Summary

Page 7 of
Print EditionWHY HAVE HUMANS been individual, competitive, egocentric and aggressive? What is the explanation/defence for ourselves? What is the reason/justification for our apparently divisive condition?

The following is a eleven-paragraph summary of the reason. This brief summary was written for use as an advertisement to promote this book. It serves here as a preface to the book.

Assume just for a moment that our aim is to consider the welfare of the group or larger whole above self. In other words, rather than be selfish which is divisive our aim is to be selfless which is integrative (integration as defined in the Encyclopedic World Dictionary is ‘the act of bringing together [parts] into a whole’). Further, assume that we have in us a genetically based instinctive self trained in altruistic behaviour but this training is only an orientation to selflessness not an understanding of it. Suppose we subsequently acquire an intellectual capacity to operate from a basis of understanding. What happens when we begin to attempt to manage life from a basis of understanding, given the already established instinctive orientation to selflessness? What happens when the mind meets the instincts?

The Birthday Party

To see what happens, imagine a children’s birthday party where all the children sitting around the table are about seven years oldPage 8 of
Print Edition except for one who is about eight years old. The seven-year-olds are still obedient to, and dependent upon, their instinctive training for management of their lives. The eight-year-old however has become sufficiently mentally developed to decide for the first time in his life to attempt to manage his life using his mind. Being an understanding device his mind requires understanding but there is none available to help him make decisions. Having to make a start somewhere on this process of thinking for himself he looks at 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 selflessness and unaware of the misjudgments and misunderstandings which can be made as the mind searches for reasons for everything, criticise him for being selfish. (Interestingly, many mothers actually witness this grand mistake of pure selfishness often made by children first attempting to self-manage. Our word for such totally unknowing mistakes is naughty). So what happens is the eight-year-old gets a nasty shock and quickly puts the cake back on the table, determined not to have anything more to do with attempts to self-manage his life. The trouble is he cannot deny his intellect and so sooner or later has to find the courage to shoulder the responsibility of learning to master his mind. Again he takes the cake only this time he adopts the more subtle form of selfishness called reciprocity, where he offers the others some of the cake to keep them quiet. The instinctive selves of all concerned however are not deceived and continue to criticise him.

To continue his search for understanding the eight-year-old has no choice but to defy the criticism. First he tries to explain that he is not deserving of criticism — that he is not bad — so he says, ‘Mum, the cake accidentally fell into my lap.’ With this explanation he is evading the apparent but false implication that he is being selfish or bad. Lacking the real explanation for his behaviour his attempt at an explanation is inadequate, an apparently blatant misrepresentation. To be able to adequately explain himself he would need all the understanding that he isPage 9 of
Print Edition setting out to find, specifically an understanding of the difference between the genetic-based learning system that gave the innocents their orientation to selflessness and the mind-based learning system which requires an understanding of why selflessness is meaningful. He is going to have to discover and learn about the DNA molecule and the nervous system and many, many other mechanisms before he will have the means to free himself from criticism, a task that has taken the combined effort of all humanity some two million years to achieve.

When he cannot explain himself satisfactorily the eight-year-old becomes frustrated and tries to demonstrate that he is not ‘bad’/‘no good’/inferior/worthless. He hurls his chair away and challenges the innocents to throw theirs as far. When this sad and desperate effort to demonstrate his worth fails to impress he retaliates against the unfair criticism. He leans across the table and punches one of the innocents in the mouth in an attempt to shut up all the critics. Finally he tries to escape the unfair criticism: he puts his fingers in his ears to block it out and he runs away from the table to hide from it.

So the boy who set out in search of meaning/understanding became egotistical (forever trying to explain/prove/demonstrate/maintain his worth/‘goodness’/self-esteem), competitive, aggressive, mentally ‘blocked out’ or evasive or alienated (paradoxically he was especially evasive of integrative meaning because of its unfair criticism of his divisive behaviour), escapist (superficial) and very unhappy. In short he became upset and because these upsets were mostly selfish rather than selfless traits his instinctive self criticised him all the more, compounding his upset and increasing his need for courage and determination to find understanding and now also to establish his worth.

The innocents and the eight-year-old’s own innocent instinctive self saw his upset as proof of his ‘badness’. From his first unknowing mistake developed what the innocents (including the innocent in himself) saw as deliberate mistakes. As far as they were concerned he had become ‘evil’ or ‘sinful’ although in reality it was their ignorance (of a mind’s need to find understanding)Page 10 of
Print Edition that led to this intolerable and maddening situation. The eight-year-old was being forced to live with a sense of ‘guilt’ that at base was completely unjustified and unwarranted.

The origin of all the human upset on earth was our instinctive self’s unjust criticism of our mind’s necessary efforts to find understanding. From the time our intelligent mind emerged some two million years ago it has had to defy/resist/fight/battle/survive the ignorance of our older and more established instinctive self or soul, the expression of which is our conscience. If our conscience had had its own way we would never have experimented in self-management and so would never have found understanding. (Of course, while we had to be free from the oppression/restraint/criticism of our conscience to experiment in self-management we had to avoid diverging too far from its integrative ideals — too much freedom and we would become too upset or ‘corrupted’, too little and our necessary search for understanding would be oppressed.)

So while humans have appeared to be divisive or disintegrative, the full or greater truth is that we were not; at all times we have been committed to integration. To find understanding and by so doing become successful, secure managers of life, as is our great potential, we had to defy ignorance, we had to endure becoming upset, we had to lose ourselves to find ourselves!

To end the upset on earth it is this paradox of being ‘good’ when we have appeared to be ‘bad’ which has had to be explained. It is explanation that has always been needed on earth. Only explanation could stop the upsetting criticism, could mediate the situation, could pacify our conscience. Specifically, we have needed the explanation as to why integration or selflessness is meaningful, why the genetic learning system, which we have called natural selection, could only acquire an orientation to integration (and how it came to do even this when the limitation of genes is that they cannot learn unconditional selflessness since a selfless trait self-eliminates) and how the mind differs in that it is a self-adjusting system, able to understand and manage events towards integration.

Page 11 of
Print Edition We have needed answers to pacify our upset — to allow us to think without encountering criticism. Certainly we have been able to temporarily abandon thinking and its consequences. We could temporarily escape our upset self and its world by abandoning them and seeking the shelter of a religion (where the ideals are preserved but not explained) or embracing the discipline/oppression of socialism (where anything but the social or integrated ideal state is denied) or adopting the ideal future, the so-called ‘New Age’ (where we act integratively), but ultimately the true path to our freedom — to a real ‘transformation’ of our selves — lies back through our mental evasions or blocks, lies in a successful confrontation with our adversary, ignorance, lies in the ability to think without encountering criticism, lies in the ability to think our split selves back together, lies in the ability to understand. Ultimately humans had to master, not avoid, thinking but to do this we needed to get up the explanations with which to think. The trinity comprising integrative meaning, the genetic learning tool and the brain learning tool, had to be explained. We have to be able to understand why we have been aggressive — why there has been terrible suffering on earth — why the inequality between people — why racism — why feminism — why ‘sex’ — why wars — why psychosis — why the devastation of our planet.

It is these answers, this profound solution, that this book supplies. It gives the unevasive but full and therefore safe/compassionate liberating truth about ourselves. While that may seem a preposterous claim it is nevertheless true. This summary demonstrates that the many limited or partial truths that we have had to evade or avoid because they were unfairly critical of us — especially integrative meaning or teleology — can now safely be acknowledged as part of the full truth. The final paradox is that the liberating full truth could only be found by accepting instead of evading integrative meaning. While science had to evade integrative meaning and concentrate on finding understanding of the mechanisms of existence that would make final liberation possible, ultimately it wasPage 12 of
Print Edition exceptional innocence, the lack of the need to be evasive, which was required to synthesise the unevasive full truth from science’s evasively presented insights and produce the liberation. It is the story of the emperor with no clothes. In the end a little boy had to break the spell of our self-deception, had to dissolve the evasions. This book is not a contrived defence of humans, such as Robert Ardrey’s selfishness-justifying ‘territorial imperative’ concept or ‘Social Darwinism’s’ selfishness-justifying ‘survival of the fittest’ concept or Sociobiology’s selfishness-justifying ‘selfish gene’ concept. It is the true defence for our divisiveness. It is the Full Truth that we have been in search of and working towards for two million years. Humanity is Free At Last from criticism.