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Print Edition Step 3
The Story of the Birthday Party

Step 3 is to look more closely at how our upset occurred.

It began some two million years ago when Adolescentman found that his first tentative efforts at mentally or intelligently managing his life put him in conflict with his by-then-well-established instinctive controlling self. It was the start of a great battle which has raged until this day. On one side was our original instinctive genetic-based self that we have long known of as our soul and more recently have redescribed as our ‘collective unconscious’¹, the expression of which we know of as our conscience. On the other, our developing mind or spirit. The problem, briefly, was that while our genetic self ‘knew’ that love or integration was the way to go, it did not understand why this was so, and our mind needed that understanding.

To see the battle it is necessary to understand the difference between genetic-based and mind-based learning systems. The whole problem of the human condition is resolved with this understanding.

Later (in Part 2) the limitations of these learning mechanisms will be described, along with the way in which these limitations were overcome in the process of developing the most possible order of matter on earth. That description is the story of the development of all the forms of life leading to the emergence of humanity.

So the story of the development of humanity involves a trinity of ‘characters’; the theme or purpose of our existence, which is developing order of matter, and the two great tools for doing it, namely genetic learning and nerve-based learning. (Incidentally, we have long been aware of the existence of this trinity of fundamental ‘characters’ or forces at work in our world. In Christian doctrine for example, they are described as God the Page 21 of
Print Edition Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost or Spirit. As we shall see, these correspond to integration, the instinctive expression or image of integration and the mind that searches for understanding of integration.)

For the present it is only necessary to look at one of the limitations of genetic learning. We know that natural selection, more properly referred to as genetic refinement, gave species the ability to adapt to new environmental conditions. In a long dry period, for instance, only long-necked varieties of giraffe, the ones which could reach the last, topmost, leaves, survived. In doing so, the giraffe species ‘learnt’ — it adapted itself to the new conditions. Genetic learning was a wonderful ability but it had this limitation: though change could be met, it could not be understood, and therefore it could not be anticipated.

However, a mind able to remember past experiences and compare them with present ones, associate the information, had insight and could learn to understand change. A mind was able to ‘watch’ what happened through time — was capable of becoming conscious of or understanding the relationship of events through time.

So, while Childman, Australopithecus, had been able (for reasons which will be explained later) to become instinctively or genetically adapted to being integrative, when the mind emerged it had to find an understanding of integration, it had to know why integration was important. This predicament has been recognised for centuries. For instance, it is perfectly described at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis where it says humans had already been made into or ‘created in the image of God’ (that is, they were integrative) but were yet to ‘become like God knowing’ (that is, understanding) (Gen 1:27 and 3:5). The problem was that, while our genetic self could tell us what was integrative or ‘good’ and what was divisive or ‘bad’ and in so doing guide us, it could not give us understanding of integration. We had to find that out for ourselves but much of our searching upset our genetic self. The effect of this was that our genetic self tried to stop the search. Our original instinctive selfPage 22 of
Print Edition was ignorant of our mind’s need for understanding and therefore unsympathetic towards the search.

Possibly the best way to illustrate how this battle and upset between the instinct-controlled self and the mind-controlled self emerged is to imagine a children’s birthday party. All the children sitting around the party table are around seven years old except one who is about eight years old. The seven-year-olds are still obedient to their instinctively trained self while the eight-year-old is beginning to think for himself how to behave. Being an understanding device a mind requires understanding but there is none available to help the eight-year-old make decisions. Seeing the birthday cake and feeling hungry he decides ‘well, why not take the cake’. But when he leans across the table and takes it the younger children, obedient to their instinctive training in integration, criticise him for being selfish. Many mothers have witnessed this grand mistake of pure selfishness often made by children first attempting to self-manage. Our word for such totally unknowing mistakes is naughty. Of course, on being abused by the innocents (the other children, who were innocent or unaware of the world associated with the need to search for understanding), the eight-year-old quickly learns the more subtle form of selfishness called reciprocity, where he offers the others some of the cake to keep them quiet. This however is only a superficial solution; the consciences of all concerned, including his own, are not deceived and continue to criticise any mistakes made in the effort to understand existence and self-manage on the basis of that understanding.

To stop the criticism the eight-year-old needs to be able to explain to the innocents and his own conscience that, while he requires conscience guidance, he does not deserve its criticism. He needs to explain that he is not bad; that he is using his mind, which is a different kind of learning tool to the one that gave the innocents their orientation to integrativeness. His mind requires understanding so he has to search for the correct understandings by trying or experimenting with different understandings. Any misunderstandings or mistakes are not bad but aPage 23 of
Print Edition necessary part of the learning process. However, to come up with this explanation the eight-year-old needs to know all that is being explained in this book about the difference between mind-based and genetic-based learning systems.

When the first Homo or Adolescentman or thinking man made his initial tentative experiments in self-management some two million years ago or more there were no such understandings and mediation available. He was just setting out in search of the understandings which have only now been achieved two million years later. It really was a Catch 22 situation: ideally to conduct the search for understanding he needed the understandings he was setting out to find!

The situation faced by the original Homos — and by the eight-year-old — was that neither of them had an explanation they could use to defend themselves against the criticism from their original instinctive self even though they ‘knew’ it was unfair. Having to live with this unfair criticism — on a daily basis and through the millenniums — is what upset us. This upset took four forms. To use the eight-year-old’s predicament at the birthday table, what he did when the innocents criticised him was:

Firstly, he tried desperately but unsuccessfully to explain or defend his actions. He said, ‘Mum the cake accidently fell into my lap’. In truth this was not a lie rather it was an inadequate attempt at explanation. Like the birthday party boy, our ‘conscious thinking self’ (which is the dictionary definition of ego) became increasingly embattled and preoccupied trying to find proof of its worthiness. We became egocentric or preoccupied with self — selfish — which only upset our selfless behaviour-demanding conscience all the more. This compounding effect meant our upset intensified very quickly. In two million years of upset we have come a long way from the state of innocence and we have almost totally forgotten what true happiness is like. Humans have been immensely heroic but as a result we are now immensely exhausted. (It might be an idea here to briefly elaborate upon this egocentric factor as it explains ourPage 24 of
Print Edition competitive nature. We have always ‘known’, although we have never been able to adequately explain it, that the greater truth was that we were not deserving of criticism, that fundamentally we were not bad. For this reason we would not tolerate criticism. We wanted it understood by others and we wanted to be able to understand ourselves why we were not deserving of criticism. Our struggle has been to explain and exonerate ourselves. Our lives have been focused on trying to prove that we were not bad. We wanted to win against the false accusation that we were bad. For two million years humans have been in competition with the implication that they were bad. For two million years we have been trying to win this fight — trying to liberate ourselves from criticism.)

The second thing the eight-year-old did was become angry. He leaned across the table and punched one of the innocents in the mouth in a frustrated attempt to stop the unwarranted criticism. This situation is the origin of our human aggression. Since aggression is divisive or disintegrative rather than integrative, this punch further offended the eight-year-old’s conscience and fuelled his upset, as it did for humanity at large.

Thirdly, the eight-year-old tried to escape the criticism. He did this in two ways. First he put his fingers in his ears to block it out. Putting his fingers in his ears developed into more permanent forms of block-out when he mentally learnt to ignore the criticism by forgetting it, repressing it and evading it. In mentally hiding from or avoiding his real situation and adopting a false position he became psychologically separated from his true situation and self. This is the origin of our human alienation/psychosis/neurosis. Humans are now two million years psychologically blocked out or departed from their original self or soul.

The second way the youngster tried to escape the criticism was by physically running away from it. This is the origin of our human need for self-distraction which materialism served. The more we shouldered the responsibility of attempting to master self-management the more we were criticised the more we needed some relief, however superficial, from that unfairPage 25 of
Print Edition criticism. For instance we needed to pamper ourselves and go away on holidays. Work itself was often used to distract our mind.

It can be seen that, in order to gain the understanding that mind-based self-management was dependent upon, we had to live with the unfair — but necessary (for guidance) — criticism from our conscience. Throughout the search for understanding, the only ways we had of defending ourselves from this criticism or finding some relief from it were: by trying as best we could at the time to explain, prove and demonstrate that we were not bad, which was our egocentricity; by attacking the criticism, which was our anger; and by escaping the criticism, which produced our alienated self and our superficial, artificial, escapist lifestyle.

The battle left us angry, egocentric, alienated and superficial or, in a word, exhausted. We exhausted our capacity to be integrative. We spent the soundness of our soul. Inevitably our world became as false as we were. This was the price of progress (towards finding understanding). So, to answer our original question: the source of, the fundamental reason for the upset we all now suffer and which had to be explained to achieve a profound solution to our personal upsets, was this battle to overcome the ignorant criticism from our conscience of our mind’s necessary efforts to master self-management. It was the uneasy transition from an instinct to a mind-controlled state. To use our religious or metaphysical terms, the situation was ‘the origin of [so-called] sin’.

It might be of interest to include here a description written by the author Eugene Marais, the first person to conduct extensive field studies of primates. In his book, The Soul of the Ape, which was written in the 1930s but not published until 1969 he says:

‘The great frontier between the two types of mentality is the line which separates non-primate mammals from apes and monkeys. On one side of that line behaviour is dominated by hereditary memory, and on the other by individual causal memory. . . . ThePage 26 of
Print Edition phyletic history of the primate soul can clearly be traced in the mental evolution of the human child. The highest primate, man, is born an instinctive animal. All its behaviour for a long period after birth is dominated by the instinctive mentality. . . . As the . . . individual memory slowly emerges, the instinctive soul becomes just as slowly submerged. . . . For a time it is almost as though there were a struggle between the two.’

By ‘causal memory’ Marais is referring to the mind’s ability to understand cause and effect which is its ability to ‘watch’ or learn about or understand what happens through time. By ‘phyletic history’ Marais is referring to the Phylum, the genetic inheritance or instinctive self. (The inhibition of conscious thought or effective reasoning in non-primate mammals and its liberation in primates will be explained in Part 2.)

Marais’ books, The Soul of the Ape, My Friends the Baboons and The Soul of the White Ant, show him to be one of the exceptionally unevasive thinkers of this century. Robert Ardrey, who dedicated his book, African Genesis, to Marais, described him as ‘a worker in a science yet unborn’². Science as we have known it has had to be evasive or mechanistic, as will shortly be explained. Before unevasive science could be born, as it now is, the full truth that defends humanity had to be found.

To return to the explanation of the human condition. It follows from what has been said that the more we (intelligent man) searched for understanding the more egocentric, angry, alienated and superficial we became. In the end we arrived at where we are today — utterly spent, completely egocentric, angry, alienated and superficial. The more we tried to find understanding that would explain we were not bad, the badder we appeared to become! The truth is we have been enormously brave and heroic but this truth has been extremely hard to see. Unjustified as they were, guilt, depression, depleted self-esteem and psychosis have become rampant. To liberate us from this Page 27 of
Print Edition predicament we have needed to find the full truth about ourselves. Only with the full truth could our upset begin to be healed or rehabilitated. As the practice of psychiatry recognises, our freedom from our upset lies back through our mental blocks or evasions or repressions. To free our mind of its neuroses we have to ‘climb onto the psychiatrist’s couch’ and try to confront, understand and so alleviate the repressed upsets/hurts in our mind. However our ability to do this has been extremely limited because humanity lacked the fundamental understanding needed, which was the defence for our exhausted, upset ‘divisive’ selves. Psychiatrists have had to be cautious about dismantling our mental blocks because they have not had the understanding with which to explain away the upsets that our blocks were hiding. Without the fundamental explanation for our upset human state psychiatrists were not in a position to begin to unravel the upset. Our neuroses were a bit like a locked room we could hardly afford to peep into. While we have long known the principles of psycho-therapy, as a practice it has remained undeveloped, even primitive. To quote a United States State Attorney-General, ‘the art of psychiatry is just one step removed from black magic’³. Rehabilitation could not properly begin until the arrival of the full truth because we could not confront many of the apparent truths about ourselves until we could also defend ourselves against the criticisms implicit in them, since our defencelessness was what made us turn away from the truth in the first place. For the same reason, we could not recognise our embattled condition until we could explain it.

For instance, we could not confront our inability to love until we could explain why we had become incapable of love or unconditional selflessness. In the age-old ‘nature/nurture’ debate, for example, the argument has really been because the nurture thesis criticised parents when deep down we knew that we were Page 28 of
Print Edition not deserving of criticism and should not be made to feel guilty for our inability to love our children as much as we might have liked. Accepting the nurture thesis would leave parents unfairly and unbearably criticised, to varying degrees, so we have argued against the truth of it. (Of course while we were not fundamentally bad we had to restrain ourselves from, and in the extreme cases, punish excessive ill-treatment of children.) In fact the truth of the importance of nurture in our upbringing is only part of the greater truth, what could be called a partial truth. Like many other partial truths it was hurtful and dangerous because it left us unfairly criticised where the full truth would not. Discovery of the full truth, the reason why humans became upset and unable to love or nurture as much as they would have liked, would put an end to the debate by removing the need to evade the hurtful partial truth. Almost without exception those areas of inquiry that have remained controversial were those ones where exposure threatened — were areas where we were being confronted by a hurtful partial truth.

We have needed the full truth about ourselves before we could stop evading all the otherwise critical partial truths — before we could begin to be honest about or repent or own up to them, which is necessary if we are to clear up our neuroses/upset. Evasions were very necessary but they represented a denial — a repression of many truths. Evasions also upset the innocent among us who were trying to hold onto these truths and found themselves being forced into adopting the evasions. While evasion was necessary paradoxically it was also necessary to be as unevasive as possible so that we did not become too alienated from the truth. The finding of the full truth ends our need to be evasive and thus stops the spread of anger, egocentricity, alienation and superficiality within and among ourselves. We can now truthfully explain to innocents why we ‘took the cake’ which will end their upset with us and our upset with them for being upset with us. It is the freedom now to be honest that saves the world.

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Print Edition With sufficient explanation of why we did what we did, self-confrontation or so-called repentance or confession would not be difficult because necessarily there would be nothing we would be ashamed of — nothing we could not explain — could not actually or truthfully justify. What we have been seeking throughout the history of humanity was the ultimate excuse — was the excuse that was the reason and not the lie — and we now have it.

Our biggest evasion has been the way we have avoided acknowledging integrative meaning. For this, too, we first needed the full truth which explained our divisiveness, our inconsistency with integrativeness. We were God-fearing instead of God-confronting (remember integration depends on selflessness or love and God is love). In fact, while ‘love’ has been one of our most used words, science has not recognised it and has had no interpretation for it. Love means selflessness which is the basis of integration, the concept which we had to evade. The old Christian word for love was caritas which means charity or giving or selflessness (see the Bible, 1 Corinthians Chapter 13 and 10:24). As long as we evaded defining that what we meant by love was the tendency or desire to be integrative or selfless, ‘love’ remained a reasonably unthreatening word to use. We could not however be expected to be comfortable with the word ‘integration’ itself. In fact while we are familiar with the word ‘disintegrative’ we are relatively unfamiliar with its opposite or antonym ‘integrative’. Integration and related words such as ‘integrity’ confronted us too directly with the truth of integrative meaning and, in the case of integrity, with our divided unsound self— with our lack of integrity — which we could not defend. We could identify with divisiveness but not with integrativeness. We did not like the word integration. We have evaded integrative meaning.

Science, instead of acknowledging a law of physics which says that systems grow by integration, acknowledged only an alternative law which says systems break down towards heat energy. We evasively identified with or preferred theories whichPage 30 of
Print Edition suggested divisive, competitive behaviour was the norm, rather than theories of integration and co-operation. The position was such that a lie that said we were not bad was less of a lie than a partial truth that said we were! Such was the paradox of the human condition. Science had to evade the concept that there was purpose in existence, that there was a tendency towards order, towards developing larger wholes. Instead of recognising purposeful development it recognised only aimless change it termed ‘evolution’. Science was mechanistic as opposed to holistic (‘holistic’ according to the dictionary means ‘tendency in nature to form wholes . . .’). Science got on with the task of finding an understanding of the mechanism of change that might one day (as it now has) make possible a confrontation with the truth of integrative meaning — in the meantime responsibly evading such a confrontation.

In doing so we built up a veritable mountain of evasions which can now be dismantled. We became extremely false, choked up with evasion or denial, which was our psychosis.

Until the arrival of the full truth, the best we could hope for, both as a species and as individuals, was to delay the process of becoming exhausted. For instance, we could stop participating in the corrupting search for understanding for a while by isolating ourselves from the main battle. Or we could stop thinking (self-managing) and simply listen to and obey our conscience. This was the refuge religions provided because it was in them we enshrined the absolute truth of integrativeness that our conscience knew. (In fact the word ‘religion’ itself is an embodiment of the absolute truth of integrativeness being derived, as it is, from re-ligare which means ‘to bind together’, or integrate.)

Over the last three thousand years a few exceptionally innocent men have appeared who, through the rare circumstances of encountering only pure love in infancy and of being isolated from upset in childhood, retained access to their consciences. As we became more battle-worn and separated from our own consciences, as our need for refuge and temporary healing has increased, the more precious the unrepressed consciences, thePage 31 of
Print Edition words of these unevasive thinkers, these prophets or holy men, became. (Incidentally, the word ‘holy’ has the same origins as our Saxon word ‘whole’ so, like the word ‘religion’, ‘holy’ was concerned with our desire for wholeness, specifically for integrity or soundness of self, a self unseparated from its conscience, non-alienated. While integration of self and integration of matter are not the same thing, being able to be unevasive and recognise the development of the integration of matter depended on being integrated in self or non-alienated.)

Religions were one of the two ways we had to return to the world of our conscience and its integrative ideals. The other way was to simply deny the corrupted world of our mind and insist on adherence to the integrative ideals. We could adopt the politics of socialism. The words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ mean stress on being social or communal, on being integrative.

Whenever we became over-exhausted we could abandon our mind with its upset corrupt behaviour and be born again into the world of integrativeness — either by taking up a religion where integrative knowhow and ideals were preserved or by adopting the restraint of socialism where anything but the integrative ideal was denied. As Karl Marx said when describing the philosophy of socialism, ‘the point is not to understand the world but to change it’. By ‘change it’ he meant make it social or integrated.

Life under the human condition was always a question of trying to balance the need for our mind to be free to search for understanding with the need for obedience to our conscience and its integrative or social ideals. Excessive freedom and we would become too upset or corrupt; excessive obedience and our need to be free to search for understanding would become overly oppressed. The difficulty was that at any one time we never knew where the perfect balance lay. The only way we could find the approximate point of balance was to pursue freedom until it became obviously excessively corrupt then swing back in the other direction and pursue obedience to the ideals until that attitude became obviously overly oppressive, and so on, backPage 32 of
Print Edition and forth. In the extreme the conflict and argument over where balance lay could — and did — result in war.

While we could temporarily contain and even heal our upset or exhaustion in these ways we could not end it because, being a mind-based understanding device, the need for self-management would eventually reassert itself, at which time the march towards exhaustion would continue. Without the arrival of the full truth complete exhaustion was inevitable and in fact complete exhaustion has been fast approaching on earth. Our hope and faith that the full truth would arrive before we destroyed ourselves and our earth was being sorely tested. Only the arrival of the full truth could stop this progression and it has come only just in time. Our upset can now be pacified. The finding of the full truth will bring an end to argument, politics and wars. It will bring the human race together and it will bring our own divided selves together; it will make us happy. It is the realisation of all our hopes and dreams.

The slide towards complete exhaustion has been halted and we can now begin the journey back to paradise. The way forward now is back because going back is at last possible. We are entering the age of rehabilitation.

The fact that we are now safe (from self-destruction) will bring wonderful relief to us. The struggle and desperation has been so great that this sense of relief is possibly all we will be able to cope with for some time. When we recover enough to set out on the homeward journey we will discover it to be very different from the outward one, fraught as it was with constant battles.

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¹ Concept of Dr. C.G. Jung, see his book Psychology of the Unconscious, 1916.

² Description given on the back cover of the recent Penguin edition of The Soul of the White Ant, first published in 1937.

³ The Attorney-General of the State of Massachusetts in the United States during the defence of a psychiatrist accused of negligence. Reported in The Australian newspaper, July 19, 1983.