre that developed for this processing/comparing/relating of information) understanding or insight, its power to anticipate.

Consciousness or awareness of the deeper meaning behind changing events and thus the ability to anticipate the long-term goal of development depended on liberating the mind from these instinctive blocks. This was achieved during humanity’s infancy by love-indoctrination. It was this ability to manage change or self-adapt (even if, during infancy, it was only for short periods) that would have promoted the mind’s development through this period. Following this, during childhood, the mind’s confidence in adapting its own behaviour emerged in the form of self-admiration, which played a part in mate selection and in this way promoted the development of the mind through this stage. Finally, during adolescence the understanding capability was needed and sought after to help relieve us from the unfair criticism levelled against us by our conscience and innocence in all its forms surrounding us.

Humanity’s mind was brought to its full capacity for understanding stage by stage. It was a remarkable journey.