Part 2.2  The two main aspects of life under the duress of the human condition

Importantly, we can see that there were two main aspects to what was happening in our minds.

Firstly, there was the depressing shame and guilt our conscious thinking mind felt for becoming competitive, selfish and aggressive and destroying the innocent cooperative, selfless and loving world of our soul. Secondly, there was a resentful angry feeling that—even though we, our conscious mind, couldn’t explain it yet—there was a good reason for why we had become so angry, egocentric and alienated and destroyed the cooperative, selfless and loving world of our soul. We didn’t feel ‘mad as hell’ about our situation for no reason; we didn’t attack, try to prove wrong, and block out any criticism we encountered for no reason; we didn’t become angry, egocentric and alienated without cause—it was because we felt we were being unjustly condemned by the whole damn world!

So our mind felt deeply ashamed and guilty for destroying our cooperative, selfless and loving instinctive self or soul’s world, and, at the same time, our mind felt deeply resentful and angry from feeling unjustly condemned as soul-destroying bad, unworthy, guilty, evil and sinful when we intuitively felt we were actually the complete opposite of bad, unworthy, guilty, evil and sinful—namely truly wonderful, good and meaningful; in fact, not just good but a hero of the story of life on Earth! We, our conscious mind, felt immense shame and guilt, but also a deep-seated angry resentment because we believed in our heart of hearts that we weren’t actually bad people. So these two polar opposite feelings and their effects have in truth been dominating our lives: extremely depressing shame and raging anger. Basically, our mind didn’t know whether we were bad or good: we felt that we were bad, but we also sensed we were good! We couldn’t reconcile with understanding which of the bad or good assessments was true; we couldn’t reconcile the human condition—which thank goodness we at last now can!

So that has been our situation for some 2 million years, not knowing if we are bad or good—basically, in our subterranean thoughts, we have been worried sick every moment of the day over whether we are evil monsters or sublimely wonderful beings! Even though we have constantly tried to block out that worry by distracting our mind, smiling and laughing and putting on a brave front, and by finding as much positive reinforcement as we could to quench and hold at bay our frustration and anger; those were the underlying preoccupations in our mind—avoid depression and relieve our anger!

And since this has been going on for some 2 million years, how much deep subconscious guilt, shame and depression, and deep subconscious volcanic frustration and anger, must now exist within us humans! While we have learnt to hold the subconscious depression at bay with continual efforts to deny it and find ways to delude ourselves that we are happy, buoyant beings, depression must actually be a dominant feature of our lives. And, with regard to our anger, while we have tried to restrain and conceal it—to ‘civilise’ it as we refer to this restraint—sometimes, when we could no longer find a way to restrain our anger it expressed itself, hence our capacity for shocking acts of cruelty, sadism, sexual depravity, hate, murder and war. So, despite our brave and heroic efforts to stay away from depression and to quell and restrain our anger, under the surface there has existed within us a deep dark shadow of depression, and, at the same time, a boiling-with-anger rage for having to live with what we felt was extremely unjust condemnation. Depression and anger have been the deeper, ‘behind the scenes’ features of human life—which, now that we have found the redeeming and reconciling understanding of our corrupted condition, can, thank goodness, all subside and disappear from human life forever!